Wise UsE

<h1 id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading">Wise Use Movement</h1><div>see tag</div><div>see militia</div><div>see sagebrush bak</div>

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</div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.kunr.org/local-stories/2022-01-07/big-lie-feeds-off-western-extremism" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.kunr.org/local-stories/2022-01-07/big-lie-feeds-off-western-extremism</a></div><div style="font-size: small;">...Many of the Republicans pushing Trump’s lies have close ties to anti-government extremists in the West.Accountable.US, a left-leaning watchdog group, released a <a href="https://www.accountable.us/news/report-insurrectionists-anti-conservation-movement-one-in-the-same/" class="Link" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; touch-action: manipulation;">report</a> Thursday connecting the insurrection with earlier conflicts over ranching and mining on federal lands, beginning with the <a href="https://www.hcn.org/articles/a-look-back-at-the-first-sagebrush-rebellion" class="Link" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; touch-action: manipulation;">Sagebrush Rebellion</a> of the 1970s.“The anti-public lands movement is a breeding ground for this type of animosity that helped supercharge the events of January 6 and contribute to them,” Accountable spokesperson Karl Frisch said.Frisch says far-right politicians like Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes and Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar were primed for the insurrection by their previous involvement with anti-government extremists.In December 2020, Reyes signed an amicus brief in support of a Supreme Court case <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163215/20201209144840609_2020-12-09%20-%20Texas%20v.%20Pennsylvania%20-%20Amicus%20Brief%20of%20Missouri%20et%20al.%20-%20Final%20with%20Tables.pdf" class="Link" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; touch-action: manipulation;">seeking to have votes thrown out</a> in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. He is also the former chairman of the Rule of Law Defense Fund, one of the sponsors of the so-called <a href="https://documented.net/reporting/republican-attorneys-general-dark-money-group-organized-protest-preceding-capitol-mob-attack" class="Link" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; touch-action: manipulation;">March To Save America</a> that took place just before protesters stormed the Capitol.The fund also sponsored robocalls urging Trump supporters to “march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal” in the days before the insurrection. After the day’s attack turned deadly, Reyes <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/01/10/utah-ag-sean-reyes-denies/" class="Link" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; touch-action: manipulation;">sought to distance himself</a> from the group.Years earlier, as the Accountable report details, Reyes <a href="https://www.deseret.com/2014/4/8/20539077/utahns-paying-close-attention-to-dispute-between-blm-nevada-rancher" class="Link" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; touch-action: manipulation;">intervened on behalf of Cliven Bundy</a> when the government planned to auction the radical rancher’s cattle in Utah to help pay down the $1 million in grazing fees he refused to pay. Bundy and his sons gained a large following among the far-right after they organized a series of armed standoffs with federal agents in Nevada and Oregon.Frisch predicts the growth of right-wing radicalism will continue in the leadup to midterm elections later this year.“Because these two movements are so intertwined, I think we’re likely to see more of it,” he said.Meanwhile, advocates like Lyngar support abolishing the Electoral College and eliminating the filibuster, which would allow Democrats to pass federal voter protections. He told the crowd on Thursday it was up to voters to put pressure on lawmakers for those changes to be adopted....</div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div>=rfk2 crime ~ nature good critique...
Coors founded the Mountain States Legal Foundation in 1976 to bring lawsuits designed to enrich giant corporations, limit civil rights and attack unions, homosexuals and minorities. He also founded the right-wing Heritage Foundation, to provide a philosophical underpinning for the anti-environmental movement. While the foundation and its imitators -- the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Federalist Society, the Marshall Institute and others -- claim to advocate free markets and property rights, their agenda is more pro-pollution than anything else. From its conception, the Heritage Foundation and its neoconservative cronies urged followers to "strangle the environmental movement," which Heritage named "the greatest single threat to the American economy." Ronald Reagan's victory gave Heritage Foundation and the Mountain States Legal Foundation immeasurable clout. Heritage became known as Reagan's "shadow government," and its 2,000-page manifesto, "Mandate for Change," became a blueprint for his administration. Coors handpicked his Colorado associates: Anne Gorsuch became the EPA administrator; her husband, Robert Burford, a cattle baron who had vowed to destroy the Bureau of Land Management, was selected to head that very agency. Most notorious, Coors chose James Watt, president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, as the secretary of the interior. Watt was a proponent of "dominion theology," an authoritarian Christian heresy that advocates man's duty to "subdue" nature. His deep faith in laissez-faire capitalism and apocalyptic Christianity led Secretary Watt to set about dismantling his department and distributing its assets rather than managing them for future generations. During a Senate hearing, he cited the approaching Apocalypse to explain why he was giving away America's sacred places at fire-sale prices: "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns." Meanwhile, Anne Gorsuch enthusiastically gutted EPA's budget by sixty percent, crippling its ability to write regulations or enforce the law. She appointed lobbyists fresh from their hitches with the paper, asbestos, chemical and oil companies to run each of the principal agency departments. Her chief counsel was an Exxon lawyer; her head of enforcement was from General Motors. These attacks on the environment precipitated a public revolt. By 1983, more than a million Americans and all 125 American-Indian tribes had signed a petition demanding Watt's removal. After being forced out of office, Watt was indicted on twenty-five felony counts of influence-pedaling. Gorsuch and twenty-three of her cronies were forced to resign following a congressional investigation of sweetheart deals with polluters, including Coors. Her first deputy, Rita Lavelle, was jailed for perjury. The indictments and resignations put a temporary damper on the Sagebrush Rebels, but they quickly regrouped as the "Wise Use" movement. Wise Use founder, the timber-industry flack Ron Arnold, said, "Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement. We want to be able to exploit the environment for private gain, absolutely." By 1994, Wise Use helped propel Newt Gingrich to the speaker's chair of the U.S. House of Representatives and turn his anti-environmental manifesto, "The Contract With America," into law. Gingrich's chief of environmental policy was Rep. Tom DeLay, the one-time Houston exterminator who was determined to rid the world of pesky pesticide regulations and to promote a biblical worldview. He targeted the Endangered Species Act as the second-greatest threat to Texas after illegal aliens. He also wanted to legalize the deadly pesticide DDT, and he routinely referred to the EPA as "the Gestapo of government." In January 1995, DeLay invited a group of 350 lobbyists representing some of America's biggest polluters to collaborate in drafting legislation to dismantle federal health, safety and environmental laws. Gingrich and DeLay had learned from the James Watt debacle that they had to conceal their radical agenda. Carefully eschewing public debates on their initiatives, they mounted a stealth attack on America's environmental laws. Rather than pursue a frontal assault against popular statutes such as the Endangered Species, Clean Water and Clean Air acts, they tried to undermine these laws by attaching silent riders to must-pass budget bills. But the public got wise. Moderate Republicans teamed up with the Clinton administration to block the worst of it. My group, the NRDC, as well as the Sierra Club and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, generated more than 1 million letters to Congress. When President Clinton shut down the government in December 1995 rather than pass a budget bill spangled with anti-environmental riders, the tide turned against Gingrich and DeLay. By the end of that month, even conservatives disavowed the attack. "We lost the battle on the environment," DeLay conceded. Undermining the Scientists Today, with the presidency and both houses of Congress under the anti-environmentalists' control, they are set to eviscerate the despised laws. White House strategy is to promote its unpopular policies by lying about its agenda, cheating on the science and stealing the language and rhetoric of the environmental movement. Even as Republican pollster Luntz acknowledged that the scientific evidence is against the Republicans on issues like global warming, he advised them to find scientists willing to hoodwink the public. "You need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue," he told Republicans, "by becoming even more active in recruiting experts sympathetic to your view." In the meantime, he urged them to change their rhetoric. "'Climate change,' " he said, "is less threatening than 'global warming.' While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge." The EPA's inspector general received broad attention for his August 21st, 2003, finding that the White House pressured the agency to conceal the public-health risks from poisoned air following the September 11th World Trade Center attacks. But this 2001 deception is only one example of the administration's pattern of strategic distortion. Earlier this year, it suppressed an EPA report warning that millions of Americans, especially children, are being poisoned by mercury from industrial sources. This behavior is consistent throughout the Bush government. Consider the story of James Zahn, a scientist at the Department of Agriculture who resigned after the Bush administration suppressed his taxpayer-funded study proving that billions of antibiotic-resistant bacteria can be carried daily across property lines from meat factories into neighboring homes and farms. In March 2002, Zahn accepted my invitation to present his findings to a convention of family-farm advocates in Iowa. Several weeks before the April conference, pork-industry lobbyists learned of his appearance and persuaded the Department of Agriculture to forbid him from appearing. Zahn told me he had been ordered to cancel a dozen appearances at county health departments and similar venues. In May, the White House blocked the EPA staff from publicly discussing contamination by the chemical perchlorate -- the main ingredient in solid rocket fuel. The administration froze federal regulations on perchlorate, even as new research reveals alarmingly high levels of the chemical in the nation's drinking water and food supply, including many grocery-store lettuces. Perchlorate pollution has been linked to neurological problems, cancer and other life-threatening illnesses in some twenty states. The Pentagon and several defense contractors face billions of dollars in potential cleanup liability. The administration's leading expert in manipulating scientific data is Interior Secretary Gale Norton. During her nomination hearings, Norton promised not to ideologically slant agency science. But as her friend Thomas Sansonetti, a coal- industry lobbyist who is now assistant attorney general, predicted, "There won't be any biologists or botanists to come in and pull the wool over her eyes." In autumn 2001, Secretary Norton provided the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources with her agency's scientific assessment that Arctic oil drilling would not harm hundreds of thousands of caribou. Not long afterward, Fish and Wildlife Service biologists contacted the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which defends scientists and other professionals working in state and federal environmental agencies. "The scientists provided us the science that they had submitted to Norton and the altered version that she had given to Congress a week later," said the group's executive director, Jeff Ruch. There were seventeen major substantive changes, all of them minimizing the reported impacts. When Norton was asked about the alterations in October 2001, she dismissed them as typographical errors. Later, she and White House political adviser Karl Rove forced National Marine Fisheries scientists to alter findings on the amount of water required for the survival of salmon in Oregon's Klamath River, to ensure that large corporate farms got a bigger share of the river water. As a result, more than 33,000 chinook and coho salmon died -- the largest fish kill in the history of America. Mike Kelly, the biologist who drafted the original opinion (and who has since been awarded federal whistle-blower status), told me that the coho salmon is probably headed for extinction. "Morale is low among scientists here," Kelly says. "We are under pressure to get the right results. This administration is putting the species at risk for political gain -- and not just in the Klamath." Norton has also ordered the rewriting of an exhaustive twelve-year study by federal biologists detailing the effects that Arctic drilling would have on populations of musk oxen and snow geese. She reissued the biologists' report two weeks later as a two-page paper showing no negative impact to wildlife. She also ordered suppression of two studies by the Fish and Wildlife Service concluding that the drilling would threaten polar-bear populations and violate the international treaty protecting bears. She then instructed the Fish and Wildlife Service to redo the report to "reflect the Interior Department's position." She suppressed findings that mountaintop mining would cause "tremendous destruction of aquatic and terrestrial habitat" and a Park Service report that found that snowmobiles were hurting Yellowstone's air quality, wildlife and the health of its visitors and employees. Norton's Fish and Wildlife Service is the first ever not to voluntarily list a single species as endangered or threatened. Her officials have blackballed scientists and savaged studies to avoid listing the trumpeter swan, revoke the listing of the grizzly bear and shrink the remnant habitat for the Florida panther. She disbanded the service's oldest scientific advisory committee in order to halt protection of desert fish in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas that are headed for extinction. Interior career staffers and scientists say they are monitored by Norton's industry appointees to ensure that future studies do not conflict with industry profit-making. Cooking the Books on Global Warming...=reboot post 2014 election?When the federal government introduced stronger standards for fracking on public lands earlier this month, the oil and gas industry was quick to file lawsuits. On Thursday, the state of Wyoming joined the fray.Claiming that the <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/03/20/3637106/republicans-freaking-on-fracking-rules/" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">new Bureau of Land Management (BLM) set of rules</a> released last week “unlawfully interferes” with the state’s existing fracking regulations, Wyoming filed a suit Thursday against the U.S. Department of the Interior, Sec. Sally Jewell, and BLM, requesting judicial review of the rules.In the <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_4EQ9PebvQIaVFaZkFKN2dPZWM/view" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">lawsuit</a>, Wyoming claims that BLM cannot put these restrictions on fracking because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has “exclusive authority” to regulate any underground injections under the Safe Water Drinking Act of 1974.<div id="in-content-ad" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 22.4400005340576px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">However, under the so-called “<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/10/24/3584055/fracking-with-benzene/" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Halliburton Loophole</a>,” added to the SWDA in 2003, fracking activities are specifically excluded from the definition of underground injections, unless diesel fuel is being used — which is fairly uncommon.“It appears the state just has it wrong legally,” Mike Freeman, an attorney with Earth Justice told ThinkProgress. “Wyoming’s petition actually cites the definition of underground injection that excludes fracking.”The new BLM rules require oil and gas companies to disclose all the chemicals used while fracking on protected lands. During the fracking process, a liquid, usually water, is mixed with chemicals and injected into shale, releasing pockets of natural gas or oil. The water generally cannot be recycled and is toxic after use. Under the new rules, companies will be prohibited from storing fracking wastewater in open pits on national public land and required to periodically test the integrity of every well to help prevent pollution.Two oil and gas industry groups, Independent Petroleum Association for America and the Western Energy Alliance, have <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/236429-drillers-file-lawsuit-to-challenge-fracking-rules" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">also filed</a> a lawsuit against BLM on similar overreach grounds, saying that the “final rule as issued is contrary to law.” North Dakota is also<a href="http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2015/03/25/north-dakota-might-challenge-new-federal-fracking-rule/" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">reportedly</a> considering a lawsuit. Both Wyoming and North Dakota have experienced an oil and gas boom in recent years.BLM manages <a href="http://www.blm.gov/wy/st/en.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">more than 17.5 million</a> acres of public lands in Wyoming, and also has the mineral rights to another 40.7 million acres in the state. In 2013, the most recent year data has been released, 620 new oil and gas wells were started in the state. According to that data, more than <a href="http://www.blm.gov/public_land_statistics/pls13/pls2013.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">7 million acres of public land</a> in Wyoming are currently under lease by oil and gas developers.The BLM’s new rules apply only to oil and gas extraction on federally managed land. As of 2013, the United States managed 247 million acres of public land and had another 700 million acres of mineral rights. Some in Congress want that to change, though. A nonbinding amendment introduced by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) would support state efforts to sell public lands, including national forests, wildlife refuges, wilderness areas, historic sites, and national monuments. The amendment, which would require further legislation in order to become law, <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/03/26/3639683/senate-sell-off-public-lands/" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">passed</a> the Senate on Thursday. The amendment echoes <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/03/16/3633814/gop-budget-public-lands/" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">similar</a> <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/07/10/3458798/ted-cruz-auction-off-public-lands/" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">proposals</a> made by House Natural Resources Committee Chair Rob Bishop (R-UT) and Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz (R-TX).