Wise use

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The Wise use movement in the United States is a loose-knit coalition of groups promoting private property rights and use of the natural environment as a natural part of human survival, including use by commercial and public interests, seeking increased access to public lands, and often opposing government intervention in the form of environmental legislation such as wetland protection and the Endangered Species Act. It critiques most environmentalist ideology as radical, arguing that most such ideology aims to make fundamental changes to the mainstream political order.

It lays claim to what it characterizes as "assumptions of the Western worldview":

Contents

[edit] The Wise Use Movement

The Wise use movement consists of a range of groups including grass-roots organizations of loggers, mill workers, ranchers, farmers, miners, off-road vehicle users and property owners. It also includes libertarians, populists, and religious and political conservatives. The movement became known as "wise use" after the 1988 Multiple Use Strategy Conference in Reno, Nevada. The movement includes or is supported by anti-environmentalist groups, companies in the resource extraction industry, land development companies, and libertarian organizations. The movement was most active in the western United States in the late 1980s and 1990s.

[edit] Wise Use philosophy

Most members of the Wise use movement share a belief in individual rights, as opposed to the authority of the federal government, in particular with regard to land use. They believe that the environmental movement is both anti-private property and anti-people. While some in the wise use movement have strongly anti-environmental views, others believe that the free market, rather than government regulation, will better protect the environment. Some wise use advocates criticize the environmental movement for viewing man and nature as separate and for having a belief in the "wilderness myth". It describes human use of the environment as "stewardship of the land, the water and the air" for the benefit of human beings, but critics see it as effectively an anti-environmentalist movement.

[edit] Access to public lands

In the 1980s and 1990s the management focus on public lands shifted from the harvest of timber to ecological goals such as improvement of habitat, largely as a response to the environmental movement. The resultant reduction in timber harvest contributed to the closures of sawmills and the layoff of loggers and other workers. Some members of the wise use movement objected to what they saw as a shifting of control of Federal lands resources from local, to outside, urban interests. They argued the National Forests were established for the benefit of the local community. They cite Gifford Pinchot, who wrote ``It is the duty of the Forest Service to see to it that the timber, water-powers, mines, and every other resource of the forests is used for the benefit of the people who live in the neighborhood or who may have a share in the welfare of each locality' Wise use members have also argued continued access to public lands was required to maintain the health, culture and traditions of local communities.

More broadly wise use groups believe that rural residents suffer a greater impact from environmental regulations and that the environmental movement was biased toward urban elites attitudes and the rural perspective was being ignored.

[edit] Ron Arnold and Wise use

The wise use movement first gained prominence when Ron Arnold helped organize a Multiple Use Strategy Conference in Reno, Nevada in 1988. Arnold, a vice-president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise,and advocate of the "right to own property and use nature's resources for the benefit of mankind." [1] helped produce a 25-point Wise Use Agenda. The 25-point Agenda included initiatives that have sought to ban commercial use of public lands for timber, mining, and oil, and to open recreational wilderness areas for easier access by the general public.

The policies and political orientations of groups in the Wise Use movement range from some who self-identify as free-market environmentalism, to industry-backed public relations groups and relatively mainstream think tanks, to some militia groups and fundamentalist religious groups.

Critics point out that Ron Arnold has been quoted as saying his goal is to "destroy the environmental movement".[2]

A non-American who has advocated some Wise Use positions is Dr. Valerius Geist, who emigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union. In his book Moose: Behavior, Ecology, Conservation (published in 1999 by Voyageur Press of Stillwater, MN) he wrote:

"Those who care most passionately about moose are - paradoxically - hunters, in particular people who live in wilderness and rural communities and those who depend on moose for food. In Sweden, no fall menu is without a mouthwatering moose dish. The Swedes fence their highways to reduce moose fatalities and design moose-proof cars. Sweden is less than half as large as the Canadian province of British Columbia, but the annual take of moose in Sweden - upward of 150,000 - is twice that of the total moose harvest in North America. That is how much Swedes cherish their moose."

