Guest Opinion: George Wuerthner's On the Range
NREPA: Local Interests and Conservation History
By George Wuerthner, 11-15-07
What do the Grand Teton National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Glacier National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument all have in common? Besides their common designation as national parks and monuments, all these conservation areas were initially opposed by local people.
After the creation of Yellowstone NP in 1872, the Helena Gazette opined “We regard the passage of the act as a great blow to the prosperity of the towns of Bozeman and Virginia City….” Montana’s Congressional representatives were so opposed to the park that they introduced bills into Congress every session for twenty years to undesignate the park. When these attempts to dissolve the park failed, they tried other mechanisms to eliminate the park, including an attempt to split off the northern part of the park so a railroad could be built. To justify removing this area from the park, Montana’s delegate characterized the Lamar Valley as “wholly unattractive country”, hence not worthy of park protection. Others proposed damming the Yellowstone River just below Yellowstone Lake for hydroelectric power. This too was prevented—but only by the intervention of dreaded “outsiders” from the Eastern United States.
When President Teddy Roosevelt established the Grand Canyon as a national monument in 1908, Arizona’s Congressional delegation successfully prevented any federal funding for the park operations and tried unsuccessfully to legally challenge Roosevelt’s monument designation.
In 1910 when Glacier National Park was created, the Kalispell Chamber of Commerce went on record opposing the park designation, fearing the park would preclude oil and gas and logging operations. Locals submitted a petition to the federal government in 1914 to dismantled the park, arguing: “… that it is more important to furnish homes to a land-hungry people than to lock the land up as a rich man’s playground which no one will use or ever use.”
In 1943 when Franklin Roosevelt designated 210,000 acres in the Tetons as a national monument, folks in Wyoming predicted Jackson would become a “ghost-town.” In fact, the Wyoming delegation introduced legislation to undesignate the park. Jackson now is home to more than 16,000 “ghosts.”
And even the creation of our national forest system was largely opposed by western interests who wanted to see these lands available for unrestricted development and exploitation. In 1907 Senator Fulton of Oregon added an amendment to the Agricultural Appropriation Bill barring President Teddy Roosevelt from creating any additional national forests in six Northwest states. Roosevelt, knowing he could not veto such important legislation, signed the bill into law, but not before he created another 16 million acres of national forest by Presidential fiat. Today most residents of California, Montana, Idaho, Oregon and Washington are grateful that local interests did not prevail and Roosevelt set aside these lands as national forests.
In 1980 when President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Alaska Lands Bill (ANILCA) he was strongly opposed by the entire Alaskan delegation who, like all previous boosters of the West, predicted wreckage and ruin to the local economy if lands were protected from exploitation. So strident was local opposition that residents of Fairbanks burned Carter in effigy to protest park creation. The towns of Eagle and Glennallen each proclaimed opposition to the parks and even offered to shelter anyone from federal authorities who was willing to violate new park regulations.
Undaunted, Carter signed ANILCA into law setting aside more than a hundred million acres of federal land as new parks, wildlife refuges, wild and scenic rivers and wilderness areas. Among other things ANILCA established 10 new national parks, including Gates of the Arctic, Lake Clark, and Wrangell-St Elias and expanded three other existing parks (Glacier Bay, Katmai, and Denali). Most Americans—and even many Alaskans—now celebrate these parks and other protected lands as crown jewels of our national park system.
They say history repeats itself when people do not learn from the past, and certainly this appears to be the case once more as seen in the recent flap over NREPA, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act. Montana Senator Max Baucus was quoted as saying “Montanans don’t take kindly to people on the East Coast telling us how to manage our lands.” (Uh, Max, these are federal lands owned by all US citizens). Despite Baucus’ implied message that once again “outsiders” from the East Coast were imposing something on poor westerners, he conveniently overlooked the fact that NREPA was created by conservationists in the region and its chief sponsor, the Alliance for Wild Rockies, is a Montana-based group.
Barbara Cubin, Wyoming’s Congressional representative called NREPA a “147-page assault on our Western way of life.” She bemoaned that local input and control would be slipping away. Local control, of course, means resource exploitation of public resources for private gain.
