Leader of the pack - environmental policies of Alaska Representative Don Young - includes related article on Alaska's congressional delegation

Sierra, Nov-Dec, 1995 by B.J. Bergman

While Young might concede the latter point--he once baited mining-reform advocates by reading aloud from the Communist Manifesto--he insists he is battling to save working people from "no-growth" environmentalists. He favors development, he maintains, because development means jobs. It also means big bucks from corporate PACs: oil-and-gas companies contributed more than $114,000 to his 1994 campaign alone, or nearly one dollar of every eight from all sources combined. But Young is more than a bought-and-paid-for capitalist tool. Timber-related concerns, for example, came up with a modest $19,000-less than commercial fishing interests, which depend on healthy forest ecosystems--and mining firms gave him barely $10,000. Extraction, for Young, appears to be largely a labor of love. Even by the standards of Alaska--whose former governor, Wally Hickel, uttered the deathless battle cry, "You can't let nature run wild!"--he is unrivaled in both his fervor for development and his contempt for those who stand in its way.

"The theme over and over again is anti-environmentalist," says David Finkelstein, a former Sierra Club volunteer now in his fourth term in the Alaska legislature. "It's very, very negative. But not everyone agrees with Don Young. If Young dislikes Alaskan environmentalists, he loathes the breed found in the nation's capital. "There's 57 different organizations that live around this hill that make a living telling the farmer he's wrong, that make a living telling the guy who's cutting a tree down that he's wrong, that make a living telling everyone that man's occupation on the earth is a cancer on the earth, " Young fumed in january. "That's why I get so frustrated with them, because they are the most despicable group I've ever dealt with."

What Young views as the arrogance of environmentalists is embodied in the 1973 Endangered Species Act, which, he complains, lets "idiots" in Washington run roughshod over property owners. Although he helped pass it then, he now claims that supporters had "envisioned trying to protect, you know, pigeons and things like that. We never thought about mussels and ferns and flowers and all these subspecies of squirrels and birds."

Soon after taking the helm of Resources, Young set up a special task force to hold hearings on the act--thereby taking the gavel away from Representative Jim Saxton (R-NJ.), a strong supporter of the act, who chairs the subcommittee that would normally have jurisdiction. For his task force chief Young drafted second-termer Richard Pombo (R-Calif), who presided over a series of staged denunciations of the current law by a hand-picked procession of farmers, ranchers, and other "private-property rights" advocates. Environmentalists were systematically excluded from testifying on behalf of the act; children who did were hooted at. (See "Stacking the Deck for Extinction," Priorities, July/August.)

"In the beginning, the task force looked like, sounded like, acted like, spoke like they wanted to repeal the Endangered Species Act," says Maryland's Gilchrest, a proponent of tough species-protection who asked to be added to Pombo's panel--and later threatened to quit in protest. "And to Don's credit he said to me in january he didn't want to repeal the act, he just wanted to reform it." ("There's nobody here that's for the repeal of ESA," George Miller notes sardonically. "You know, 'I'm not for killing you. I'm just going to take your heart out.'") But when Gilchrest wanted to broaden the task force's horizons by holding a hearing with actual scientists--including Pulitzer prize-winning Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, Zoo Atlanta Director Terry Maple, and Cornell University entomologist Thomas Eisner--he was flatly rebuffed. Then Newt Gingrich stepped in.