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The Life, Death and Potential Resurrection of Environmentalism

DRAFT VERSION 

Ed Marston, Publisher Emeritus of High Country News

Colorado Water Workshop, July 27, 2005

 

        When I moved from the New York City area to then rural western Colorado , I was not an environmentalist. Paonia, a coal mining and fruit-growing town of about 1,400 made me one. Not because I saw that rural land uses were damaging the land. Far from it. To my city boy's eyes, Paonia and the surroundings looked great. I joined the greens because Paonia in the 1970s was like the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union .

        Former Congressman Wayne Aspinall, who built the West's dams, still moved around his former congressional district like a god. Gunnison National Forest Supervisor Jimmy Wilkins ruled his forest like a total dictator. And the voice if not the vote of one rancher, or of one long-time resident, was worth 100 voices like mine.

        Paonia gave me a hint of how a black person might feel in the more tolerant parts of the United States. So I became opposed to most of the things the rural westerners were doing: building dams, logging and grazing, paving dirt roads, bulldozing new dirt roads through forests, irrigating meadows and orchards, spraying against pests.

        I knew almost nothing about what they were doing, but I knew it was being done by people who excluded me politically and socially from what I naively thought of as the public sphere. They even excluded me ­ and continue to exclude me ­ from serving on juries.

        Was there any particular event that made me feel this way? There were hundreds of such events. There was the time Forest Supervisor Wilkins, sitting in the audience, ended a public hearing on a proposed molybdenum mine in Crested Butte by drawing his forefinger across his throat. The staffer running the meeting ended it in mid-sentence.

        There were hundreds of times I heard someone open their remarks at a meeting with the phrase: I have lived here for…, or I was born here,  or my parents came here in a covered wagon.

        There was the time in the mid-1980s when a member of an audience in Montrose got angry at some remark I had made, and asked me: "Why did you people move here anyway?" (It was during the energy bust, and my response showed I'd learned a thing or two: "Because you people don't know how to make a living here anymore.")

        About two years ago, High Country News, the paper I once published, ran a letter-to-the-editor from a rancher in the Cortez area. He said that in retrospect, he wished he and his fellow ranchers had greeted the newcomers who came pouring into the area in a more welcoming way.

        That letter spoke to me because I have wished since the early 1990s that those of us who came here from the cities and suburbs had turned aside the slights directed at us and behaved with more maturity and forbearance and wisdom.

        But if regrets and remorse were water, everyone in this room would be drowning. The question is: Where to from here?

        I can only speak from the environmental side of the fence. And I can only speak from my experience on that side of the fence. I think we greens got off on the wrong foot at Echo Park , where the Yampa and Green come together in the remotest corner of Colorado .

        When I first floated that corner in the early 1980s, there were wooden ladders spiked into the vertical canyon walls. When I came back a few years later, most of the ladders had been removed, probably by the National Park Service. All they left were the four-inch boreholes drilled into the canyon walls.

        The agency's actions destroyed the physical evidence that the United States had wobbled on its axis where it looked as if nothing had ever happened or could ever happen. But it was here in 1956 that the late David Brower and his environmental allies avenged John Muir's defeat at Hetch Hetchy by stopping two dams ­ Echo Park and Split Mountain . He even came close to derailing the entire Colorado River Storage project Act, which authorized Flaming Gorge, Glen Canyon, Navajo and other dams.

        In 1968, Brower and his team did it again, this time stopping two dams planned for the Grand Canyon , and almost defeating the Central Arizona Project. I think that Brower understood for the rest of his life that he and the environmental movement were at the peak of their powers during the 1950s and 1960s, and that it was to be downhill from there. He never admitted that, so far as I know. Instead, the berated himself in public for having turned victory into defeat by allowing Glen Canyon Dam to be built. From it, he drew the lesson, which he drummed into environmentalism, that you never compromise. You always go for the jugular.

        But he taught it too late. And it was a dangerous, self-defeating, destructive lesson for a movement in decline.

        Brower's 1950s and 1960s victories had two roots. First, the dams were planned for in or near units of the national park system. In those prosperous and secular days, threats to the national parks were as close as one could come in America to sacrilege. Americans had not yet abandoned secular gods to return to traditional gods.

        But if sacrilege is committed and no one knows about it, then it doesn't matter. David Brower made sure the part of the nation that counted ­ those who read its big city newspapers ­ knew that national parks were being threatened. He invented the kind of media war and issue spinning that we are now immersed in, and that the opponents of Brower's beliefs have especially mastered.

        Brower bemoaned his victory at Echo Park because it led to the inundation of Glen Canyon . I bemoan his victory because, combined with the passage of the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Superfund act, and other pieces of legislation, it created a path for the environmental movement that has ended in the present disaster.

        In the internet circulated article titled "The Death of Environmentalism" (Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus), the writers point out that the modern, well-funded environmental movement, with more members than every, has spent the last 15 years attempting to control climate change through the general path pioneered during the 1960s and early 1970s: public pressure exerted  to produce legislation, to be followed by agency rule making and litigation to make the legislation work. Their efforts failed, which to the writers say means that the environmental movement's core approach to issues has failed.