<span id="trigger-slidedown" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 22.4400005340576px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="tags" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0.5em 0px 1em; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 22.4400005340576px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h4 style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0.5em 0px 0px; border: 0px; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.15em; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(153, 153, 153); display: inline;">Tags:</h4> <ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; padding: 1em 0px 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; display: inline;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.33em; padding: 5px 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.6em; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline-block;"><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/tag/blm/" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 1px 0.5em; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); border-radius: 6px; background: rgb(221, 221, 221);">BLM</a></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.33em; padding: 5px 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.6em; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline-block;"><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/tag/bureau-of-land-management/" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 1px 0.5em; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); border-radius: 6px; background: rgb(221, 221, 221);">Bureau of Land Management</a></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.33em; padding: 5px 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.6em; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline-block;"><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/tag/dept-of-the-interior/" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 1px 0.5em; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); border-radius: 6px; background: rgb(221, 221, 221);">Dept. of the Interior</a></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.33em; padding: 5px 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.6em; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline-block;"><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/tag/fracking/" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 1px 0.5em; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); border-radius: 6px; background: rgb(221, 221, 221);">Fracking</a></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.33em; padding: 5px 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.6em; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline-block;"><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/tag/lawsuits/" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 1px 0.5em; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); border-radius: 6px; background: rgb(221, 221, 221);">Lawsuits</a></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.33em; padding: 5px 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.6em; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline-block;"><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/tag/oil-and-gas/" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 1px 0.5em; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); border-radius: 6px; background: rgb(221, 221, 221);">Oil and Gas</a></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.33em; padding: 5px 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.6em; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline-block;"><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/tag/wyoming/" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 1px 0.5em; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); border-radius: 6px; background: rgb(221, 221, 221);">Wyoming</a></li></ul></div>=ebell:<div id="mw-content-text" lang="en" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr" style="direction: ltr; line-height: 19.2000007629395px;">The American Land Rights Association was founded in 1977 by property owners located within Yosemite National Park and was known as the National Park Inholders Assosiation."Its mission was to protect private property landowners from unwanted acquisition by the National Park Service," ALRA's website states.<a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://www.landrights.org/Mission.htm" style="text-decoration: none; padding-right: 13px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC) 100% 50% no-repeat;">[1]</a> In 1980 it changed its name to National Inholders Association (NIA) to broaden its focus to all private land owners within or adjoining public lands. In 1995, the NIA was renamed the American Land Rights Association (ALRA)."ALRA is a national clearinghouse and support coalition encouraging family recreation, multiple-use, commodity production, and access to federally-controlled and state lands. Its purpose is to oppose selfish, single-use, restrictive land use designations that damage local economies, schools and roads in rural America," it states on its website.<a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://www.landrights.org/Mission.htm" style="text-decoration: none; padding-right: 13px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC) 100% 50% no-repeat;">[2]</a>ALRA was one of the leading groups in the anti-environmental <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Wise_Use_Movement" title="Wise Use Movement" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Wise Use Movement</a> that reached its peak in the 1990's opposing public lands initiatives of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Clinton_administration" title="Clinton administration" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Clinton administration</a>. With Republicans taking control in Congress and the White House, ALRA had more friends in Washington DC <a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://pla.freedom.org/AmLandRightsAssn2006VI.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; padding-right: 13px; background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAQAAAAnOwc2AAAATklEQVR4XmXKQQqAMAwF0X/7XsSz9CSKiyIIFRFcjMmihmiGbB5fqDCaQJ4j46pzYLUWe+cXZ6OVBhTS0srY2Njp/+XxXXZOLu6EUWAOPX1vnwTBe6qQAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat;">[3]</a> but has still opposed some Republican initiatives <a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=29743" style="text-decoration: none; padding-right: 13px; background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat;">[4]</a> and nominees <a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://www.tidepool.org/original_content.cfm?articleid=132061" style="text-decoration: none; padding-right: 13px; background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat;">[5]</a>.It sponsors the Land Rights Network, a nationwide mail, phone, fax and e-mail lobby network.<h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Other SourceWatch resources</h2><ul style="line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANAQMAAABb8jbLAAAABlBMVEX///8AUow5QSOjAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAABNJREFUCB1jYEABBQw/wLCAgQEAGpIDyT0IVcsAAAAASUVORK5CYII=); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Wise_Use_Movement" title="Wise Use Movement" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Wise Use Movement</a></li></ul><h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Contact details</h2>ALRA
30218 N.E. 82nd Ave.
PO Box 400
Battle Ground, WA 98604
Tel: 360-687-3087
FAX: 360-687-2973
Web: <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://www.landrights.org/" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC) 100% 50% no-repeat;">http://www.landrights.org</a></div><div id="catlinks" class="catlinks" style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 5px; margin-top: 1em; clear: both; line-height: 19.2000007629395px; background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249);"><div id="mw-normal-catlinks" class="mw-normal-catlinks"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Special:Categories" title="Special:Categories" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Categories</a>: <ul style="line-height: 1.5em; list-style: none none; margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; display: inline;"><li style="margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left-style: none; padding: 0px 0.5em 0px 0.25em; zoom: 1;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:Environment" title="Category:Environment" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Environment</a></li><li style="margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0px 0.5em; zoom: 1;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:United_States" title="Category:United States" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">United States</a></li></ul></div></div>==nice sum from demented:<div>Similar to the anti-Agenda 21 and Tea Party protests of today, Wise Use has a parallel history of fomenting dissent at the behest of private industry’s interests with overblown, nonsensical, and apocalyptic language against any and all environmental regulations. It is the same international, socialist, enviro-Nazi conspiracy rhetoric and coordination tactics, and the same names that are seen today. Rather than battles over stream restoration and endangered species, the focus has now turned toward urban planners and zoning regulations.</div><div>
</div><div>Also known as “Multiple Use,” or “Shared Use” in Canada, [LM europe?] the Wise Use movement is a collection of private interests—mining, timber, ranching, construction, agriculture, chemical manufacturers, and oil and gas companies—who have been battling with the federal government over natural resource rights and regulations since the days of Teddy Roosevelt.</div><div>
</div><div>Ever since the Mining Act of 1872, private resource industries have had free use of federal lands in many locations to mine, log, and graze cattle with little or no payment to the government. When the government tries to regulate access to those federal lands—be it by blocking stream access to ranchers, closing off mountain roads to loggers, or regulating pollution in the vicinity of a mining operation—legal, political, and sometimes physical conflicts have erupted over whether these actions constitute a “taking.” If an environmental regulation is defined as a taking, rather than the EPA fining polluters for not regulating their emissions properly, polluters could sue the government for the loss of potential income from said restriction. Such a decision would set a precedent that, applied across many mining operations, oil refineries, and chemical plants, would mean billions in government payouts.</div><div>
</div><div>In the seventies, this dissent against government control of public lands led a number of ranching groups to form the Sagebrush Rebels. The Sagebrush Rebels were allied to fight the implementation of the growing environmental movement who had won numerous legislative victories in the late sixties and seventies: the Wilderness Act, Roadless Area Review and Evaluation Act (RARE), National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and National Forest Management Act. These policies were put in place to restrict access to government-owned lands and resources that were being used for free or for far below market value while being maintained by the government. The Sagebrush Rebel alliance was able to push their pro-ranching, logging, and mining agenda into the White House with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.</div><div>
</div><div>The story of Wayne Hage is the prototypical example of this battle over government land regulation. A public lands rancher, he grazed his cattle on government-owned lands until the government blocked access to a water source used to feed his cattle. Hage sued the government under takings law for their restriction and eventually won. His twenty-plus-year legal struggle won him $14 million in damages plus interest, and he became a late symbol of the Sagebrush Rebellion and ranchers’ rights.</div><div>
</div><div>Because there is so much at stake, any struggle over government regulation anywhere in the country—from an easement used to create a bike lane, a zoning regulation on housing construction, or an attempt to designate a river as “wild and scenic”—could become legal precedent or a rallying point about the injustices of governmental interference and therefore a front line in the conflict over property rights. Throughout the nineties, natural resource industry interests took to this fight by funding front groups to help foment dissent against park rangers, environmental activists, or anybody that stood in the way of anything but one hundred percent private use of park lands.</div><div>
</div><div>Groups with innocuous-sounding names like “Friends of the Rivers” worked with right wing think tanks like the John Birch Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the Heartland Institute under the philosophy of Lyndon Larouche to claim a grand socialist plot by the UN. Calling environmentalists “watermelons” (green on the outside, red in the middle), they declared all EPA gestapo regulations to be part of an interconnected global hippie conspiracy aimed at destroying U.S. industry and a new paganism that “sacrifices people and worships trees” in order to recruit members and make money. In their view, ozone depletion was a concocted myth meant to justify land seizures. According to these groups, climate change is also a myth, trees cause smog, and toxic waste cleanup is a misuse of public financing.</div><div>
</div><div>Those same think tanks, funded by the natural resource industries, provided boilerplate legal language for politicians to employ across different states and local governments. Pro-bono legal organizations, like Pacific Legal Foundation and Mountain States Legal Foundation, were funded by the same natural resource companies and would seek out and represent individuals with disputes against the government over takings law. A 1984 Yale Law Journal analysis criticized them for not actually serving the public interest as required for 501(c)(3) designation. More often than not they were found to be serving the interests of their oil and ranching industry board members in lawsuits against environmental regulations.</div><div>
</div><div>The tactics of Wise Use are thoroughly documented in David Helvarg’s groundbreaking book The Battle Over the Greens. In it, Helvarg details the same ideology and tactics at the heart of the Tea Party and anti-Agenda 21 movements to come. In many ways, these later groups are merely an extension of Wise Use being led and reinforced by the some of the same actors.  It is the same technique of strategic fearmongering at the local level for private interests. Or as Helvarg explains, “the strength of anti-environmentalism is not in its membership rolls but in its ability to mobilize a network of core activists to intervene in and politicize local conflicts, creating a perception of power that they hope can be used as a springboard for further expansion.”</div><div>
</div><div>Long before the Tea Party accused Obama of being an “Alinsky radical,” groups like Bill Grannell’s People for the West!, Charles Cushman’s National Inholder’s Association, and Ron Arnold’s Center For the Defense of Free Enterprise used the techniques of Saul Alinsky to blame the preservationist elite for the ills of rural Montana. Bill Grannell even took Alinsky’s classes in Chicago before going on to use Alinsky’s tactics for the interests of ranching groups. Instigating instant riots at town meetings, spamming government fax lines, phone lines, and talk radio call-in shows, and threatening a UN takeover of all private property were some of the common tricks of the trade.</div><div>
</div><div>Financial backing for Wise Use would decline because of associations with militias in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and the election of a pro-industry president in George W. Bush, but it didn’t disappear. It would eventually make a new resurgence with the Tea Party and its short-lived attempt to alter the 2010 Congressional elections while denouncing the looming threat of Agenda 21.</div><div>
</div><div>The Paranoid Style in American Politics</div><div>
</div><div>The Wildlands Network, a small non-profit aimed at protecting native fauna on the verge of extinction by connecting habitats across the U.S., is often invoked as Agenda 21’s guideline for mass human relocation, but the project has been misinterpreted to the point of absurdity. They are often denounced as the architects of rural cleansing, where, in the interest of biodiversity and urban development, people in rural communities across the country will be forcibly moved out of their homes and into cities by the government through eminent domain.</div><div>
</div><div>Kim Vacairu, a representative of the Wildlands Network, responded plainly that the non-profit does no lobbying, does not work on policy, does not purchase land, does not work with eminent domain law, and “has never received a dime from the federal government.”  They mainly work with private landowners, almost exclusively in the West, to create wildlife corridors between national parks so that mountain lions are not turned into roadkill.</div><div>
</div><div>Considering the amount of invective the Wildlands Network gets for being near the heart of the global conspiracy, Vacairu says that they rarely get any inquiries. “It hasn’t come up in the last two years.”  Yet the group supposedly produced the “death map” (found across almost every Tea Party website rallying against Agenda 21), which lays out a plan for mass relocation of the human population.</div><div>
</div><div>The map shows all federally-owned lands combined with all state and county-owned lands, with restricted pathways interconnecting them. All of it is classified as off-limits to human activity. On the map, whole towns are designated as uninhabitable; the Adirondacks are a 9,375-square mile exclusion zone.</div><div>
</div><div>Independent of motive, the map would be damning evidence of a non-profit’s overreach if it did not show the copyright of the map’s actual creator, an organization by the name of Environmental Perspectives, in the lower-right corner. Environmental Perspectives had the map drawn up as a prop for Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison’s 1994 debate over the UN Convention on Biodiversity. Anyone can purchase a copy from the Environmental Perspectives website for $10 apiece.</div><div>
</div><div>The ire against Wildlands seems to be aimed not at that particular NGO, but at a nebulous “Wildlands Project,” which is used as a catch-all for any federal policy or NGO that attempts to protect National Park lands or endangered predators. At one point, environmental research professors Reed Noss and Michael Soulé outlined a Wildlands Project that would protect areas of biodiversity for endangered animals in the West, but Noss addressed the controversy in an interview with RANGE magazine, stating that:</div><div>
</div><div>There are unethical people out there perpetrating ridiculous lies in an attempt to discredit us. The Wildlands Project has never proposed relocating people to accommodate our reserve designs. [...] Nevertheless, certain folks in the Wise Use Movement have fabricated maps, attributed them to us, and circulated them to rural newspapers, websites, and so on, apparently intending to frighten local people and turn them against conservation. [...] Those relatively few private lands identified as core areas are lands belonging to The Nature Conservancy, land trusts, conservation-minded ranchers, and other folks who voluntarily manage their lands for conservation.</div><div>
</div><div>As it turns out, Environmental Perspectives is the brainchild of Dr. Michael Coffman. Although Coffman does not specifically work on Agenda 21, he does preach a Larouchian worldview that takes aim at international paganism, claiming that climate change is a hoax used to bring forth a biblical end times. With a background in forestry and previous work as a representative for the paper industry, he offers what he calls a Judeo-Christian stewardship of the environment that integrates free markets, private property rights, and traditional values, but mainly encourages industry to use as many resources as they want.</div><div>
</div><div>For someone threatening that a pantheistic cult is about to drive all of us off our property in preparation for the end times, Coffman’s tone is very reasonable. When mentioning the struggle for logging rights in the Adirondacks during the 1980s and 1990s, he strongly chided that, “the people there fought hard for economic use of their land all while being insulted by the New York Times,” framing it almost as a labor issue. This would be a compelling argument if not for the details of that struggle, which include an organized campaign of arson, gunfire, and death threats against the Adirondack Parks Agency, all for the sake of the timber industry, which had clear-cut the majority of the forest, risking the Hudson Valley watershed.</div><div>
</div><div>Coffman also runs the Local Environment and Resource Network (LEARN), which aims to inform localities on how to sidestep federal environmental regulations by establishing local policies. According to LEARN, an obscure loophole in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) indicates that if a local or state government establishes their own unique environmental conventions, the federal government must cooperate with the locality. The LEARN success stories provided are the same battles of natural resource industry versus environmental regulations on national monument land seen during the Wise Use movement: mining road access, stream restoration easements, and timber salvage limits.</div><div>
</div><div>Coffman is also executive director of Sovereignty International, the organization founded in 1996 by Henry Lamb (with members of the National Federal Lands Conference and the cattle industry) that is dedicated to fighting global governance. Almost immediately after being created, Sovereignty International used their newfound existence to claim that the UN was looking to establish an international “blue hull” Coast Guard. Threatened by this attack on U.S. autonomy, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma immediately stepped in to help stop U.S. ratification of the Law of the Sea treaty, asserting national security concerns.</div><div>
</div><div>Sovereignty International’s Henry Lamb is the linchpin for all things Wise Use and Agenda 21. He is ex-vice president of the Land Improvement Contractors Association and former head of the Environmental Conservation Organization—an umbrella group for over 300 smaller Wise Use organizations founded by developers to oppose wetlands protection. He also worked to defeat the UN Convention on Biodiversity from ratification in the U.S., founded Freedom 21 with members of ranching groups to organize anti-Agenda 21 conferences, and writes the occasional article for WND(formerly World Net Daily) on how Agenda 21 is not merely a conspiracy theory but an actuality happening right before our very eyes. He also appears in Tom Deweese’s anti-Agenda 21 planning toolkit, and Deweese sits on the advisory council of Sovereignty International.</div><div>
</div><div>Both Deweese and Lamb appear at property rights conferences funded by the same resource industry-funded think tanks from the Wise Use era: the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, and the John Birch Society. The speakers at these conferences are often the same stellar names found within the Wise Use movement—e.g., Michael Coffman and Dan Byfield of Stewards of the Range (a group created by the son of Wayne Hage)—but also include those dedicated to the anti-Agenda 21 movement, like Rosa Koire, Orlean Koehle, and Michael Shaw. Those same think tanks, along with right-wing legislation mills like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) provide boilerplate legal documents that municipalities can use to ban sustainable development and any environmental restrictions on land use.</div><div>
</div><div>Together, they have found a common ground—property rights—with which to rail against the government.</div>

