Dear HCN,
I would like to respond
to Glenn Koepke’s letter, “Don’t glorify Babbitt” (HCN, 3/12/01:
Don’t glorify Babbitt). Mr. Koepke presents his arguments with
enviable skill, and articulates what may be the majority position
in the West regarding public-lands management – that the lands
exist to be utilized in traditional ways, to produce timber,
minerals, watershed protection, grazing, etc. I agree with Mr.
Koepke that the Clinton administration, and former Interior
Secretary Bruce Babbitt, have, in Koepke’s words, “said to hell
with those in rural areas devoted to producing food and fiber for
the urban majority.”
As a rural person who has
produced both, and with respect for Mr. Koepke’s views, I will try
to explain why I think this has happened.
The
minority of U.S. citizens who concern themselves with the fate of
the public lands may, as Koepke claims, be urbanites. If so, they
see firsthand the effects of the rapidly rising population of the
U.S. They are the ones driving in the traffic jams, breathing the
smog, and listening to the ever-rising crescendo of industry and
commerce. Can they be blamed for holding out the hope that on the
public lands there can be some respite from the insatiable demands
of mankind that dominate their landscape? That in some place beyond
the urban horizon there is a place with no roads, where wildlife
can survive without the groan of the forester’s chain saw, or the
boom of the miner’s explosives?
Can we hate them
for reading about the corporate logging of the Cascades or the
Bitterroots, or the destruction of BLM lands in Montana’s Little
Rockies by Pegasus Gold, and then sending their money to the Sierra
Club? Voters in urban areas have no concept of the kind of
sustainable, benevolent management Mr. Koepke refers to, because
they’ve never seen it.
To be truthful, neither
have I. Working as a logger, timber thinner, tree planter, and on
mine-reclamation crews, all I have seen is the drastic exploitation
of the public lands by industry, and by private individuals in
pursuit of profit. Certainly local communities benefited from this
exploitation, economically, in jobs, and goods sold, but they are,
as Koepke points out, a minority. The majority, the millions of
people throughout the U.S. who are also owners of the public lands,
lost their chance to see and enjoy those lands in a more pristine
condition. They lost the chance to fish in a river unmuddied from
logging, or walk or hunt through old-growth
timber.
When they came in their thousands to
comment favorably on Clinton’s roadless plan, they were saying,
“We, too, own the public lands, and we want to see them preserved
from further exploitation by industry.” It was an example of
democracy, or as Edward Abbey would have said, it was simply “the
tyranny of the majority,” this time, for once, in the service of
conservation.
Why did the Clinton administration,
and Mr. Babbitt, respond to this demand? An economic model, which
timber and mining interests love to use, will answer the
question.
As population rises, and human
activities cover more and more of the land, what commodity becomes
more scarce, and thus more valuable? Unexploited spaces. Undammed
rivers. Unlogged forests. Wildlife. Solitude. Room to wander, hunt,
shoot, fish. All found on the public lands, and all lost as soon as
“management” as we have seen it practiced traditionally, is brought
to bear. I challenge Mr. Koepke to fly in an airplane from Montana
to Florida, on a clear day, seated by the window, and declare that
we need more roads and human activity on the public lands of the
West.
Mr. Koepke does not discuss the fact that
it is the economy that has wrought the changes which have orphaned
rural communities. Face it, 10 times more beef is produced on
private, rain-drenched lands in Mississippi than on the parched BLM
lands of the West. The Canadians have swamped us with cheap timber,
Weyerhaeuser produces pulp on its own lands on a 25-year rotation
in Alabama (at a terrific environmental cost, which makes the
unlogged and unroaded public lands of our nation even more
irreplaceable), copper from plundered lands in Africa ensures that,
for now, there will be no more Berkeley Pits opening up in
Montana.
Americans, myself proudly among them,
have embraced the twin systems of democracy and capitalism, both of
which have caused the decline of the rural “communities of place”
that Mr. Koepke understandably reveres. I share his reverence, but
refuse to place the blame for their decline on an eight-year-long
presidential administration, where it does not
belong.
At this very specific point in time, and
dependent on a million economic factors beyond our control, the
public lands are most valuable as habitat for our fellow creatures,
places for our citizens to pursue something other than an economic
agenda. Why is that so repugnant?
Someday we will
look back on these times and realize that we were like a group of
children in a play school who could not quit fighting over all the
toys, until someone ( in this case, history) simply took them all
away.
Hal
Herring
Corvallis, Montana
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Babbit followed ‘the tyranny of the majority’.
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