        In the West, we can see environmentalism's failure on the ground, in the form of the enemy's flags, drill rigs, flying everywhere over the public and private lands. A movement that in the 1950s and 1960s could force major compromises on the Colorado River Basin Project and the Central Arizona Project is today so weak that drill rigs can go literally anywhere.

        This weakness has existed since the 1980s, but was masked first by George HW Bush's old guard Republicanism moderation, and then by Bill Clinton's political genius. George W. Bush has revealed our impotence.

        Shellenberger and Nordhaus say we have become losers because  environmentalism has become just another special interest, failing to connect with the larger and more general needs of the population. Their cure is an Apollo II project, in which we create jobs and wealth by weaning the energy from oil.

        It's a good idea, but suffers from the old question: Who will bell the cat. Environmentalism didn't accidentally stumble into this fix. It came about because of the way in which the people who are part of the environmental movement approach not issues but life. The class of people who staff and back the environmental movement are almost without exception, people for whom making a living has not been a problem for at least two generations. They are therefore out of touch with the concerns of an increasing number of Americans: those who just get by, or who worry about getting by.

        It is a truism that those who attend environmental meetings and who belong to environmental groups are almost always white. What can't be seen is that they also tend to be comfortable themselves, or the children of the comfortable. Because of this background, the West's environmental movement felt no compunction about making war on blue collar people: loggers, illworkers, ranchers, dam builders and the like.

        Andy Kerr or the Oregon Natural Resources Council was more outspoken than most when he said that loggers should turn to making cappuccino. But no one rose from within environmentalism to oppose him. The zero cut and cattle-free movements were not opposed from within the movement as a form of economic and class warfare. The environmental constituency simply didn't see things that way.

        The only social sensitivity I have seen within the movement comes in the form of traditional liberal mores. The Sierra Club membership soundly defeated a measure to involve that organization in controlling illegal immigration. Ethnic sensitivity trumped in environmental concerns on this issue.

        My board at High Country News was fairly typical of environmentalism: a mix of excellent people who were racially sensitive but didn't have a clue when it came to class issues. It was never suggested that we seek out miners or loggers or millworkers as board members, but we were forever seeking Native American and Hispanic board members. The best we did was to have a few ranchers, a couple of whom were people who depended on the ranch for their livings.

        The time I felt closest to being summarily fired came when I told the board that it had proven impossible to attract minority interns to Paonia as interns, but that on a few occasions we had succeeded in finding interns from Anglo working class families.  The fact that I had drawn an equation between minorities and the Anglo working class enraged several board members.

        For other evidence, take a look at the cover of the book Welfare Ranching. It is supposedly a critique of ranching's land use practices, but it is really an assault on the people who ranch. The cover photo shows some very healthy looking land. But riding through that land on a four-wheeler is an overweight, self-satisfied looking rancher. The cattle-free movement was and is a war against people as much as it is a war for healthy land.

        So the fact that the movement adopted David Brower's initially successful tactics at Echo Park and in the Grand Canyon was not totally the blind following of a charismatic leader. It had to do with the hostility and arrogance of the political and economic class that dominated the rural West in the 1960s and 1970s coming up against the ignorance of the land and the class bias of those of us who moved here.

        I do not know why constructive leadership did not emerge on either side until very recently. I suspect leadership is like seeds: it can only take root in fertile soil. And on my side of the divide, writers like Edward Abbey were the most popular. On the other side, "real" westerners elected senators like Larry Craig and Wayne Allard and who pandered to them rather than attempted to lead them to a workable center piece.

        In general, I think the almost total defeat of environmentalism in the West is an excellent thing. I mourn the wholesale destruction of land that the gas industry is visiting upon the West, but to me that is a relatively small price to pay for putting the responsibility for the West into the hands of Westerners.

        I see signs that Westerners are beginning to take on this responsibility now that it is clear that the Sierra Club, et al, are no longer players in the region. I see those signs in the growth of organizations like the Quivira Coalition, River Network, Oregon Natural Country Beef marketing co-operative, the countless watershed groups, and ­ it is possible ­ the land conservancies.

       [  Rest of the talk: I will describe a few of these groups, and why I think they are signs of hope. I will express concern about the land conservancies because they are doing private, wealth-based land use planning and seem to take no responsibility for forcing up the cost of housing .]

        Finally, I will say that a major hope must lie with the ranchers. Private land ranchers control 170,000 square miles of the interior West, and the assault upon them by environmentalism has had some good results, which I will briefly describe.

        I will say that the environmental movement did many wonderful things, like protected wilderness and rivers, expanded national parks, raising the prominence of wildlife predators and fire. Even more important, it forced Westerners to think about what they were doing to the land as a whole, and built that awareness into the region.

        The weakness of the movement was that it always depended on distant allies, of the liberal persuasion, who did not understand the region. It was the weakness of the British style of colonialism: not brutal, but arrogant. It is unfortunate but inevitable that the open mindedness it initially brought to the region should have so soon degenerated into mindless orthodoxy.