===

<font color="#ff0000" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><a href="http://www.publicgood.org/reports/maughan.htm">Wise Use</a> is a right-wing business lobby.<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;"> It creates and uses local "property rights" groups as political fronts. Originally started as a partnership between Rev. Sun Myung Moon and Washington ultra-libertarian <a href="http://www.publicgood.org/reports/merchant.htm" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">Alan Gottlieb</a><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;">, Wise Use employs writer Ron Arnold and organizer Chuck Cushman as their main propagandists. In Washington State, the two main industry supporters of Wise Use are the Washington Contract Loggers Association and the Building Industry Association. At the local level, most Wise Use support comes from extractive resource industries and real estate developers. <a href="http://www.publicgood.org/reports/steal.htm" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">County secession</a><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;"> groups were started by a handful of key Wise Use operators and recruited heavily among Christian Patriot groups. Likewise, most militias in Western Washington drew heavily on <a href="http://www.publicgood.org/reports/wuinps/append7.htm" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">Wise Use support</a><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;">.

==

<a href="http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v07n2/wiseuse.html">http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v07n2/wiseuse.html</a>

wiki

The sagebrush rebels attempted to influence environmental policy in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_West" title="American West" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">American West</a> during the 1970s and 1980s, surviving into the 21st century in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_land" title="Public land" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">public lands</a> states (generally, the 13 western states where <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_lands" title="Federal lands" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">federal land</a> holdings include 30% to more than 50% of a state's area), and surviving in organized groups pressuring public lands policy makers, especially for grazing of sheep and cattle on public lands, and for mineral extraction policies.

An extension of the older controversy of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalism_in_the_United_States" title="Federalism in the United States" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">state vs. federal</a> powers, Sagebrush Rebels wanted the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_government_of_the_United_States" title="Federal government of the United States" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">federal government</a> to give more control of federally owned Western lands to state and local authorities. This was meant to increase the growth of Western economies. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party(United_States)" title="Republican Party (United States)" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">Republican</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan" title="Ronald Reagan" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">Ronald Reagan</a> declared himself a sagebrush rebel in an August 1980 campaign speech in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Lake_City" title="Salt Lake City" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">Salt Lake City</a>, telling the crowd, "I happen to be one who cheers and supports the Sagebrush Rebellion. Count me in as a rebel."<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#cite_note-1" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[1]</a> Reagan was faced with opposition with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_organizations" title="Conservation organizations" class="mw-redirect" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">conservation organizations</a>. This struggle persists today after changing form, with the "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_use" title="Wise use" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">wise use</a> movement" in 1988. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H.W._Bush" title="George H. W. Bush" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">George H. W. Bush</a> helped work around restrictive environmental laws to help mining, ranching, and real estate developing industries that created jobs in the states.

The term "Sagebrush Rebellion" was coined during fights over designation of National Wilderness lands, especially in Western states, and especially after the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Forest_Service" title="U.S. Forest Service" class="mw-redirect" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">U.S. Forest Service</a> (USFS) and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Land_Management" title="Bureau of Land Management" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Bureau of Land Management</a> (BLM) conducted required surveys of plots of public lands of at least 5,000 acres (20 km²) that were unroaded, after 1972, for potential designation as part of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Wilderness_Preservation_System" title="National Wilderness Preservation System" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">National Wilderness Preservation System</a>. This process was known as the Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE, or later, RARE I). The process developed significant opposition by environmental groups and by public lands users, and was challenged in federal court.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#cite_note-2" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; white-space: nowrap; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">[2]</a> Results of RARE I were tabled by the courts for lack of uniform criteria for evaluation of lands and other procedural problems, and a second review started in 1977, known as RARE II, involving more than 60 million acres (240,000 km²) of wildland under federal jurisdiction. RARE II was completed in 1979. Controversy, and lack of support from the Reagan administration starting in 1981, largely sidelined a formal, national wilderness assessment. Congress has designated several wilderness areas since 1981, sometimes using data acquired through the RARE processes.

The National Wilderness Preservation System grew out of recommendations of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_administration" title="Kennedy administration" class="mw-redirect" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">Kennedy-administration</a> Presidential Commission, the Outdoor Recreational Resources Review Commission (ORRRC)<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#cite_note-3" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; white-space: nowrap; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">[3]</a> chaired by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Rockefeller" title="Laurence Rockefeller" class="mw-redirect" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">Laurence S. Rockefeller</a>, whose 1962 report suggested legislation to protect recreational resources in a "national system of wild and scenic rivers", a national wilderness system, a national trails system, the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, and recreation areas administered by then-existing public lands agencies beyond National Parks and National Monuments (both of which are administered in the Department of the Interior by the National Parks Administration).

Much of the wildland was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush" title="Sagebrush" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">sagebrush</a>, which some wanted to use for grazing, off-road vehicle use, and other development instead of wilderness conservation. These "rebels" urged that, instead of designating more federal wilderness protection, some or much of the land be granted to states or private parties. They took on the phrase "Sagebrush Rebellion" to describe their opposition to federal management of these lands.

<h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); background-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Public lands history<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select: none; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; padding-right: 0.25em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate; direction: ltr;">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels?veaction=edit&vesection=1" title="Edit section: Public lands history" class="mw-editsection-link-primary" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">edit</a>]<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sagebrush_rebels&action=edit&section=1" title="Edit section: Public lands history" class="mw-editsection-link-secondary" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; visibility: hidden; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> </a></h2>

Complaints about federal management of public lands constantly roil relations between public lands users—ranchers, miners, researchers, off-road vehicle (ORV) enthusiasts, hikers, campers and conservation advocates—and the agencies. Ranchers complain that grazing fees are too high, that grazing regulations are too onerous, and that promised improvements to grazing on federal lands does not occur. Miners complain of restricted access to claims, or to lands to prospect. Researchers complain of the difficulty of getting research permits, only to encounter other obstacles in research, including uncooperative permit holders and, especially in archaeology, vandalized sites with key information destroyed. ORV users want free access, hikers and campers and conservationists complain grazing is not regulated enough, some mineral lease holders abuse other lands, and ORV use destroys the resource. Each of these complaints has a long history.

Federal holding of public lands was originally an accident of history. Among the first pieces of legislation passed under the U.S. Constitution was the<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Ordinance" title="Northwest Ordinance" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Northwest Ordinance</a>, which was designed to dispose of lands the federal government held after state claims were conceded, in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Territories" title="Northwest Territories" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Northwest Territories</a>(now Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana).

In order to encourage settlement of western lands, Congress passed the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrell_Act" title="Morrell Act" class="mw-redirect" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Morrell Act</a> in 1862, granting parcels in 40-acre (160,000 m2) increments to homesteaders who could maintain a living on land for a period of time. Congress also made huge land grants to various railroads working to complete a transcontinental rail system. Much of these latter grants intentionally included mineral- and timber-rich lands, so that the railroads could get financing to build. Again, the hypothesis was that the railroads would sell off the land to get money.

