Dear HCN,
Rifts like the one in the
Northwest environmental community described in Kathie Durbin’s
article (HCN, 12/27/93) are often portrayed as moral questions:
hardliners vs. sellouts or realists vs. idealists. In fact, these
splits are perfectly predictable given the rules of the political
game.
Organizations such as the Sierra Club and
Wilderness Society work on many issues. Their ability to achieve
their goal on any one issue depends on their reputation as a
willing negotiator. If they take the hard line on every issue, no
one in Congress or the administration will deal with
them.
But local organizations are often based on
single issues, such as protection of a single roadless area,
watershed or endangered species. For them, there is no “next time’:
The roadless area, watershed, or species is either saved or it
isn’t. So they have no incentive to
compromise.
This difference in incentives leads
to a natural split in the environmental community. Local groups see
compromise of their goals as a sell-out; nationals see compromise
as a reasonable way to gain the most in the long
run.
There is even some organizational benefit to
accusing the national groups of being sell-outs, as Dave Foreman
discovered when he started Earth First! Ten years ago, the leading
characters in Durbin’s article, James Monteith and Andy Kerr, led
one of those outside groups, the Oregon Natural Resources Council
(ONRC). Accusing national groups of selling out their interests,
ONRC rapidly grew to its current status as the largest statewide
environmental group in the West.
Ironically, this
turned ONRC into an established group with a motivation to
occasionally compromise. Kerr, the consummate politician, was more
comfortable in the role of insider than Monteith, the visionary.
Eventually, Monteith left ONRC and started Save the
West.
In doing so, he is again the outsider who
saves the forests by being more radical than everyone else. The
first person he has to be more radical than is Andy Kerr, who is
now the leading political tactician for the ancient
forests.
So we need to judge the Northwest debate
on broader criteria than whether the environmental movement is
willing to “draw a line in the sand.” The real question is whether
environmental groups have the power, as Monteith imagines, to stop
the combined forces of the timber industry, Western congressional
delegations, and the administration; or whether, as Kerr thinks, a
small compromise today will lead to greater savings of old growth
tomorrow.
Randal
O’Toole
Oak Grove,
Oregon
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Upstarts today are establishment soon.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
