The May 10th edition contained yet another article
praising an effort to protect wilderness. HCN presents these
efforts as being promoted by grassroots groups, and as a result, of
this reporting, the typical HCN reader is likely to conclude that
there is a true grassroots movement for wilderness in the West.
Unfortunately, this is not the case.
In every case of
which I am aware and in virtually every Western state, the reported
grassroots effort is in reality the implementation of a wilderness
strategy formulated by a small group of professional
environmentalists working for the Pew Charitable Trusts, a large
foundation headquartered in Philadelphia which runs on oil money.
The unwritten rule has been if you want money for a wilderness
campaign, you must adopt the Pew approach. That approach argues for
concentrating on the low-hanging fruit — going for wilderness
areas that local congressmen and state senators are willing to
support because they are not controversial.
Not
surprisingly, each grassroots effort or coalition has adopted
Pew’s strategy. Even groups like the Oregon Natural Resources
Council, which once challenged the political wisdom of the Eastern
environmental establishment and created (with help from lots of
other grassroots groups) the Ancient Forest Movement, has become
meekly subservient to Pew’s views on how to go about saving
Western wilderness.
Whether such influence and control by
a single foundation is or is not good for the public land
conservation movement is open to debate, as is Pew’s
wilderness strategy. Unfortunately, neither Pew’s influence
nor the wilderness strategy it funds have been adequately debated
within the public-land conservation movement nor by publications
like HCN. Maybe we in the environmental movement have become so
confused about who we are and how we operate that we are incapable
of making distinctions between grassroots and hierarchical or
between a movement and an interest group.
Felice
Pace
Klamath,
California
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline What grassroots wilderness movement?.
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