Ultimately, however, it turned out that much land west of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_River" title="Missouri River" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">Missouri River</a> was too wild for homesteading, because of mountainous terrain or lack of available water. By the early 20th century, the federal government held significant portions of most western states that had simply not been claimed for any use. Conservationists prevailed on President <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt" title="Theodore Roosevelt" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">Theodore Roosevelt</a> to set aside lands for forest preservation, and for special scientific or natural history interest. Much land still remained unclaimed, even after such reserves were initially set up. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Interior" title="Department of Interior" class="mw-redirect" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">Department of Interior</a> held millions of acres in the western states (with Arizona and New Mexico joining the union by 1913). <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover" title="Herbert Hoover" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">President Hoover</a> proposed to deed these lands to the states in 1932, but the states complained that the lands had been overgrazed and would in other ways impose a burden on cash-strapped state budgets. The Bureau of Land Management was created to manage much of that land.

<h2 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); background-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Congressional support for the Sagebrush Rebellion<span class="mw-editsection" style="font-weight: normal; -webkit-user-select: none; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; padding-right: 0.25em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate; direction: ltr;">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels?veaction=edit&vesection=2" title="Edit section: Congressional support for the Sagebrush Rebellion" class="mw-editsection-link-primary" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">edit</a>]<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sagebrush_rebels&action=edit&section=2" title="Edit section: Congressional support for the Sagebrush Rebellion" class="mw-editsection-link-secondary" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; visibility: hidden; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> </a></h2>

Various bills to transfer federal public lands to western states had been proposed after 1932, all failing to garner much attention, let alone action. Among key objections to such transfers were the increasing value to the federal treasury of mineral lease receipts, and complaints that the "crown jewels" of the national lands holdings, the National Parks, could not be managed adequately or fairly by individual states. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_National_Park" title="Yellowstone National Park" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Yellowstone</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yosemite_National_Park" title="Yosemite National Park" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Yosemite</a> National Parks were considered to be national treasures, and few legislators would concur with turning them over to the states.

The spark that turned these complaints into a "rebellion" was the enactment in 1976 of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Land_Policy_and_Management_Act" title="Federal Land Policy and Management Act" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Federal Land Policy and Management Act</a> (FLPMA), which sought to establish a system of land management by the BLM, recognizing that most of the BLM holdings would not be turned into private hands. While FLPMA required BLM to plan land use accommodating all users, specifically naming ranching, grazing, and mining, it also introduced formal processes to consider preservation of the land from ranching, grazing and mining. Western land users regarded the act as a bureaucratic power grab at best, or the imposition of a totalitarian socialist regime at the radical worst.

Newly-elected Senator <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrin_Hatch" title="Orrin Hatch" style=" text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Orrin Hatch</a>, R-Utah, joined in land transfer legislation in 1977, after loud complaints from ranchers and oilmen from Utah, coupled with strong support from several Utah county governments. By late 1979 Hatch was the one legislator most interested in land transfers. He sought to introduce a transfer bill that would get hearings and potential action. Upon advice of members of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Utah_Wilderness_Commission&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Utah Wilderness Commission (page does not exist)" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(165, 88, 88); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Utah Wilderness Commission</a>, appointed by Utah Governor <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_M.Matheson(Utah_governor)" title="Scott M. Matheson (Utah governor)" class="mw-redirect" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Scott Matheson</a>, Hatch agreed to leave National Parks and National Monuments in federal hands, and he drafted a bill that would allow states to apply for control over selected parcels. With 16 cosponsors, he introduced the bill in 1980, and again in 1981. Partly because Hatch's bill dealt with major objections to previous bills, news outlets for the first time covered the bill as if it had a serious chance of passing. This provided a huge morale boost to long-aggrieved public lands users other than conservationists, and started a two-year newspaper, radio and television fight for the legislation.

Ultimately Hatch's bill got little more than press attention. The election of Ronald Reagan as president put a friend to the Sagebrush Rebels in the White House. Reagan appointees slowed down or closed down wilderness designation legislation, and by Reagan's second term, the Sagebrush Rebellion was back to simmering on the back burner of federal land management agencies.

<h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); background-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">References<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select: none; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; padding-right: 0.25em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate; direction: ltr;">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels?veaction=edit&vesection=3" title="Edit section: References" class="mw-editsection-link-primary" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">edit</a>]<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sagebrush_rebels&action=edit&section=3" title="Edit section: References" class="mw-editsection-link-secondary" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; visibility: hidden; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> </a></h2>

</td><td class="mbox-text" style=" border: none; padding: 0.25em 0.5em; width: 596.7999877929688px;">This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help <a class="external text" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sagebrush_rebels&action=edit" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVklEQVR4Xn3PgQkAMQhDUXfqTu7kTtkpd5RA8AInfArtQ2iRXFWT2QedAfttj2FsPIOE1eCOlEuoWWjgzYaB/IkeGOrxXhqB+uA9Bfcm0lAZuh+YIeAD+cAqSz4kCMUAAAAASUVORK5CYII=); padding-top: 0px !important; padding-right: 13px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">improve this article</a> by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Introduction_to_referencing/1" title="Help:Introduction to referencing/1" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none !important; padding: 0px !important; background-position: initial initial !important; background-repeat: initial initial !important;">adding citations to reliable sources</a>. Unsourced material may be <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Citation_needed" title="Template:Citation needed" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none !important; padding: 0px !important; background-position: initial initial !important; background-repeat: initial initial !important;">challenged</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Burden_of_evidence" title="Wikipedia:Verifiability" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none !important; padding: 0px !important; background-position: initial initial !important; background-repeat: initial initial !important;">removed</a>. (October 2010)</td></tr></tbody></table>

<li id="cite_note-1" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#cite_ref-1" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">^{</a> }Coates, James, "Sagebrush Rebellion On Hold, Group Lights Other Legal Fires," Chicago Tribune, Mar. 16, 1996 <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-03-16/news/8601190635_1_sagebrush-rebellion-national-parks-sierra-club" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVklEQVR4Xn3PgQkAMQhDUXfqTu7kTtkpd5RA8AInfArtQ2iRXFWT2QedAfttj2FsPIOE1eCOlEuoWWjgzYaB/IkeGOrxXhqB+uA9Bfcm0lAZuh+YIeAD+cAqSz4kCMUAAAAASUVORK5CYII=); padding-right: 13px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-03-16/news/8601190635_1_sagebrush-rebellion-national-parks-sierra-club</a></li>

<li id="cite_note-2" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#cite_ref-2" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">^{</a> }Dearen, Jason (September 2, 2012). ""Sagebrush Rebellion" Suffers Legal Setback". The Virginian Pilot. Associated Press. p. 10.</li>

<li id="cite_note-3" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#cite_ref-3" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">^{</a> }See William K. Reilly's forward to the Report of the President's Commission on Americans Outdoors, a 1987 report, in the Island Press edition (1987) p. ix.</li>

</ol>

</div>

<h2 class="" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); background-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Further reading<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select: none; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; padding-right: 0.25em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate; direction: ltr;">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels?veaction=edit&vesection=4" title="Edit section: Further reading" class="mw-editsection-link-primary" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">edit</a>]<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sagebrush_rebels&action=edit&section=4" title="Edit section: Further reading" class="mw-editsection-link-secondary" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; visibility: hidden; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> </a></h2>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;">R. McGreggor Cawley, Federal Land, Western Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion and Environmental Politics, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Press_of_Kansas" title="University Press of Kansas" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">University Press of Kansas</a>, 1993.</li>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Wayne Hage, Storm Over the Rangelands: Private Rights in Federal Lands, 1989. (A defense of grazing rights).</li>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kemmis" title="Daniel Kemmis" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Daniel Kemmis</a>, This Sovereign Land: A New Vision for Governing the West, Island Press, 2001. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/1559638427" class="internal mw-magiclink-isbn" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">ISBN 1-55963-842-7</a></li>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Robert Henry Nelson, Public Lands and Private Rights: The failure of scientific management, Rowman & Littlefield, 1995.</li>

</ul>

<h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); background-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">External links<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select: none; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; padding-right: 0.25em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate; direction: ltr;">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels?veaction=edit&vesection=5" title="Edit section: External links" class="mw-editsection-link-primary" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">edit</a>]<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sagebrush_rebels&action=edit&section=5" title="Edit section: External links" class="mw-editsection-link-secondary" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; visibility: hidden; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> </a></h2>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.library.unr.edu/specoll/mss/85-04.html" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVklEQVR4Xn3PgQkAMQhDUXfqTu7kTtkpd5RA8AInfArtQ2iRXFWT2QedAfttj2FsPIOE1eCOlEuoWWjgzYaB/IkeGOrxXhqB+uA9Bfcm0lAZuh+YIeAD+cAqSz4kCMUAAAAASUVORK5CYII=); padding-right: 13px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">"A Guide to the Records of The Sagebrush Rebellion, Collection No. 85-04</a> at the University of Nevada - Reno Libraries Special Collections</li>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://archives.auraria.edu/sagebrsh/sagebrsh.html" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVklEQVR4Xn3PgQkAMQhDUXfqTu7kTtkpd5RA8AInfArtQ2iRXFWT2QedAfttj2FsPIOE1eCOlEuoWWjgzYaB/IkeGOrxXhqB+uA9Bfcm0lAZuh+YIeAD+cAqSz4kCMUAAAAASUVORK5CYII=); padding-right: 13px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">"SageBrush Rebellion Collection No. 32"</a> at the University of Colorado Denver Library</li>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.foresthistory.org/Research/usfscoll/policy/States'_Rights/1980_Sagebrush.html" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVklEQVR4Xn3PgQkAMQhDUXfqTu7kTtkpd5RA8AInfArtQ2iRXFWT2QedAfttj2FsPIOE1eCOlEuoWWjgzYaB/IkeGOrxXhqB+uA9Bfcm0lAZuh+YIeAD+cAqSz4kCMUAAAAASUVORK5CYII=); padding-right: 13px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">"1980 Sagebrush Rebellion"</a> from the Forestry History Society</li>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/PVCC/mbase/docs/sagebrush.html" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVklEQVR4Xn3PgQkAMQhDUXfqTu7kTtkpd5RA8AInfArtQ2iRXFWT2QedAfttj2FsPIOE1eCOlEuoWWjgzYaB/IkeGOrxXhqB+uA9Bfcm0lAZuh+YIeAD+cAqSz4kCMUAAAAASUVORK5CYII=); padding-right: 13px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">Text of a 1980 article in U.S. News and World Report</a> from the University of Virginia Digital History Center</li>

</ul>

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==

2004

Fifteen years ago the anti-environmental "wise use" movement made a splash with its talk of timber wars, threats to shoot "jackbooted" park rangers and resource managers, and attacks on grassroots environmental activists. You don't hear much about wise use anymore, but that's not because the wise-users went away.

Far from it. Just as neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle long pushed their hawkish agenda from the sidelines before becoming key officials, veterans of once-discredited militant anti-environmental groups are now setting natural-resource policy for the Bush administration.

Wise use arose in 1988, combining property-rights activists with elements of the timber, mining, oil, and off-road-vehicle industries and a smattering of Reagan administration leftovers. Its original focus was the perceived threat that George H. W. Bush would follow through on his pledge to be "the environmental president."

Wise-use activists went on to confront the Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, and local environmental activists, sometimes with vigilante-style tactics ranging from telephone death-threats to arson and shootings. In Washington, Idaho, Montana, and New Mexico, a number of wise-users even united with the militia movement.

That alliance proved their undoing: Following the deadly 1995 attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by militia associates Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, wise use lost much of its industry backing and went into decline.

Today wise-use veterans and their lawyers and lobbyists are back, working for the son of the president they once detested. Among prominent appointees in the administration with wise-use backgrounds is Interior Department secretary Gale Norton, who began her career at the Mountain States Legal Foundation back when it billed itself as the "litigation arm of Wise Use."

Mountain States was the brainchild of Reagan's notoriously anti-environmental Interior secretary James Watt. (After being forced to resign, Watt told a group of ranchers that "if the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used.")

Department of Agriculture secretary Ann Veneman also has roots in the movement. As a lawyer in California, Veneman represented wise-use activists opposed to a federal conservation plan for the Sierra Nevada. Her chief of staff, Dale Moore, is a former lobbyist for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, a stalwart member of the wise-use coalition, while her undersecretary for natural resources, Mark Rey, was a timber lobbyist and featured speaker at wise-use events through the late 1990s.

Back in its heyday, the movement put forth a 25-point "Wise Use Agenda," which at the time was dismissed as right-wing fantasy. It included a call to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to log Alaska's Tongass National Forest, to gut the Endangered Species Act, and to open up public lands to motorized recreation. These and other wise-use bullet points now frame Bush administration environmental policy.

Drilling for oil in the Arctic Refuge has been a constant preoccupation, and the Tongass was opened to wide-scale logging last December. The Endangered Species Act has been continuously undercut. Secretary Norton reversed a plan to ban snowmobiles from several national parks, instead increasing their numbers. She also directed the Bureau of Land Management to find ways to expedite coal, oil, and gas development on 250 million acres of public lands.

The Wise Use Agenda also called for privatizing the national parks and handing them over to people "with expertise in people-moving such as Walt Disney." Norton has promoted "outsourcing" thousands of National Park Service jobs to the private sector to provide "better delivery of services to the public."

"I wish we could take credit for that, but we can't," demurs wise use's founding ideologue Ron Arnold of the Center for Defense of Free Enterprise. "Dick Cheney sits on my board of directors, but we're not pen pals. Sometimes you just put something out there long enough and it gets picked up, despite what you do."

