To save America's wilds - environmental responses to 'Wise Use' movement - Column

Sierra, Sept-Oct, 1992 by Joan Hamilton

Not since the heyday of James Watt have environmentalists been faced with such daunting challenges. As our problems multiply, those in a position to help seem increasingly unwilling or unable to do so. In need of bold action, our country is hamstrung by a politicized Supreme Court, an ineffectual Congress, and a president waging war on environmental protection.

Riding herd on all three branches of government is the self-styled Wise Use coalition, a diverse assemblage of developers, miners, loggers, ranchers, and farmers. Though these folks like to portray themselves as victims of an environmentalist conspiracy, they in fact represent the most powerful economic forces in this country.

As the Users see it, nature was meant to be consumed. The coalition wants to open wilderness and parks to mining, to exclude "non-adaptive" species from protection under the Endangered Species Act, to log the Pacific Northwest's remaining old-growth forests, and to pump oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The Users' most galvanizing theme has been property rights, an all-American concept they redefine to suit their economic interests. Landowners, they maintain, should be reimbursed by government for any economic burden imposed on them by environmental regulations. A mall magnate barred from paving a wetland should be paid for profits forgone. Farmers asked to keep toxic runoff out of rivers should get back the money polluting would have saved them.

In light of widespread public support for environmental protection, such proposals might ordinarily be laughed off, but lately the Bush bunch and their sympathizers have been lending an all-too-ready ear. Congress is considering User-instigated "property rights" legislation, as are nine state legislatures. (Arizona, Washington, and Delaware have already passed similar laws.) Three "property rights" lawsuits rose to the Supreme Court this year, and many more clog the lower courts. Even some of the environmental movement's most steadfast allies in the House and Senate seem daunted by the Users' letters pilling up on their desks.

So the chuckling has stopped, and the hard work has begun. "We are going to the courts, to Congress, to the public, and to the media to explain the threats of the Land Abuse Coalition," says Sierra Club Associate Executive Director Carl Pope. At the same time, he says, the Club is launching the most ambitious conservation initiative in its 100-year history: the Campaign to Save America's Wilds, which combines critically needed defensive actions with the aggressive pursuit of new policy.

The Club is beating back four User-inspired bills in Congress, while pushing nine separate pieces of its own legislation, including the California Desert Protection Act and strong wilderness bills for Utah, Colorado, and Montana. It is producing television spots decrying Bush's User-friendly record; gathering signatures in Arizona to submit that state's new "property rights" law to a referendum; designing new ways to protect land (with ancient-forest preserves first on the list); and constructing visionary plans in defense of 19 ecoregions around the country.

The Sierra Club hopes to turn its opponents' momentum to its own advantage, martial-arts fashion, letting the Users help remind the public of environmentalists' overarching goal: preserving the health of the whole planet, rather than the freedom of a few individuals to plunder. "The Sierra Club's traditional conservation agenda is more vital than ever," Pope maintains. We must protect and expand our wetlands acreage and our wilderness and parks systems, he says; strengthen the Endangered Species Act; toughen regulations governing logging and grazing on public lands; and drop the dangerous 1872 Mining Law down a deep, dark shaft.

For all its shortsightedness, the Wise Use movement has highlighted some important issues, the most critical of which center on the economy. Preservation of a healthy environment is indisputably the best guarantee of a healthy economy in the future. The political and business leaders in this country need to hear that message from a movement--ours--that combines concern for the nation's economic condition with an unselfish love of the environment. Likewise, our movement must help devise ways to ease the transition for workers caught in unsustainable jobs, as the Sierra Club is doing in the Pacific Northwest through our support of provisions for community and worker assistance in the ancient-forest legislation now moving through Congress.

If all goes well, we may ultimately feel grateful to the strident Users. "They were badly misguided and often deceptive," we might find ourselves musing on some distant, brighter day. "But their barbs helped spur us on."