Montana Congressman, Denny Rehberg, opposed NREPA because he considered it a “top-down” measure rather than a locally-generated proposal. Rehberg favors local “cooperative” approaches like the Blackfoot Challenge and the Beaverhead-Deerlodge Partnership in Montana as the right way to designate wilderness. Of course, Rehberg is enamored with “partnerships,” “collaborative” and other so-called local approaches that are compromises because they usually wind up advocating for the continuation of logging, ORV use, and mining on most of the public land base, and ultimately protect less land from exploitation than landscape-scale and ecologically-driven proposals like NREPA.
People like Rehberg and other advocates for such collaborative or compromise approaches to wildlands protection never acknowledge that the starting point for compromise was passed decades ago. The vast majority of the United States is already committed to industrial uses, and we are now fighting over the last little scraps of wildlands. Conservation history has shown repeatedly that invariability future generations will not complain that we protected too much land; rather they will wonder why we protected so little.
What is clear from any review of conservation history is that in nearly all cases even local people come to value the designation of conserved lands after the fact. If you were to ask the Kalispell Chamber of Commerce what is most distinctive and valuable about Kalispell’s location, they would tell you its close proximity to Glacier National Park. And when Newt Gingrich and his Republican majority shut down the federal government in 1995, Arizona volunteered to pay the salaries of Park Rangers so that Grand Canyon NP could remain open. And though residents on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula opposed establishment of Olympic NP and continuously sought to open up the park’s forests to logging, most residents of the Olympic Peninsula today realize that the park’s trees have far more value standing upright in the forest than if they had been cut for two-by-fours
The take-home message I get from a broad reading of conservation history is that local opposition to anything worthwhile is to be expected. Trying to accommodate entrenched local interests invariably weakens protective measures and typically reduces the effectiveness of conservation efforts. Imagine what we would have had if civil rights activists had tried to work with southern racists to hammer out a “collaborative” agreement on civil rights. If they were lucky, they might have gotten modest accommodations as such as allowing African Americans to sit anywhere on buses, but it is doubtful that we would have the sweeping changes that enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act created, such as ending discrimination in employment as well as segregation in schools and other public places. As citizens and conservationists we ought to learn from these history lessons and look beyond parochial regional interests to advocate what is in the best long term interest of the nation and that best preserves our collective natural heritage.
We might not get all what we advocate for, but in conservation, as in civil rights, we ought to strive for what is ultimately best for the land and nation, not what is politically acceptable now.
In 1935, Bob Marshall, on founding the Wilderness Society wrote: “We want no stragglers. For in the past far too much good wilderness has been lost by those whose first instinct is to compromise.” This is advice that many in the West’s conservation movement would be wise to remember when they attempt to work with “local interests” to protect wildlands.
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Comments
Yet, Rehberg and others consider the Beaverhead-Deerlodge deal as a model of "collaborative" public lands management? Wait, wasn't that "Partnership" between big groups with political connections and multi-million dollar budgets (National Wildlife Federation, Montana Trout Unlimited, Montana Wilderness Association) and powerful interests from the logging industry (Smurfit-Stone, Roseburg Forest Products, etc).
I own these public lands as much as anyone else and I certainly don't think that certain organizations or certain industries with all the political connections and money should decide behind closed doors how our public lands are managed. If anything, that's a "Top down" approach and one that the vast, vast majority of us stuck on the outside looking in should oppose.
I am sure it will generate the usual hatred and naysaying, but it stands very strong. As Aldo Leopold said, you cannot make wilderness, you can only lose it.
The hatred of anyone that would protect land and wildlife has been with us forever. I was reading that, in response to "Silent Spring," the chemical companies hired writers to produce " The Desolate Year" a booklet describing the takeover of the earth by insects....needless to say, "Silent Spring," inspired by the author's love for the planet and her despair at seeing the increasing application of what she called, "biocides," is still a classic, and the "Desolate Year," written for money, carefully crafted by its "authors" to inspire terror, based on lies and in the service of giant corporate masters who cared not a whit for anything beyond profit, is now forgotten.
Where is the poetry of the Mirex, the subdivision, the leach-pit, the high wall, and the clear cut? What inspiration do we draw, after our wages are paid and spent, by the Zortman-Landusky mine, which you can see from the Missouri Breaks, thirty miles away? The same people who will post here, calling George an idiot, are the ones who would have praised the Mike Horse gold complex that scarified the aquatic life of the Blackfoot River, who would have made fun of anyone who asked that the miners not be allowed to rip those heavy metals out of the earth and let them drain into the watershed. Their predecessors were writing letters to Congressmen, telling them not to allow Yellowstone and Glacier Parks, or advocating for the Yellowstone Dam, or for the state to give a huge chunk of the Bitterroot Valley for a Boeing plant, "so our kids can stay here at home and work."