One victory wise use will take credit for goes back to the early days of the Bush administration, when it appeared the White House might appoint John Turner as Interior secretary. Turner had been head of the Fish and Wildlife Service under the elder Bush, and was a fishing buddy of Dick Cheney's.

But he was also president of the Conservation Fund, a "non-membership, non-advocacy" land preservation organization, so wise use considered him a "land-grabber" aligned with "the Rockefeller Family Foundation and their financing of the environmental left," according to Chuck Cushman of the American Land Rights Association. Cushman (known to his admirers as "Rent-a-Riot") organized an anti-Turner campaign; the angry protest spooked the Bush White House, and Turner's name was replaced by Gale Norton's.

"They caved, they blinked," says wise-use founder Arnold. "Cheney's probably angry at us, but who cares? Norton is a friend."

This spring, wise use again stepped in to block the Senate from ratifying the Law of the Seas treaty, an innocuous framework agreement for ocean management and marine protection. With broad support from the Navy, oil companies, the White House, and environmentalists, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had voted 19—0 to take the agreement to a final vote.

Then wise-use veteran Henry Lamb, former head of the so-called Environmental Conservation Organization (a group founded by developers opposed to wetlands protection) got involved. His new group, Sovereignty International, claimed that the Law of the Seas treaty was a plot to undermine the United States by establishing a "blue hull" United Nations navy (from which presumably to launch the black helicopters of militia-movement fantasy).

Lamb's group got Senator James Inhofe (R) of Oklahoma to call a hearing regarding "national security concerns" over the treaty, leading Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to put off the vote until after the presidential elections so as not to alienate Bush's supporters on the far right.

While traditional wise-use paranoia still proves effective, its rhetoric is softening. Where once leaders like Arnold railed against environmentalists ("We're out to kill the f––s. We're simply trying to eliminate them. Our goal is to destroy environmentalism once and for all"), today's wise-use veterans like Interior secretary Norton take a softer tone.

"We have in many ways reached the limits of what we can do through government regulation," she blandly asserts. Now that they occupy the seat of power, the wise-use movement no longer needs its blowhards and bullies as it quietly and effectively implements its radical agenda.

David Helvarg is author of The War Against the Greens (revised and updated 2004, Johnson Books) and president of the <a href="http://www.bluefront.org/" target="_blank" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(51, 51, 102);">Blue Frontier Campaign</a>. sierra mag "Wise Use" in the White House

Yesterday's fringe, today's Cabinet official.

by David Helvarg  <a href="http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200409/wiseuse.asp">http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200409/wiseuse.asp</a>

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), also called the Law of the Sea Convention or the Law of the Sea treaty, is the international agreement that resulted from the third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III), which took place between 1973 and 1982. The Law of the Sea Convention defines the rights and responsibilities of nations in their use of the world's oceans, establishing guidelines for businesses, the environment, and the management of marine <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_resource" title="Natural resource" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">natural resources</a>. The Convention, concluded in 1982, replaced four 1958 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaties" title="Treaties" class="mw-redirect" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">treaties</a>. UNCLOS came into force in 1994, a year after <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guyana" title="Guyana" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Guyana</a> became the 60th nation to sign the treaty.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_the_Law_of_the_Sea#cite_note-history-1" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; white-space: nowrap; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">[1]</a> As of October 2012, 164 countries and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union" title="European Union" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">European Union</a> have joined in the Convention. However, it is uncertain as to what extent the Convention codifies <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customary_international_law" title="Customary international law" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">customary international law</a>.

While the Secretary General of the United Nations receives instruments of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratification" title="Ratification" style="line-height: 19.200000762939453px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">ratification</a> and accession and the UN provides support for meetings of states party to the Convention, the UN has no direct operational role in the implementation of the Convention. There is, however, a role played by organizations such as the<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Maritime_Organization" title="International Maritime Organization" style="line-height: 19.200000762939453px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">International Maritime Organization</a>, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Whaling_Commission" title="International Whaling Commission" style="line-height: 19.200000762939453px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">International Whaling Commission</a>, and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Seabed_Authority" title="International Seabed Authority" style="line-height: 19.200000762939453px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">International Seabed Authority</a> (the latter being established by the UN Convention)....

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</div>

Although the United States helped shape the Convention and its subsequent revisions, and though it signed the 1994 Agreement on Implementation, it has not signed the Convention.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_the_Law_of_the_Sea#cite_note-rufe-11" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; white-space: nowrap; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">[11]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_the_Law_of_the_Sea#cite_note-12" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; white-space: nowrap; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">[12]</a>

On 16 July 2012, the U.S. Senate had 34 Republican Senators who have indicated their intention to vote against ratification of the Treaty if it comes to a vote. Since at least 2/3 of the 100 member Senate (at least 67 Senators) are required to ratify a treaty, consideration of the treaty was deferred again.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_the_Law_of_the_Sea#cite_note-13" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; white-space: nowrap; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">[13]</a>

Some American commentators, including former Secretary of Defense <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld" title="Donald Rumsfeld" style="line-height: 19.200000762939453px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">Donald Rumsfeld</a>, have warned that ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty might lead to its taxing authority being extended to cover the resources of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space" title="Outer space" style="line-height: 19.200000762939453px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none;">outer space</a>.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_the_Law_of_the_Sea#cite_note-14" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; white-space: nowrap; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">[14]</a>

===

alec jan 95

In this Heartland PolicyFax, it presents a model piece of legislation as publicized by ALEC's. Called the Sagebrush Rebellion Act, it is designed to establish a mechanism for the transfer of ownership of unappropriated lands from the federal government to the states. The purpose is to establish and empower a State Board of Public Lands Review whose purpose it will be to hold in trust for the benefit of the people of this state, all unappropriated, public lands within the exterior boundaries of this state.

==

1984 art

<h2 class="title" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-weight: normal; background-color: rgb(240, 250, 255);">The timely end of the Sagebrush Rebellion</h2><div>
</div>

<a href="http://www.nationalaffairs.com/authors/public_interest/frank-j-popper" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">FRANK J. POPPER</a>

PRIMARILY through the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the federal government owns 86 percent of Nevada. The state has long resented the federal landlord, particularly because of the environmental and natural resource regulation it imposes. In 1979, the state filed a lawsuit claiming the BLM land, and the Sagebrush Rebellion was born. Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, all with large federal ownerships and state grievances, made similar claims through legislation. The legislature of Alaska, then the state with the highest federal ownership (96 percent), endorsed what it called “the efforts of the Western states to gain control of their lands.” The Rebels sought to put large parts of the federal holdings-the public lands of the West—into the hands of states, localities, individuals, and corporations. It was a populist land reform promoted by rural conservatives against their age-old enemy, the federal government.

<img src="/d4050831-1967-51c7-b614-aab9c91e84c3.gif"/> To download a PDF of the full article, please <a href="http://www.nationalaffairs.com/doclib/20060406_issue_076_article_5.pdf" target="_blank" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">click here</a>.

==

long lawsuit hague <a href="http://www.hcn.org/issues/44.16/one-sagebrush-rebellion-flickers-out-or-does-it">http://www.hcn.org/issues/44.16/one-sagebrush-rebellion-flickers-out-or-does-it</a>

==

<h1 class="entry-title" style="margin: 0px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 24px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Behind the Sagebrush Rebellion of 2012</h1>

<footer class="entry-meta" style="margin-bottom: 10px; line-height: 16px;">BY <a class="url fn n" href="http://www.adventure-journal.com/author/jodi-person-high-country-news/" title="View all posts by jodi peterson high country news" rel="author" style="text-decoration: none;">JODI PETERSON HIGH COUNTRY NEWS</a> <a href="http://www.adventure-journal.com/2012/06/behind-the-sagebrush-rebellion-of-2012/" title="11:00 am" rel="bookmark" style="text-decoration: none;"><time class="entry-date" datetime="2012-06-13T11:00:47+00:00" style="text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: 1px; margin-right: 15px; display: inline-block;">JUNE 13, 2012</time></a></footer>

In late April, Arizona’s Legislature approved a bill demanding that Washington, D.C., give the state control over most of its federal land. Utah Gov. Gary Herbert signed a similar measure in March. These bills are, of course, highly unlikely to result in any actual transfer of land; most legal experts think they’ll prove unconstitutional, and decades of Supreme Court decisions firmly support federal oversight of certain lands.

The rhetoric behind the measures is all about states’ rights, but they would also boost corporate access to Western natural resources. “This push is driven by the fossil fuel industry,” says Pete Maysmith, executive director of Colorado Conservation Voters, “and it’s been fascinating to see ALEC and its agenda and funders more exposed.”

ALEC — the American Legislative Exchange Council — is funded by major corporations such as Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and Shell. Nationwide, about 2,000 state legislators are members of the conservative policy group, which furnishes them with model bills, including the template for the current measures. ALEC also supplied language for an unsuccessful 1995 federal Sagebrush Rebellion Act that sought to transfer 422,200 square miles to the states.

Republican nominee Mitt Romney has said he doesn’t know the purpose of public lands.

</blockquote>

The first land-transfer efforts began much earlier, in 1929-’30, spurred by anger over grazing fee hikes. Later Sagebrush Rebellion skirmishes, in 1979-’80 and in 1995-’97, forced federal agencies to collaborate more with locals on land management. Now, the Arizona Legislature demands that the feds relinquish some 48,000 square miles, roughly the area of Pennsylvania, by 2014, while Utah asserts ownership of about 47,000 square miles. (At press time, Gov. Jan Brewer had yet to sign or veto the Arizona bill.) In Colorado, a bill seeking control of 36,000 square miles recently failed. The bills exclude national parks, Indian reservations, and military bases. A handful of other states are said to be contemplating similar measures for next year. “What we envision,” says state Sen. Al Melvin, R-Tucson, the primary sponsor of Arizona’s bill, “is all of the Western states going before the Supreme Court to force this issue.”

Supporters say that the federal government hasn’t kept a promise, made at statehood, to grant Western states ownership of their public lands. They claim that vast Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service holdings — ranging from 22 percent of Washington to 76 percent of Nevada — put those states at a competitive and tax disadvantage compared with Eastern states, which have mostly private land. They also complain that federal over-regulation has hurt state economies and increased fire danger. “Over the last 30 years,” says Melvin, “mining, lumbering, and grazing have come to a screeching halt, snuffed out by the so-called environmental practices of the Forest Service and BLM.”

But in each previous round of the Sagebrush Rebellion, states have ultimately backed off. Many Westerners value their right to hunt, fish, and recreate on federal lands, and they worry about watershed protections. “These bills miss the mark so badly about how much Westerners value their public lands,” says Maysmith. Nor are states necessarily ready to give up federal benefits like firefighting services, Payments in Lieu of Taxes, grazing subsidies, and mineral royalties. The national treasury also gains from those royalties and other revenues, notes Gregg Cawley, professor of political science at the University of Wyoming and author of Federal Land, Western Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion and Environmental Politics. Furthermore, federal lands are owned on behalf of all citizens, and Eastern and Midwestern congressional representatives aren’t eager to give those lands to Western states.

The land-transfer bills, when paired with recent bills regulating oil and gas development, also point to serious internal conflicts over “local control.” State lawmakers tout the importance of giving locals a strong voice in how land is managed, rather than handing down federal dictates. Yet, because they also want to make it easy for industry to operate, they’re often reluctant to cede authority down to the city and county level.

Idaho Gov. Butch Otter, a Republican who often talks about “local control” over natural resources, signed a law in March preventing counties and cities from banning or even regulating oil and gas drilling. While local governments retain some say in zoning and planning, the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission has final authority. Colorado has taken a similar stance; two counties tried to pass their own drilling regulations this spring, only to receive a warning letter from the state’s attorney general and its oil and gas commission stating that “responsible government requires uniform regulation” at the state level. Counties can hire their own well inspectors and exercise some limited influence over surface impacts like dust and noise, but can’t prohibit drilling or set rules for “downhole” activities like hydraulic fracturing. Colorado lawmakers are also now considering a bill to punish local governments that “restrict or delay” oil or gas production, by preventing them from receiving their share of severance taxes.

“Legislators say we need one-size-fits-all regulation for oil and gas development at the state level,” says Bruce Baizel, senior staff attorney at Earthworks. “Then they turn that same argument against the federal government and say, ‘One size doesn’t fit all.’” Baizel predicts lawsuits from local governments: “These states have taken away people’s basic right to say ‘no.’”

If Republicans take the Senate and the White House this November, the Sagebrush Rebellion is likely to benefit. The 2011 Disposal of Excess Federal Lands Act, introduced last year by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, would force the sale of more than three million acres. Former Republican presidential hopefuls Ron Paul and Rick Santorum have also called for federal land sell-offs, while Republican nominee Mitt Romney has said he doesn’t know the purpose of public lands.

