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No other single environmental group can come close to TNC’s holdings,
which also include over a million acres of land. Recent practice
has been for activist groups to form coalitions with shared funding
targeted at a particular cause, such as halting logging in the
Southwest, with financial coffers commonly totaling half a million
dollars a year on each issue. It is spent on influence, both on
politicians and in the public media.
By contrast, the total budget for lobbying activities of the National
Cattlemen’s and Beef Association is about $2 million a year, including
salaries and costs. Yet these funds, derived from a much smaller
base of the population, must be devoted to a number of issues
and even individual cases. Even if agricultural groups could combine
their assets in the way that environmentalist groups do under
shelter of foundations, the strain on a limited pool of rural
contributors would itself threaten the continued existence of
many of them. The bitter choice among those in agriculture is
in whether they can afford to just stay even with a “movement”
that enjoys enough funding to expend more and more in soliciting
financial support from the cities and suburbs.
• • •
The public popularity of “saving” the environment is by itself
so potent that sometimes little special interest pressure at all
is necessary to trigger administrative action that is not even
offered for public debate. The outstanding example, though not
the only one, was the 1996 campaign designation of the Grand Staircase
Escalante in Utah as a National Heritage Site, surprising even
the entire Utah congressional delegation.
Indeed, what has characterized the Clinton administration is evasion
of public debate, even in Congress, by using administrative orders
and regulations to carry out major policy changes on public lands.
Secretary Babbitt has frequently expressed his frustration with
congressional reluctance to approve his proposals. Not for the
first time, Babbitt infuriated some in Congress recently by telling
the National Journal–“We’ve switched the rules of the game. We’re not going to do anything
legislatively.”
It’s that kind of bluster, along with previous actions, that has
helped stir opposition to the administration. Yet even mild political
dissent to such authority has been branded as “anti-government”
in the heated issue of public lands.
Opponents to environmental initiatives by the administration are
frequently labeled as dupes or tools of powerful corporations
such as oil companies. Ironically, however, a huge amount of wealth
employed by the leading environmental organizations can be traced
to grants from fortunes made in the 20th century from corporate
exploitation of natural resources. This includes The Rockefeller
Family Foundation (Standard Oil), The Pew Charitable Trusts (Sun
Oil), The Ford Foundation, and a long list of other well-known
corporate titles with charitable foundations that donate hundreds
of millions of dollars a year to environmental groups. When it
comes to funding, there is no doubt that the “big” money is in
green hands.
• • •
The idea persists among many westerners that it is some kind of
international conspiracy involving a plan to turn over large parts
of the United States to the United Nations. There are 47 “Biosphere
Reserves” |
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“Biosphere Reserves” and 27 “World Heritage” sites in the United
States covering as much as 70 percent of national parks and monuments
which are in theory protected under international agreement with
the United Nations.
That does not mean those lands are controlled by the U.N., but
what is less understood is the power awarded in settling disputes
over these lands to the influence of nationally and internationally
recognized “Non Government Organizations” (NGOs) such as The Nature
Conservancy.
Such politically-weighted “international authority” has also been
used by the Clinton administration to avoid a national debate
(notably in blocking the New World Mine near the border of Yellowstone
National Park).
Secretary Babbitt is certainly aware of the appearance of demagoguery
in his administration and has initiated other measures such as
Resource Advisory Councils (RACs) to provide what some argue is
only an appearance of democratic participation among ranchers,
recreationists, academicians, environmentalists and local government
in deciding use of public lands.
In what they say is an attempt to reach consensus on such issues
as multiple land use, federal authorities have established training
programs for land management staff in “facilitated” meetings now
commonly experienced by many westerners. They are recognizable
in their signature direction by a “facilitator” writing the views
of participants on easel-sized tablets of white butcher paper.
That the methodology is so common is no accident. Breaking participants
into small groups generally unfamiliar with each other is intended
not only to produce a variety of thought, but to discourage disagreement
in a politely uncertain social setting. Translating their views
into simple statements listed on the paper makes their differences
seem even less significant. What comes of it, according to critics
of this “Delphi” method, is the appearance of agreement on a pre-planned
solution. The critics say participants are simply manipulated
into thinking they have found consensus. Whether or not the critics
are right about that, such “facilitated” methods appear to be
taking the place of social and scientific debate. Those with particular
expertise and knowledge in the field, in fact, are characteristically
excluded from the consensus process.
To say there is a conspiracy or some sort of grand plan for a
socialist takeover of the West distorts the reality of a vastly
more complex (not to mention more capitalist funded) environmental
“movement” that has captured the enthusiasm of young people in
particular through a public media campaign that presents an opportunity
for redemption of some mutually held social guilt. If it distorts
reality and ignores its own responsibility for the creation of
social and even environmental crises, it has evolved less as a
conspiracy than as a political agenda which yet requires an educated
response.
SPECIES ENDANGEREDIS IT THE OWLS? OR IS IT US?
From the very beginning of their campaign in 1989, the Sierra
Club made no secret of the fact that the spotted owl was virtually
invented from questionable research as a “surrogate” useful to
halting all old growth forest harvesting in the Northwest.
Andy Stahl of the Sierra Club was delighted in comparing the owl
to “Bambi” as a symbol of the |
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