We can't save the land without first saving the West

Once a month I spend several hours with what I affectionately call my “wise-use” group. It’s not really a wise-use group but at first glance it resembles one. Members include the six county commissioners from Delta and Montrose counties here in western Colorado, a rancher, a timber mill employee, a coal miner, a banker, and a BLM and Forest Service employee.

Changes in the Forest Service created the group. Traditionally, county commissioners had only to clear their throats and the local Gunnison National Forest scurried to prepare timber sales, cut new roads, and accommodate ranchers’ grazing requests.

No longer. Even when the commissioners go beyond throat clearing to foot stamping, goodies don’t flow off the forest. So this group was formed to show how important public-land commodities are to the area, and to put together a diverse membership to make the findings credible.

The meetings are polite pushing matches. Much of the emphasis is on the economic importance of public land logging, mining and grazing. My self-appointed role is to emphasize the importance of the health of the land. I argue that instead of asking the agencies for more trees or coal, we need, for example, to burn invading brush and juniper trees to restore grasslands and watershed. And in order to burn, we need to plan where houses are built. It was the West’s inability to plan that made this summer’s fires so expensive and fatal to fight.

I’ve learned a lot from the group, and they’ve listened to my views. We get along, but we have differences. Our November meeting was the day after the election and the group asked, with undisguised glee: “How did you like the election?”

So I told them how George Bush had been an environmental president. He vetoed the $1 billion Two Forks Dam outside Denver. And during his four years, the making and testing of nuclear weapons stopped, the wild flows out of Glen Canyon Dam were tamed, the Central Utah and Central Valley projects were reformed, no new dams were built, and old-growth logging in the Northwest ended.

Some of this was done with Bush’s assent; some was done despite him. The point, I said, is that the West is being changed by powers greater than those exerted by a president and Congress.

After that, we got to work – figuring out how to live together in Delta and Montrose counties.

Only connect

Environmental attorney Grove Burnett of Glorieta, N.M., believes activists suffer from impoverished spirits. We work far from the land, among people who do not share our values. So Grove established the Vallecito Mountain Refuge, where activists can come for two weeks, away from telephones and faxes and intense conversation. There, he believes, they reacquaint themselves with who they are and with the land.

For a New Yorker raised on concrete, Paonia, with its population under 2,000 and proximity to public land, brings me close enough to the land. I nourish my spirit by visiting cities. But I find that talking only to people like me isn’t enough. A gap, perhaps Grove’s spiritual gap, was partially filled when I connected with Doc and Connie Hatfield and their fellow ranchers in Oregon (HCN, 3/23/92). And now I also get nourishment from my local multicultural group.

I learn from them that we environmentalists are up against foes, but not implacable, demon-like foes, eternally hostile to us and to the earth. In our mutual loyalty to community and to modest, low-key lives, we have much in common. Where we differ is that they are accustomed, I believe, to support their lives by leaning too heavily on the land and on the federal treasury. And I am quick to minimize the difficulties people face when economic conditions change around them.

I learned more about our supposed enemies in October, at a board meeting of the Pacific Rivers Council. The Eugene group created a near-riot this fall when its lawsuit evicted a few cows from Oregon’s Umatilla National Forest. The reaction from eastern Oregon seemed out of proportion to the event. So Pacific Rivers Council hired a consultant to visit Oregon, Idaho and western Montana to see what was what.

Despite the public nature of the lawsuit, the consultant found it had taken rural Oregon by surprise. And similar actions, perhaps a bull trout listing in Montana and Idaho, he predicted, will take those communities by surprise. In general, he said, the rural interests we see as so fearsome and effective are often disorganized, poorly informed and mostly reactive.

The consultant had to sit through a chunk of our board meeting before giving his report. He told this typically beleaguered and overworked environmental group that it struck him as well-informed, with a strong sense of long-range mission and short-term tactics. Relatively speaking, the council seemed a powerhouse. It all depends on your vantage point.

Slogans and stereotypes

There are rich and arrogant ranchers, and mine and mill managers who would rather trash the land than care for it. But the West also has many people of modest means who feel helpless in the face of forces they do not comprehend.

Environmentalists don’t help when they publicize slogans like “Livestock Free by “93,” which translates directly into “Rancher Free by “93,” and by inference into “Miner and Logger Free by “93.” The “Livestock Free” slogan was never contested by mainstream environmental groups. From outside the environmental movement, it looked like all of us were united in wanting to drive ranchers off the land.

That impression was reinforced when Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Colorado Gov. Roy Romer convinced some courageous environmentalists and ranchers to make a run at consensus early this year – and incidentally combat the War on the West talk. The group was met in Denver by full-page ads in The Denver Post and New York Times condemning the consensus effort. The ads were signed by a slew of national, regional and local environmental groups.