If that transfer ever does occur, the old adage “Be careful what you wish for” might apply. Cash-strapped states would have trouble covering even minimal management of former federal land. (It’s hard to know just what the impact on states would be, but if Colorado’s bill had passed, for example, lawmakers thought about 350 more employees might be needed. The BLM and Forest Service spend roughly $260 million annually on the lands they manage in the state.) “The idea would be to sell most of this land,” says Melvin, “and remit 95 percent of the proceeds to the federal government.” However, there aren’t ready buyers for these millions of acres. “(These bills) seem very agenda-driven and not rooted in the reality of the world we live in,” says Maysmith. “They don’t recognize how essential these lands are to who we are as Westerners.”

==

omg

<a href="http://www.booktv.org/Program/14782/Sagebrush+Rebel+Reagans+Battle+with+Environmental+Extremists+and+Why+It+Matters+Today.aspx">http://www.booktv.org/Program/14782/Sagebrush+Rebel+Reagans+Battle+with+Environmental+Extremists+and+Why+It+Matters+Today.aspx</a>

"Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan's Battle with Environmental Extremists and Why It Matters Today"

William Perry Pendley

About the Program

William Perry Pendley talks about Ronald Reagan's energy and environmental policies and discusses President Reagan's efforts to balance environmental protection and economic growth.  This event was hosted by the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC.

William Perry Pendley served as deputy assistant secretary for energy and minerals at the Department of Interior during the Reagan administration and helped to author President Reagan's environmental policies.  He is currently president and chief legal officer of Mountain States Legal Foundation.  Mr. Pendley is the author of "It Takes a Hero" and "Warriors for the West."   <a href="http://regnery.com/books/warriors-for-the-west/">http://regnery.com/books/warriors-for-the-west/</a>

<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=WmUTtGkZqGwC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">http://books.google.com/books?id=WmUTtGkZqGwC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false</a>

shuler story is tracked wounded griz next day, self def, subject to $7K fine, actualy 4, tossed on appeal but wanted 225K for lawyers, denied; hunter pepper spray b/c he feared loss on hunt lic [notpossible?] feds paid for some of electr fence

prfa: Book Review by Nathaniel R. Dickinson

Warriors for the West by William Perry Pendley

Regnery Publishing, Inc. 2006

The dedication to Dave True Jr., the “Wyoming Wildcatter,” appropriately introduces the impressive work Warriors for the West by William Perry Pendley, noting True’s philosophy that man can develop and use our land’s resources while still conserving our land’s beauty and gifts. This view, needless to say, is not shared by those on the wrong side of the political spectrum. They declared the war on the West and just about everything else that is right. Fortunately, the relentless attacks by the Clinton administration inspired a dedicated grassroots response that took its members to Washington, the federal district and appellate courts, and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court. Pendley’s book chronicles the fight of the Warriors under incredible odds. Incidentally, Perry Pendley played a major role as anyone who knows him will tell you that when you lock horns with him, you had better have a solid case.

The first of the Warriors introduced is John Shuler, who raises sheep in northern Montana. He became entangled in what the author refers to as the pit bull of environmental laws, the Endangered Species Act. This reviewer has written numerous pieces on this atrocious concoction, and marvels at how incompetent people can find so many threatened creatures, in so many places, in such a short period of time. And they do not seem to appreciate that for eons the rule has been that species come and species go. They must, however, be aware that any species can be listed by making observations where the habitat is marginal. They are at best pseudo-scientists manipulated by radical politicians.

Back to the abuse of Mr. Shuler — he committed the unthinkable mistake of shooting and killing an endangered grizzly bear which had attacked his sheep and then come after him. Just what is the definition of self defense? Pendley chronicles the injustice that followed in the eight-year battle. The next case related by the author had its setting near the Utah-Arizona state line, where a landowner used his property for agriculture and housing developments. Unfortunately, prairie dogs also declared ownership. There followed an extended run-around orchestrated by the once noble U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Subsequently Prebles meadow jumping mice entered into the fray — a very convenient find — allowing another sweetheart deal between the Service and environmental groups to be hatched. The plot thickened when cave bats, of which experts said their loss threatens the interdependent web of all species, whatever that all means, were thrown into the mix.

Pendley appropriately entitles the book’s second chapter “Fighting Lyin’ Cheatin’ Bureaucrats.” Reference is made to bumper stickers that state “Don’t Steal — The Government Hayes Competition” and “I Love My Country But Fear My Government” — very fitting indeed. A story is related about Jarbige, Nevada, an old mining town, with John Bernt one of few hardy souls remaining. In 1996 John got his taste of government arrogance and abuse after locating five mining claims on land managed by the U.S. Forest Service, in accordance with the General Mining Law of 1972. There followed five years of government falsification of records and outright fraud. No one bothered to correct the injustice. As one said, “What a mess.” Then there was what the author referred to as the “Bitter Taste in Sweet Grass Hills” — again shenanigans regarding mining claims.

In subsequent chapters Pendley artfully tackles issues such as racial preferences disguised as trust responsibilities, as related to Indian tribes and the resulting travesties, including tribal casinos and Clinton abuses of the Antiquities Act of 1906 and its statutory limits and the failure of those who followed to do anything about them.

It was good to see that the author devoted most of one chapter to that splendid gentleman, Bruce Vincent, from Libby, Montana. Bruce certainly deserves recognition as one of the first to stand up against the bureaucracies and environmental organizations that threatened the rights and livelihoods of local people. He now is nationally known as an advocate for the rights of local communities. A quote is offered at the chapter’s end that should stimulate thought. “Private property rights are a quaint anachronism which society cannot afford.” Obviously these are not the words of Mr. Vincent.

“Fighting ‘Your Land is Our Land’ State Bureaucrats” is the title of Chapter 6. Anyone concerned about property rights must read this one, which begins with the familiar Woodie Guthrie song. Pendley chronicles numerous horror stories. This is followed by a discussion of the closure of “sacred” public and private lands and justification for such actions, fighting federal government when it wears two hats (with an appropriate quote from Ronald Reagan — “If it moves, tax it, if it keeps moving, regulate it, and if it stops moving, subsidize it” — referring to government’s view).

And then there are excellent discussions involving the government’s bad neighbor policies, fighting the criminalization of everything (including effects on use of government lands and one’s own land, equal protection guarantee, racial gerrymandering of election districts, taking without just compensation, access to private property, and illegal immigration).

The epilogue states, on behalf of the heroic individuals and entities recognized in this book — true Warriors for the West — that Mountain States Legal Foundation has been in the courts fighting for individual liberty, the right to own and use property, limited and ethical government, and the free enterprise system. Pendley invites the reader to join us.

The “Endnotes” section contains an impressive total of 42 pages with a grand total of 883 references. This alone was a massive undertaking. The author is undoubtedly very dedicated. For anyone interested in researching property rights, environmental matters, and governmental dealings, an excellent bibliography is provided.

===

rfk2:

after earth day 1970 (20 mil in street, #1 in us hist), 28 mjr laws passed in 120 yrs 22; b2 is win of 30 yr stealth

attack.

1976 coors Mtn states Legal fdn to ctr eco law (one of colo

biggest polluters) also philips petrol, exxon, texaco, amoco , shell ford

chevron; coors also heritage doc to news dir, staffers, hate radio  23

heritage wants to "strangle the envio movement...the greatest single

threat to the Am economy" hw etc "henny-pennyism" 24  #1 w/ top 5 fdn:

olin, scaife, coors, koch, bradley ($40Mil since 1985.  exxon chev dupont

etc give 34m/yr

1980 coors etc spearheaded Sagebrush Rebellion (corp and rw) turned ctt

into pol power 25 RR: I am a S rebel"  Hertiage shadow cabinet, 2k pp

Mandate for Change became blueprint (Coors in kitchen cab).  Coors picked

assoc Anne Gorsuch for epa; hubby cattle baron to head BLM, tho had

declared to shut it  25

Watt dominion theology, "subdue" nature is duty; sold off public assets at

fire sale prices : GAO 26  "I do not know how many generations we can

count on till the Lord returns"  greens are plot to delay energy

development and "weaken America" , a "left-wing cult which seeks to bring

down the type of gov't i believe in" 26 proto-Agenda 21?

Gorsuch cut budget 30% so no new laws or enforcement; killed Superfund at

start, became a welfare pgm of corp lawyers 26 appt lobbyist to run depts

CoS timber lawyer, enforecenmt chief ex-exxon

by 1981 1.1 mil signatures on petition to get rid of watt; after out, 25

counts felony, perjury, concealment and obstr of justice. Gorsuch and 23

others forced to resign, sweetheart deal w/ coors (her #2 Rita  LaVelle

jailed perj and obstr).  26

blow to sagebrush but regrouped at aug '88 nugget hotel reno and rename

Wise Use" arnold; our goal is to destroy, to erradicate the env move. we

want you to be able to exploit the env for pvt gain, absolutely" p 27

lobbyists guided grassroots activists thru signals" some real but mostly

greenwash , a 1/2 billion$/yr? industry 27. Cit for the Env has no cits

(against clean air act etc)  Env Conservation Org, Evergreen fdn,  Cits

for Sensible Control of Acid Rain 27 astro

Wise Use plus Xian Moonie  (arnold head of Wa State  Am Freedon Coalition

(moonie pol arm) 28  also Pat Rob ChrCoalition?,  1991 New World Order best seller ,

fed gov alien trying to wreck family and take guns. on green see mike Lind

NY rev bks 2/2/95 env evil pagan priests; opened door of militia, racists

and other fringe to be anti-green (?)  r reed his #2, gave seminars to

corps on how electronic and grassroots to ctr green; anti-grn staple of Chr Broadcast

network 29 industry $ behind Xian for  1st x, so its pols got elected 29  by 94 got

most ~ eco congress in hist, wise use helped gingrich revo (Contr w/ A, ~

grn)  assist by consigiore spkr Delay, w/ "biblical worldview" 30  TDelay: DDT

as safe as aspirin", ~ESA; columbine b/c teach evol.

1/95 TD  (delay?) invites 350 lobbyists to dismantle regs 30  learned from watt

disaster PR, so plant tree foto op and used free mkt rhet to hide; Luntz

did PR (wrote Cont for Am) snuck riders on key bills, "supermandate"

regulatory reform, ~ unfunded mandates etc but PIRG etc caught them, 1

mil signatires, so mod gop opposed; after gov't shutdown newt lost public

support. TD: we lost debate on envir"

b2 pick DC ensured Wise Use backing. go-to guy for wise use  and oil in

80's; arranged /led 1st  veto of wilderness bill in hist under RR, big win

psychol. 1992 to 2000 "distinguished advisor" to Ctr for Def of Free Ent (WU)

arnold exec VP. DC also on bd of Nat'l Legal Ctr for Public Interest, WU

CTT 31

inaug day, andy card froze all clinton pending regs

wu #1 Norton, 2 griles (mining lobby), mark rey (timber lobby); doj  asst

ag for env and nat res  WUse leader Sansonetti p 32

EPA fisher and horinko lobby.consult to Koch; Holmstead (lobbyist and WU

cfront gp)

Connaughton

quick permits waivers, cut$ for implement; dropped cases ~ oil and coal;

reinterpret law (eg used farmed salmon to remove from ES list so logging

co did not have to protect wild ! 33

epa 3 rules, 2 ct ordered and one a rollback (vs 30 BC and 21 b1 33

9/23 tried to weaken #1 green law NEPA, which req public input June 2003

USForst S tried to exclude EIS and hearings.  Made it tough to get FOIA

info 33 210 enforcement job wants cut, violation notices down 58%, fines

28% 34

2001 told epa no action on fac farms w/o top ok; eap? EPA? a "country club for

corp polulters' 34

dropped cases ~ oil and coal Koch 97 felony counts on Koch, knowingly

dumped 90 tons benzene in Corpus Cr Tx and hid from regulators;  cd be $352 M

fines, but dropped to 9 counts and 20 mil$  p34-5 dropped investigation of coal,

army corp req ok from top for wetlands citations 34

12/27/2001. 86 bill to prevent gov contract for co's w/ repeated safety

and eco vio (could mean up to 138B$) 35  BUT John Ashcroft used sailor

mongering act ~ Greenpeace for 1st x in 132 yrs (fines and probation 5

yrs) fed judge threw out  (!?)