[edit] Major organizations

Major organizations promoting Wise Use ideas include Alliance for America, the American Land Rights Association, the Cato Institute, the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, People for the West, the Blue Ribbon Coalition, and the Heartland Institute. During the Reagan administration, many Wise Use groups had influence in Reagan's kitchen cabinet, including Colorado brewer Joe Coors of Coors and Co.[citation needed] Coors founded the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), and the Heritage Foundation, two anti-environmental groups endeavoring to reduce restrictions on major polluters such as Coors and Co. Using his influence in the Reagan administation, Coors chose anti-environmentalists like Anne Gorsuch and her husband Robert Burford to administer the EPA and the Bureau of Land Management, repectively. Burford had pledged to destroy the Bureau of Land Management.[citation needed] Coors also chose MSLF President James Watt as Secretary of the Interior.[citation needed] "Watt was a proponent of 'dominion theology,' an authoritarian Christian heresy that advocates man's duty to 'subdue' nature" (Crimes 25).

Pat Robertson and his Christian Coalition replaced communism with environmentalism as the biggest threat to democracy and Christianity (see The New World Order by the Rev. Pat Robertson, and Crimes Against Nature by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.). Robertson used his Christian Broadcasting Network in coordination with Ralph Reed, an official in the Bush campaign, to foil environmentalists. The CBN made anti-environmentalism as the point issue in talk shows, documentaries, and news hours. In Crimes Against Nature, Kennedy reports that "...Reed gave seminars to corporate public relations executives, coaching them on how to use electronic technologies and grassroots organizing to foil environmentalists" (Crimes 29). Wise Use helped propel Newt Gingrich to the Speaker's seat of the U.S. Congress in 1994, and Gingrich showed his loyalty to Wise Use in what Kennedy calls his "anti-environmental manifesto" - Contract With America. During this time period, Gingrich and Congressman Tom DeLay tried to sneak anti-environmental attachments on bills through Congress. DeLay once admitted to the Wall Street Journal (as quoted in Crimes Against Nature) that "We have lost the debate on the environment," after President Clinton shut down the government in December 1995. DeLay said the Endangered Species Act is the greatest threat to Texas after illegal aliens. DeLay also called the EPA "the Gestapo of government" (Crimes 19). Dick Cheney is also connected to branches of Wise Use. From 1992 until he became Vice-President, Cheney was a "distinguished adviser" to the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, and was on the board of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest. Ron Arnold, Wise Use leader, is the executive vice-president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Several environmental advisors to president George W. Bush have been associated with the Wise Use movement. These include Terry Anderson and Interior Secretary Gale Norton.

[edit] Wise use support

The Wise use movement often portrays itself as a grass roots movement, but some groups identifying themselves with "Wise use" are openly or clandestinely supported by industrial interests. According to James McCarthy,[citation needed] the most prominent Wise use groups receive most of their support from resource extraction industry. In addition to populist support from ranchers and farmers and industry, the movement is also supported by libertarian and other think tanks and larger umbrella organizations.

[edit] Critics and criticism

Some critics of the Wise Use movement claim that the strong rhetoric used has deepened divisions between opposing interest groups as well as created a climate that has led to an increase in violence and threats of violence against environmental groups and public employees. Some link strong anti-government rhetoric to militia groups. [3]

Stephenie Hendricks has claimed in her book Divine Destruction that wise use is in part " being driven by biblical fundamentalists who believe exhausting natural resources will hasten the Second Coming of Jesus Christ."[4]

[edit] Grass roots or front groups

Many large environmental groups believe that organized opposition to the environmental movement was orchestrated by industry. The most popular was David Helbarg's bookT The War Against the Greens" Helvarg argues that the Wise Use movement is not grassroots uprisings but “Astroturf” movements created by big business. Another writer, Carl Deal, author of The Greenpeace Guide to Anti-Environmental oranizations also made the same claim, that Wise Use groups give the appearance of being popular grassroots movements, but are actually astroturfing front organizations for industry groups with a financial interest in the movement's agenda. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. also details this conspiracy against the environment by Wise Use organizations in his 2004 book Crimes Against Nature.

In 1993 the Wilderness Society asked a media communications firm, MacWilliams Cosgrove Snider, to study the Wise Use movement." The report was entitled The Wise Use Movement – Strategic Analysis and Fifty State Review. According to Erich Veyhl later a conferance was held, reviewing the report called “The Wise Use Movement – Threats and Opportunities” During this conference environmentalist activist Debra Callahan "said she had previously thought of the resistance to environmentalism as coming from “command and control, top heavy, corporate funded, front groups,” but that “what we're finding is that wise use is really a local movement driven by primarily local concerns and not national issues..." we have come to the conclusion that this is pretty much generally a grass roots movement" [5]

