Dear HCN,
Last summer I spent
several days in Salmon, Idaho, as part of my research on the human
dimensions of ecosystem management. I expected to hear the same
sort of petulant threat-mongering that Jon Margolis mocked –
something I’ve heard increasingly often in my years of listening to
the voices of the rural West (HCN,
2/20/95).
Instead I found a community where it
was still thought proper to be polite to strangers bearing
notebooks. Salmon was a working town where mining and logging were
honorable occupations, but where folks also were proud of the
contribution that river rafting makes to the local economy. It was
a place where the Forest Service and BLM were said to be part of
the solution as well as part of the problem … a place where
county rights activists talked of “local custom and culture” but
insisted that local environmentalists be represented on county
land-use committees … a place where conservative Mormon farmers
and ranchers set up a phone tree so they could quickly turn off the
irrigation pumps when a salmon or two were seen waiting to head up
the Lemhi River to spawn.
I’d hoped to be able to
do a follow-up study this summer to try to discover what made Lemhi
County different. Why was it still possible in Salmon – but not in
Joseph or Kalispell or Republic or Silver City – for there to be
civil discourse between people who care equally about the land but
want such different things from it?
Now I can
forget that idea. Folks in Salmon are polishing their six-guns just
like their counterparts across the West – thanks to the Wilderness
Society, Pacific Rivers Council, and the Sierra Club Legal Defense
Fund lawsuit that would block all grazing, logging and mining on
the national forests of central Idaho. I suppose it’s easy when
you’re in an office in Portland or San Francisco to forget that
living, breathing people are part of the landscape of the West. It
may be easy, but it’s also disastrous. This sort of
one-size-fits-all approach to environmentalism, imposed from
outside by people who wield their legal hatchets simply because
they know they can, will harm the environmentalist cause just as
surely as any dam.
If we lose the Endangered
Species Act and other environmental laws in the 104th Congress, it
won’t be because the bad guys got elected at precisely the wrong
time. It’ll be because the good guys tried to kill a gnat with a
meat cleaver, and in the process managed to slice into their own
jugulars.
Mark
Brunson
Logan,
Utah
The writer is as
assistant professor of forest resources at Utah State University
and a former Montana
journalist.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline One-size-fits-all environmentalism can be disastrous.
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