JDept gave ron arnold $325K to study eco-terror, JAsh says #1 terror threat

krugman jn 22 nyt 2004

norton in charge of 450 m acres land, 3 bill acres coastal waterways;

year after law school grad, MSLN under Watt; grazing limits, oil offshore

and in wilderness and wildlife refuges  36 funders Burlington N, exxon,

Indep Petrol assoc and rocky mtn  oil and gas assoc 37. in 84 after 2 yrs

at Hoover, got into dept of agric, then int, then RR CEQ. at Pacific Res

Inst ofr Public Pol, her takings rule  would end enforcement. did not win

senate seat  v37  advisor to TASSC, Defenders of prop Rights WU, PERC,

founded Council for Rep for Env protection (Newt on bd) $ from Coors,

arco, am forest and paper assoc, chem mfg assoc 37

at WUse mtg, trashed wheelchair ramps, smog check, Fair labor St'd act, rid

schools of asbestos and Vio ~ Women Act 38

Griles ass't Cason  James E made #2 b/c no congr approval needed (ex #2 to

Watt, sweatheart deals , strip mining in parks; dep soliciter  Wm G Myers,

dir of WU front for cattlemen. H VCraig Hanson (ex gov Sison F&G, ~ ESA

Mining lobby Rebecca Watson asst sec of land and Min magmt . WU bennet

Raley asst sec water and Sci (~ 1994 CW act author)

Lynn Scarlett ex pres Reason Fdn (~ curbside rcycle and food labels) 39

Jeff D Jarrett dir office of surface mining reclam and enfoprce ex coal

exec 39 (had been inveast by that org for obstr of j in 90's)

Norton approved biggest pit mine near Az's Gila mtns saying 3,360 cu mine

no impact. reverse limits on mining waste; opened oil in  AK and utah;

redraw monument lines for oil; 1st admin since ESA to list zero ( tried to

make grey wolves easier to kill. petitioned UN to remove yellowstone as

world heritage site 41

demands obedience and fired moved or demotes longterm employees 41

Sierra Framework 10 yrs in making; bs admin asked gocv arnold to drop,

refused unless sci say change; rove said ok, but FServ 3x cut vs plan;

fantic calls never ret. 43  watt said in 2001 that b2 was doing what he

wanted to 44.

rfk2

omb watch b2

Rebecca Watson was confirmed to be Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management. In this position she will work on public land's management, including land use planning, onshore and offshore minerals management, and surface mining reclamation and enforcement.

<a href="http://www.earthjustice.org/policy/profiles/display.html?ID=1017">As Earthjustice's research (provided by the Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy Research and White House Watch) points out</a>, Watson has spent almost her entire legal career defending industries such as the mining and timber industries, strongly advocating on their behalf. She has defended clients such as Plum Creek Timber (the second largest private timberland owner in the U.S.), Redstone Gas Partners (coal bed methane), Seven-Up Pete Joint Ventures (open pit gold mining), and the Western Environmental Trade Association, an industry trade group.

Watson served and serves on the Board of Litigation for the Mountain States Legal Fund, an anti-environmental nonprofit law firm that has been described as the "litigating arm of the Wise Use Movement." Watson served in the first Bush administration as Assistant General Counsel for the Department of Energy, and is listed on the Defenders of Property Rights Attorney Network.

=

carbon war; paid by Cyprus Minerals,?  largest funder of wise use

mojo wingnuts: 1997  http://motherjones.com/politics/1997/12/wingnuts-sheeps-clothing

Henry Lamb A former executive with the Land Improvement Contractors of America, Lamb co-founded Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO) in 1990 as a front group for land developers to fight Clean Water Act protections for wetlands, then turned it into a network for Wise Use groups nationwide. He recently co-founded Sovereignty International Inc., an anti-United Nations property-rights group. Prominent in the anti-environmental and property-rights movements, Lamb publishes newsletters and gives radio interviews attacking the U.N.'s Man and the Biosphere Program, World Heritage Treaty, Convention on Biological Diversity, and Convention on Climate Change.

Staff Member of:

Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), Executive Vice President

Board Member of:

Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), Board of Directors

National Wilderness Institute, National Advisory Board

Sovereignty International, Chairman of the Board

Steve Symms The former U.S. senator from Idaho, elected in the 1980 "Reagan Revolution," was the voice of the anti-environmental movement on Capitol Hill and the champion of various failed "takings" bills. His signal achievement was a bill that built new off-road vehicle (ORV) trails in the national forests. Retired in 1992, today he sits on the boards of a half-dozen of the most arch-conservative, anti-environmental groups in the country. Symms' specialty is defending individual property rights at any cost.

Staff Member of:

Freedom Alliance, President

Board Member of:

Defenders of Property Rights, National Advisory Board

Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), Board of Advisors

National Wilderness Institute, National Advisory Board

Freedom Alliance, Board

American Conservative Union, Board of Directors

American Policy Center, Chair of the Board

Nancie Marzulla A Justice Department attorney in the Reagan administration and a veteran of the Wise Use litigators the Mountain States Legal Foundation, Nancie Marzulla co-founded the Defenders of Property Rights (DPR) in 1991 with her husband Roger, who served as assistant attorney general under Ed Meese.

http://www.fed-soc.org/publications/author/roger-marzulla  revolving door  Fed Soc

Staff Member of:

Defenders of Property Rights, President and Chief Legal Counsel

Board Member of:

Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), Board of Advisors

American Land Foundation, Property Rights Task Force Member

<a href="http://www.defendersproprights.org/">Defenders of Property Rights</a>

Founded by Reagan Justice Department lawyers Roger and Nancie Marzulla in 1991, Defenders of Property Rights is part of a national network of right-wing law firms and legal foundations that serve as a pro bono Wise Use legal defense fund. DPR pursues anti-environmental lawsuits through the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, a conservative court whose 16 judges were all appointed by Reagan and Bush; DPR's directors reportedly plan strategy at an annual meeting sponsored by the Heritage Foundation. Funded by: Carthage KOCH Foundation, Hardwood Manufacturers Association.

Fred Singer

</div>

<h3 id="siteSub" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">From SourceWatch</h3>

<div id="jump-to-nav" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wise_Use_Movement">http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wise_Use_Movement</a></div>

<ul>

</ul>

</div>

===

BM

4.5 Organising anti-environmental action

The Wise Use Movement

The Wise Use movement is a loose network of groups within the USA that are held together by a common loathing of environmental pressure groups and environmental legislation and an agenda stressing the rights of private property owners to make their own decisions as to how best to exploit natural resources. The movement is a broad church uniting workers in the extractive industries, libertarian free marketers, and the extreme right. Many commentators believe that B-M was instrumental in setting up the Wise Use movement. Many of B-Mâs more unsavoury clients have sponsored Wise Use groups, and in the 1980s when the movement began 36 of the companies known to be sponsoring Wise Use groups were clients of B-M[41]. Direct proof of B-Mâs involvement has so far remained elusive.

British Columbia Forest Alliance

An anti-environmental group that B-M certainly did create is the British Columbia Forest Alliance. In late 1990 B-M was hired to re-engineer the public image of Canadaâs forest industries. The cornerstone of its campaign was a new front group, the British Columbia Forest Alliance. Environmental researcher, Andy Rowell described it thus âThe Alliance was designed as the industryâs stealth bomber, packed with influential people and fuelled with industry dollars, to blast holes in the environmentalistsâ forestry campaigns. However, it came packaged as a dove of concern and conciliationâ.[42]

The BC Forest Alliance was launched in April 1991 under the leadership of Jack Munro, formerly the Chairperson of the International Wood Workers of America Union. Gary Ley, of B-M, was appointed executive director. In its first year it received $1m from corporate sponsors[43].

PRESS SUPPRESSION:

The Vancouver Sun, the biggest newspaper in British Columbia, with a daily circulation of 260,000, soon fell under the influence of the Alliance. Forest company officials and Alliance members were soon visiting its offices. Before the launch of the BC Forest Alliance, the Sun had five full-time reporters covering forestry, native affairs, and other environmental issues. Soon only one environment journalist remained. The rest were assigned to a category called "resources" in the business section.

Reporters who wrote critically about the forest industry, and those who probed the workings of the Forest Alliance and Burson-Marsteller itself, say they were subjected to pressure. The Sun's forestry reporter, Ben Parfitt, was pulled from environmental issues after writing about Burson-Marsteller and the Forest Alliance, and reporter Mark Hume was grilled by a logging company official and an industry consultant, in the editorâs office, about columns he had written about a pro-logging coalition, while the editor, Hume says, stood by in silence[44].

Ken Rietz of Burson Marsteller produced a seven- part TV series, entitled âThe Forest and the Peopleâ to spread pro-industry propaganda[45].

The BC Forest Alliance now claims a membership of 10,000 individuals and 300 companies and industry groups[46].

Forest Protection Society (Australia)

Throughout the 1980s the Australian timber industry was targeted by ecological campaigns and direct action. In response the industry spawned a new front group, the Forest protection Society, with start-up money from the Forest Industry Campaign Association[47].

Employing Wise Use-style rhetoric, the FPS got itself listed as an environmental protection organisation in the Directory of Australian Associations. It promotes a âbalanced useâ of Australiaâs forests and claims that the best way to protect forests is to extract the wood and sell it. From the start the FPS aimed to build a large âgrass-rootsâ membership to suggest an independent standpoint[48]. The FPS involves itself in as many forest campaigns as it can, fighting for the rights of local communities to exploit the forests, and of course the for the timber industry. By April 1998 the FPS had 56 local branches across Australia[49].

Amongst other tactics the FPS has used include taking over local environmentalist meetings, with the result that they became distracted from their ongoing campaign[50]. Like many groups associated with the American Wise Use movement, the FPS is a client of Burson-Marsteller.

=

<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold">http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold</a>

Ron Arnold is the Executive Vice-President of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Center_for_the_Defense_of_Free_Enterprise" title="Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise">Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise</a> (CDFE) from 1984 to present. He is considered the father of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wise_Use" title="Wise Use" class="mw-redirect">Wise Use</a> movement.

<h2>Contents</h2>

[<a href="javascript:toggleToc()" class="internal" id="togglelink">hide</a>]</div>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Wise_use_movement">2 Wise use movement</a>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Biography_of_James_Watt">2.2 Biography of James Watt</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Ron_Arnold_.26_Alan_Gottlieb">2.3 Ron Arnold & Alan Gottlieb</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Interviews.26_quotes_on.27eco-terrorism.27">3 Interviews & quotes on 'eco-terrorism'</a>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#New_York_City_Indymedia_.26_Reason_Magazine">3.1 New York City Indymedia & Reason Magazine</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#New_Zealand_Herald">3.2 New Zealand Herald</a>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-3"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#War_Against_the_Greens">3.2.1 War Against the Greens</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Portland_Oregonian">3.3 Portland Oregonian</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Outside_magazine">3.4 Outside magazine</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#New_York_Times">3.5 New York Times</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Toronto_Star">3.6 Toronto Star</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Boston_Globe">3.7 Boston Globe</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Conservative_News_Service">3.9 Conservative News Service</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Playboy_magazine">3.10 Playboy magazine</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Ron_Arnold.26.22rural_cleansing.22">4 Ron Arnold & "rural cleansing"</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Ron_Arnold_takes_aim_at_philanthropic_foundations">5 Ron Arnold takes aim at philanthropic foundations</a>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Ron_Arnold_.26_Teresa_Heinz_Kerry">5.1 Ron Arnold & Teresa Heinz Kerry</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Ron_Arnold_.26_animal_rights">6 Ron Arnold & animal rights</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Contact">7 Contact</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Articles_.26_sources">8 Articles & sources</a>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#SourceWatch_articles">8.1 SourceWatch articles</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#References">8.2 References</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#External_articles">8.3 External articles</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#External_resources">8.4 External resources</a>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-3"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#Books_.26_Publications_by_Ron_Arnold">8.4.1 Books & Publications by Ron Arnold</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

</ul>

</li>

</ul>

</td></tr></tbody></table>

Ron Arnold was born in Houston, Texas and studied business administration at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Washington. After graduation, he worked as a technical writer for <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Boeing" title="Boeing">Boeing</a> from 1961 to 1971; when he founded the Northwood Studio. In 1974 he began contributing to the Western Conservation Journal, and began his public opposition to environmentalism. Between 1978 and 1981, Mr. Arnold was a contributing editor of Logging Management Journal. His 1979 magazine series, "The Environmental Battle", was the winner of the American Business Press 1980 Editorial Achievement Award.

In 1981, he wrote the authorized biography of Interior Secretary James G. Watt, who served under President <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ronald_Reagan" title="Ronald Reagan">Ronald Reagan</a> from 1981 to 1983. In 1988, he was one of the catalysts for the founding conference of the Wise Use movement in Reno Nevada and published its policy wish-list, the "Wise-Use Agenda". The movement is comprised of a loose-knit coalition promoting expansion of private property rights and reduction of government regulation.<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-0" title="">[1]</a>

Mr. Arnold is a former <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Dow_Chemical" title="Dow Chemical" class="mw-redirect">Dow Chemical</a> consultant. He was also head of Washington State chapter of the American Freedom Coalition, the political arm of the Rev. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Sun_Myung_Moon" title="Sun Myung Moon">Sun Myung Moon</a>'s <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Unification_Church" title="Unification Church">Unification Church</a> from 1989-91. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-1" title="">[2]</a>

<h2 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Wise use movement</h2>

Since the late 1980's, CDFE has been at the center of the Wise Use Movement.