[edit] Response to criticism

According to Jesse Walker the book "offers environmentalists a conspiracy theory to account for the populist backlash against their movement". In his review of the book Walker quotes Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair “The Wise Use movement, led by former Sierra Clubber Ron Arnold and staked (like the big Greens) by oil companies, was able to score many hits and rally populist opposition precisely because so many of the charges rang true. The mainstream environmental movement was elitist, highly paid, detached from the people, indifferent to the working class, and a firm ally of big government.…The environmental movement is now accurately perceived as just another well-financed and cynical special interest group, its rancid infrastructure supported by Democratic Party operatives and millions in grants from corporate foundations.”[6]

[edit] Fringe groups associated with Wise Use

A radical fringe element of the Wise Use movement emerged in California for a period during the early 1990s with two now defunct groups, the Sahara Club and Mother's Watch, openly encouraging harassment and vandalism directed at environmental activsts, and include placing billboards [7] in small towns in the western United States which were recent victims of wildfires, falsely blaming "environmentalists" for causing those fires. There have been instances where the appearance of Wise Use speakers in a town, especially the activities of the aforementioned fringe groups, was followed by violent attacks on local environmental activists, burnings in effigy, or by rhetoric voiced by local citizens that all environmentalists "should be lined up and shot" (Helvarg, 1994).

[edit] History

The term "wise use" was coined in 1910 by U.S. Forest Service leader and political Progressive, Gifford Pinchot, to describe his concept of substainable harvest of natural resources.

  • Today's wise use coalition has appropriated a nineteenth-century term but not the underlying conservation philosophy. According to historian Douglas McCleery, the idea of "conservation as wise use" of natural resources began with conservation leader Gifford Pinchot in the late nineteenth century. The original wise use movement was a product of the progressive era and included the concept of multiple use—public land can be used simultaneously for recreation, for timber, for mining, and for wildlife habitat. The multiple-use and wise use concepts advocated by Pinchot reflected the view that nature's resources should be scientifically managed so as "to protect the basic productivity of the land and its ability to serve future generations." [8]

The modern use of the term wise use to refer to opposition to the environmental movement dates to the publication of Ron Arnold's book Wise Use Agenda in 1989. The Wise Use movement has it roots in both the earlier "Sagebrush Rebellion" in the western United States around 1980 and to the earlier opposition to the formation of the National forests. However unlike Sagebrush Rebellion, which consisted largly of the formation of industry public relations groups by resource extraction industries led by companies such as Coors and Co, Wise Use included grass-roots groups. Ron Arnold believed that the inclusion of citizen groups would make the movement more effective In 1979 in Logging Management magizine Arnold wrote: “Citizen activist groups, allied to the forest industry, are vital to our future survival. They can speak for us in the public interest where we ourselves cannot. They are not limited by liability, contract law or ethical codes…industry must come to support citizen activist groups, providing funds, materials, transportation, and most of all, hard facts.”[9]

McCarthy wrote:

  • The Wise Use movement is a broad coalition of over a thousand national, state, and local groups. Its existence by this name dates from a 1988 ‘Multiple-Use Strategy Conference’ attended by nearly 200 organizations, mainly Western-based, including natural resource industry corporations and trade associations, law firms specializing in combating environmental regulations, and recreational groups. The conference produced a legislative agenda intended to ‘destroy environmentalism’ and promote the ‘wise use’ of natural resources - an intentionally ambiguous phrase strategically appropriated from the early conservation movement. [10]

[edit] References

[11]The Structure of Social Movements: Envionmental Activism and its opponents Luther P. Gerlac

[12]An Ideological Analysis of the Wise Use Movement

[13] First World Politial Ecology: lessons from the Wise Use Movement. James McCarthy

[14]Dangerous Territory: Jonn Lunsford

  1. ^ A Overcoming Ideology by Ron Arnold, in A Wolf in the Garden: The Land Rights Movement and the New Environmental Debate, Edited by Philip D. Brick and R. McGreggor Cawley, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Lanham, Maryland, 1996 ISBN 0847681858. Regarded as the seminal expression of Wise Use ideas.

[edit] Books

  • The War Against the Greens by David Helvarg (1994)
  • The Greenpeace Guide to Anti-Environmental Organizations by Carl Deal (1993)
  • First World political ecology: lessons from the Wise Use movement McCarthy J, (2002)
  • Crimes Against Nature by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (2004)
  • The New World Order by Pat Robertson (1991)

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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