Even they would not really like the results of the mines and factories and developments that they tirelessly advocate for, but they won't complain about it. Why not? Because, no matter what they might say, they don't really care. And they'll hate you because you do care.
I've heard it all my life, "hippy!" "treehugger!" "nature-fag!" "prairie fairy" "I'll beat your ass, you ******* treehugger!"
Salmon, Idaho, Catron County, and on and on....fueled by the politicians looking for a little of that good ol boy cred, while they steal the people blind, or sell off the public lands where all the raging locals hunt and take their kids and roar around on ATVs, sorry buckaroos, this is what you wanted, better look for jobs in town. And who remembers any of them? Nobody. Who remembers the venal hatemongers that opposed Roosevelt's plans for the National Parks and Forests? Nobody. Can anybody even remember the names of the screaming County Commissioners on the "Shovel Brigades?" Who was Richard Pombo? What did he stand for? Oh, that's right, he hated the Endangered Species Act and worked to destroy the protections for wildlife and wetlands so more freeways could be built to more developments....
Bob Marshall. Aldo Leopold. Rachel Carson. John Muir. William Hornaday. Teddy Roosevelt. George Bird Grinnell. Gloria Flora.
People who worked for something larger than themselves that would outlast them and give to generations to come. That is why they are remembered.
How often have you heard the old line, "You can't eat scenery."
Well, in point of fact, you can, and everyone who makes a buck off of travel and tourism is doing so.
It is ironic that the old ranch families that so bitterly opposed the Grant Teton National Park, are now fabulously rich -- not from cattle -- but from tourist-driven real estate sales that turned mediocre ranches into golden housing developments.
As for NREPA itself, it's the Dave Foreman Campfire Dream writ large, the misguided and anti-human "conservation biology" pseudoscience Nirvana all wrapped up with a Congressional bow.
So Chris Shays and Carolyn Moloney love it? So what? And who gives a rip if whatzerface Natural Woman (oh, I remember, Carole King) supports it? Lots of celebs support crazy stuff. Like Sean Penn mooning after Hugo Chavez?
As for rich man playground Glacier Park...yep. It was created as such, and still is. Priced a night at Sperry Chalet recently? Before the Sun Road was built, yes, a ROAD!, Glacier Park was the playground of Great Northern Railway vacationers that filled the Pullmans and hired the horse packers and stayed in the fancy hotels. It was not the realm of Ma and Pa Kettle until it was democratized by the Sun Highway.
The same deal in Yellowstone. NP packed 'em down to Gardiner and UP to West, first class travelers all the way. The fact is, the demographic of NPS visitors is that of the more-than-usual disposable-income cohort. The elite.
And that brings me to George's claim that Glacier is the center of our universe here in the Flathead. Sure....most of our sawmills have bit the dust despite zillions of renewable trees which are now going up in smoke every summer.
And when THAT happens, the Chamber panics and cranks out press releases that the Park is Open. You can't breathe, or see endless horizons, and no Haze Filter will help make your vacation pictures worth a rip -- but you won't burn up! We've already burnt half of the Park in the Last Ten Years. Come Spend Anyway!
And Hal? Hornaday opposed hunting. I thought a big sportsman like you would know that.
National parks, forests and wildlife are the economic engine that draws humans to these relatively cold, inhospitable landscapes. They visit by the millions to view & recreate in these magnificant places and they are not all wealthy.
And people like Dave Skinner overlook the fact that the majority of remaining unroaded public lands--are the less productive left-over lands--that no wanted and where critters like Big Horn sheep, mountain goats and bears are raw-hide tough enough to survive in. As you pointed out George, the vast, vast majority of lower elevation more productive lands in this country are paved over, urbanized or in agriculture production. If we can't survive on the most productive lands, how will the less productive lands save us?
The bottom line in this debate is between those who believe that "eternal human growth & consumption" is desirable and practical in a finite world (Americanus Homo Consumptus) versers those who believe that there should be a national debate about growth limits (Americanus Homo Constrainists).
Yeah! That's the spirit!