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Texas journalist Molly Ivins says the Democratic defeat was caused by male anger over the World Series. No doubt. But in the West, some of the results were caused by the rhetoric of environmentalists, which made the Republican drumbeat about a War on the West credible. Instead of just going after damaging practices in the West’s forests and grasslands, we gave the impression that we were going after people. Too often, environmentalists said that the displaced could pour cappuccino or make Nikes or help build condos. We were asking the public at large to care intensely about the land, but to treat people and communities as expendable.

As part of the total package we presented to the West, we environmentalists are seen as cheering for a regional transformation that fair-minded people see as tragic.

New York Times reporter Timothy Egan caught this tragedy in a Nov. 16 story he wrote out of Jackson, Wyo., headlined “The rich are different: they can afford homes.” He told of a motel owner, three of whose employees were killed while commuting, and of a woman who came to a Halloween party wearing a cardboard box titled “affordable housing.” Egan was writing just about Jackson, but it’s the same throughout the West: long commutes over icy winter roads from the towns where working people live to the towns working people have been forced from.

This economic and social injustice should be a major issue for environmental groups because an unjust society will never care about healthy land. We see proof of that in everything from the story of Robin Hood to today’s destruction of Latin American rain forests. But instead of grasping this truth, many represent the servant economy as a Green Economy or as a helpful demographic change. (A lot of good all those new trophy homes did us in the last election.)

There have been a bunch of studies of this new economy by environmental groups and their economists; almost all welcome it. Only the study by the Claiborne-Ortenberg Foundation, Montana: Steady State in Transition, which used both economic analysis and in-depth interviews, caught the anger and misery it is causing and the numbers behind that anger and misery.

Someone who didn’t need an economic study to see the significance of the transformation is the Archbishop of Denver, J. Francis Stafford. In a 12-page Thanksgiving Day proclamation, The Heights of the Mountains Are His, the archbishop wrote:

“What we risk creating, then, is a theme-park “alternative reality” for those who have the money to purchase entrance … In the last century the Western Slope functioned as a resource colony for timber and mining interests. Those scars will be with us for generations. We cannot afford to stand by now as the culture of a leisure colony, like the walled communities which dominate so many American suburbs, takes its place.”

He continued, “In sum, the right to private property and personal profit is not absolute. It carries a social mortgage … The tent and trailer camps, sometimes without electricity or running water, that today house so many service workers on the Western Slope, raise troubling questions about the kind of society emerging there.”

He was moved to write by his visits to small towns in western Colorado, but he could have been writing about almost any part of the West. A similar cry of anguish was sent up by county commissioner Bill Hedden about the Moab, Utah, area in the Sept. 5, 1994, issue of HCN.

Land and people

How do we fight for the land while not fighting against people? One part of the answer is to create or join diverse groups that seek to understand each other while solving problems. Many believe consensus means compromise and sell-out. I don’t experience it that way. It means you get to know issues and people better. You get to find out what you really believe in – something you can’t learn while singing with or preaching only to the choir.

Wise-users and environmentalists have complementary blind spots. Wise-users see people and some of the pain the current transition is causing. But they adamantly refuse to acknowledge how badly the West’s land and resources have been damaged, and how pitiful the West is because of its dependence on federal and ecological subsidies.

Environmentalists see the damaged landscape and the subsidies. But we look away from people.

Even as Clinton and Babbitt were being sworn in two years ago, some environmentalists were labeling them sellouts. If only our failures were so easily explained. The truth is that the West was galvanized against reform from the start. With 20 United States senators in Washington, D.C., gorged with all the money special interests can provide, it was easy to stop reform. It happened with Carter and now with Clinton. So long as the West remains the way it is, it will happen again and again.

The best way, perhaps the only way, to change the mining law and its fellow Lords of Yesterday is to reform the West itself – its schools and universities, its media, its local government, its corporations, and its citizen groups, whether they are environmental or wise use or whatever. Until internal reform occurs, the West has the power to hang on to the current ways of doing things.

Without internal reform, our only “victories’ will be more of what we see today: the transformation of towns into either enclaves for recreationists and the well-to-do, or into shanty towns feeding labor to the nearest upscale community.

If we want true reform, we need to continue with external pressure – the kinds of lawsuits that stopped old-growth logging and that are forcing cows out of streams, and the thousands of appeals of illegal or inappropriate agency actions. And we must keep telling America that many Western interests loot both the U.S. Treasury and the region’s ecosystems.

But guiding these actions must be a larger, humane vision.

Ed Marston is publisher of HCN.

The Archdiocese of Denver is at 200 Josephine St., Denver, CO 80206; 303/388-4411.

The Liz Claiborne and Art Ortenberg Foundation is at 650 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10019; 212/333-2536.

This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline We can’t save the land without first saving the West.