<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alan_Gottlieb" title="Alan Gottlieb">Alan Gottlieb</a>, a former tax felon, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-2" title="">[3]</a> founded CDFE in 1974, along with two anti-<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Gun_control" title="Gun control">gun control</a> groups; the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Citizens_Committee_for_the_Right_to_Keep_and_Bear_Arms" title="Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms">Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms</a> and the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Second_Amendment_Foundation" title="Second Amendment Foundation">Second Amendment Foundation</a>. Other Gottlieb ventures include the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Free_Enterprise_Press" title="Free Enterprise Press">Free Enterprise Press</a> (book publisher), the American Press Syndicate and the American Broadcasting Network. CDFE's Free Enterprise Press has published several books by Ron Arnold, including Ecology Wars (1987) and Ecoterror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature, the World of the Unabomber (1997). <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-3" title="">[4]</a>

In the last days of the 1992 presidential campaign, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=George_H.W._Bush" title="George H.W. Bush" class="mw-redirect">George H.W. Bush</a> denounced "environmental extremists". At the heart of this imagined green conspiracy was the "Ozone Man", Senator <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Al_Gore" title="Al Gore" class="mw-redirect">Al Gore</a> Jr., author of Earth in the Balance. Bush's attack on environmentalism failed to save his candidacy, but it was a high water mark for the wise use movement, a network of loosely allied <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Right-wing" title="Right-wing">right-wing</a>, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Astroturf" title="Astroturf">astroturf</a> and corporate interest groups which attack <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Environmentalism" title="Environmentalism">environmentalism</a> in order to promote unfettered resource exploitation. They are often funded by timber, mining, and chemical companies. In return, they loudly claim that the well-documented hole in the ozone layer doesn't exist; carcinogenic chemicals in the air and water don't harm anyone and trees won't grow properly without (government subsidized) clear cutting. Proponents were temporarily slowed by Bush's defeat and media exposure of the movement's founders' connections to Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church network. However, it quickly rebounded with relentless <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Disinformation" title="Disinformation">disinformation</a> campaigns about the purpose and meaning of environmental laws in every state. According to wise users, environmentalists are pagans, eco-nazis and communists to be fought with shouts and threats. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-4" title="">[5]</a>

The term was appropriated from the moderate conservationist tradition by Ron Arnold. In 1910, Gifford Pinchot, first head of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=U.S._Forest_Service" title="U.S. Forest Service">U.S. Forest Service</a>, called for national forestry policies based on the wise use of America's trees and minerals. This triggered a simmering feud between Pinchot and <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Sierra_Club" title="Sierra Club">Sierra Club</a> founder <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=John_Muir" title="John Muir">John Muir</a>; who wanted to the wilderness valued for its own sake, as the spiritual center of the world. The current U.S. system of combining resource extraction of national forests with wilderness areas managed for recreation, is a compromise to this debate.

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Biography of James Watt</h3>

Ron Arnold's big career break coincided with the coming of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reagan_administration" title="Reagan administration">Reagan administration</a> and his own rapid swing to the right. In 1981, he co-authored At the Eye of the Storm, a flattering biography of James Watt that the former Secretary of the Interior helped to edit. Mr. Watt's attempts to dismantle environmental regulation and open federal lands to logging and mining produced short-term gains for corporate interests; with the long term result public revulsion and the explosive growth of the environmentalism in the 1980's.

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Ron Arnold & Alan Gottlieb</h3>

His movement building was also enhanced by joining forces with Alan Gottlieb; who seemed to possess a genius for dancing along the edge of legal business practices. He purchased the CDFE headquarters with money from two of his own non-profit foundations, then transferred the building title to his own name. He then charged his own foundations over $8,000 per month in rent.

Mr. Gottlieb also spent seven months in prison for tax evasion. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-5" title="">[6]</a>

<h2 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Interviews & quotes on 'eco-terrorism'</h2>

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">New York City Indymedia & Reason Magazine</h3>

In a September of 2007 response to an on-line issue of NYC <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Indymedia" title="Indymedia">Indymedia</a>, Mr. Arnold claimed credit for coining the term <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Eco-terrorism" title="Eco-terrorism">eco-terrorism</a> in a 1982 <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reason_Magazine" title="Reason Magazine">Reason Magazine</a> article. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-6" title="">[7]</a>

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">New Zealand Herald</h3>

In a 1986 visit to New Zealand, sponsored by the Agricultural Chemical and Animal Remedies Manufacturers, Arnold described himself as the "Darth Vader for the capitalist revolution" and defended the use of the carcinogenic chemical 2,4,5-T. He claimed that chemical manufacturers wanted to make sure their chemicals were used safely. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-7" title="">[8]</a>

Mr. Arnold warned New Zealanders that the U.S. was experiencing a dangerous "upsurge in eco-terrorism." According to an interview with the New Zealand Herald:

<dd>"We have had power stations blown up, bridges burned, electrical transmission towers collapsed, forest trails booby trapped with wired shotguns, attacks on forestry pesticide application crews, Forest Service officers shot to death and numerous other acts of violence in the name of the environment".<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-8" title="">[9]</a></dd>

</dl>

<h4 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">War Against the Greens</h4>

In his book on the Wise Use movement, The War Against the Greens; David Helvarg reported that Arnold was subsequently cross examined on the claims he made in New Zealand, as part of an activists lawsuit against the government. According to the activists, they were being targeted as marijuana growers because of their anti-pesticide work; an industry strategy suggested by Ron Arnold. When asked in the court for his sources, he referred to a government report and claimed the incident occurred in Southern Oregon in relation to a marijuana patch. When pressed about the connection to someone involved in campaigning for the environment, he referred to an article he had written years earlier for a <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Conservative" title="Conservative">conservative</a> magazine. Upon retrieval and examination, it was found that the article had no connection with marijuana or the incident. Mr. Arnold explained that the connection was the similarity between incidents like damage to logging machinery and ideological views of environmentalists who use marijuana. He eventually gave up attempting to connect environmentalists with the killing of a Forest Service official. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-9" title="">[10]</a>

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Portland Oregonian</h3>

For a number of years, Mr. Arnold was a registered agent for the American Freedom Coalition, a political offshoot of Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. The American Freedom Coalition takes credit for funding the first Wise Use conference in 1988. Aside from telling Outside he is willing to ignore facts to achieve his goals, Arnold proclaims at every opportunity that his mission is to destroy the environmental movement.

<dd>"We're mad as hell. We're dead serious. We're going to destroy them," he told the Portland Oregonian. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-10" title="">[11]</a></dd>

</dl>

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Outside magazine</h3>

In 1991, Ron Arnold told Outside magazine that he chose the term because it was ambiguous and fit neatly in newspaper headlines. Such duplicitous and opportunistic tactics are a trademark of the movement:

<dd>"Facts don't really matter. In politics, perception is reality." <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-11" title="">[12]</a>, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-12" title="">[13]</a></dd>

</dl>

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">New York Times</h3>

According to Mr. Arnold in a December 1991 article in the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=New_York_Times" title="New York Times">New York Times</a> by reporter Timothy Egan:

<dd>"We want to destroy environmentalists by taking away their money and their members." <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-13" title="">[14]</a></dd>

</dl>

<dd>"We (CDFE) created a sector of public opinion that didn't used to exist. No one was aware that environmentalism was a problem until we came along."</dd>

</dl>

While CDFE's <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=IRS" title="IRS" class="mw-redirect">IRS</a> return states that Mr. Arnold works 20 hours a week without any compensation, Mr. Egan reported that in 1991 he charged $3,000 a day as a speaker or organizer of anti-environmental groups. For conservative fundraisers like Mr. Gottlieb, the enemies were Senator <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Edward_M._Kennedy" title="Edward M. Kennedy">Edward M. Kennedy</a> and gun control. However, he realized the potential financial rewards of opposing environmentalism:

<dd>"For us" said Mr. Gottlieb... "the environmental movement has become the perfect bogeyman." <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-14" title="">[15]</a></dd>

</dl>

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Toronto Star</h3>

It was a theme he re-stated within days to Toronto Star reporter Katherine Long:

<dd>"Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement ... We're mad as hell. We're not going to take it anymore. We're dead serious - we're going to destroy them," he said. "We want to be able to exploit the environment for private gain, absolutely ... and we want people to understand that is a noble goal."</dd>

</dl>

He claimed that spotted owls weren't on the verge of extinction but preferred regrowth forests. He suspected the hole in the ozone layer had always existed:

<dd>"If chlorflourocarbons really destroy ozone, why isn't there a hole over chlorflourocarbon factories? As for the greenhouse effect, he was emphatic. "There isn't any such thing".<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-15" title="">[16]</a></dd>

</dl>

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Boston Globe</h3>

While he denies the reality of environmental problems, he does not aim to persuade the middle ground. Rather, he aims to mobilize those receptive to his polemical rhetoric which equates policy to wars. According to an January 1992 interview with the Boston Globe:

<dd>"We are sick to death of environmentalism and so we will destroy it. We will not allow our right to own property and use nature's resources for the benefit of mankind to be stripped from us by a bunch of eco-facists." <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-16" title="">[17]</a></dd>

</dl>

While he often expressed his "fear" that someone will be hurt as a result of 'eco-terrorism', he doesn't shy away from inflammatory rhetoric. In a May 30, 1993 interview with <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=CNN" title="CNN" class="mw-redirect">CNN</a>, he described the role of a <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wise_use" title="Wise use" class="mw-redirect">wise user</a> as akin to a warrior weilding a sword. "And that sword has two purposes: to carve out a niche for your agenda, to reshape the American law in your image; and, kill the bastards." When asked to describe how he would like to be thought of, he replied:

<dd>"People in industry, I'm going to do my best for you. Environmentalists, I'm coming to get you. ...We're out to kill the fuckers. We're simply trying to eliminate them. Our goal is to destroy environmentalism once and for all." <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-17" title="">[18]</a></dd>

</dl>

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Conservative News Service</h3>

When a small group, Green Anarchists, organized a tour in 2002, Arnold latched on to their support of people such as the imprisoned 'Unabomber' Ted Kaczynski as a 'political prisoner' to call for the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=FBI" title="FBI" class="mw-redirect">FBI</a>'s Domestic Terrorism Program to investigate the group. Arnold told the Conservative News Service (CNS) that the tour:

<dd>"presents probable cause for investigation. You do have people here recommending violence, murder, property damage, everything you can think of." <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-18" title="">[19]</a></dd>

</dl>

The following year Mr. Arnold, long considered a fringe player, landed a role as an "expert consultant on ecoterrorism" to a University of Arkansas Terrorism Research Center project to study terrorism cases in the US. The project was funded to the tune of $343,885 by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-19" title="">[20]</a>

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Playboy magazine</h3>

In a 2004 interview with Playboy, Mr. Arnold recounted key policies:

<dd>"Number one was educate the public about the use of natural resources. Immediately develop petroleum resources in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Cut down remaining old-growth forests on public lands and replace with new trees. Cut down 30,000 acres of the Tongass National Forest each year to promote economic forestry practices. Open all public lands, including national parks, to mining and oil drilling. Construct roads into all wilderness areas for motorized wheel chair use. Stop protecting endangered species, such as the California condor, that were in decline before man arrived. Force anyone who loses litigation against a development to pay for the increase in costs for completing the project, plus damages. But the idea of wise use has become embedded. It's no longer a list like that. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-20" title="">[21]</a></dd>

</dl>

In Arnold's view, the threat of 'eco-terrorism' warrants more far-reaching investigative powers for law enforcement agencies than were even allowed for under the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patriot_Act" title="Patriot Act" class="mw-redirect">Patriot Act</a>. According to a 2004 interview with Playboy magazine:

<dd>"It's easy to throw rocks at industry, because everybody can think of a corporate abuse. But there are also problems with eco-terrorism, both in giving too much and not enough power to law enforcement. Under the Patriot Act the FBI can't keep a database of people suspected of being subversive or working with enviro-terrorists unless they've been convicted. Some nonprofits have assembled databases on ecoterror. The mink farmers have done it. We want to be able to make this information accessible to police. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-21" title="">[22]</a></dd>

</dl>

<h2 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Ron Arnold & "rural cleansing"</h2>

More recently Arnold coined the term 'rural cleansing' in an attempt to starkly portray environmental movement campaigns as being only in the interests of urban elites. Arnold explained 'rural cleansing' as being:

<dd>"The deliberate use of environmental laws - by appeals, lawsuits and administrative actions - to remove all the resource workers from rural America. All of them. It's essentially an effort to dismantle rural America so that there no longer are loggers, miners, fishermen, ranchers or farmers, with the intent of "off shoring" these jobs and industries to other nations. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-22" title="">[23]</a></dd>

</dl>

<h2 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Ron Arnold takes aim at philanthropic foundations</h2>

Where in earlier years Mr. Arnold worked on rallying the 'Wise Use' movement against <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Clinton_administration" title="Clinton administration">Clinton administration</a> environmental policies, more recently he has taken aim at foundations that fund environmental campaigns. He complains that as a result of <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Internal_Revenue_Service" title="Internal Revenue Service">Internal Revenue Service</a> (IRS) regulations against corporate foundations, 'self-dealing' corporations also fund environmental groups:

<dd>"That's why the wise-use movement gets almost nothing from industry, and why the total corporate donations received by the whole wise-use movement - all 3,000 or 4,000 grass-roots groups - is not as much as one environmental group gets in that same year."</dd>

</dl>

Mr. Arnold's complaint is not that foundations funding is out of touch with the American public, but that they are in tune with them; depriving right wing groups of resources.

<dd>"It's also a result of the overall liberal cast of American society, which has thoroughly permeated many big foundations, so you find that $3 out of every $4 given by foundations go to left-leaning groups rather than to right-leaning groups."<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-23" title="">[24]</a></dd>

</dl>

In his testimony before a U.S <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=House_of_Representatives" title="House of Representatives" class="mw-redirect">House of Representatives</a> committee in February 2000, Arnold invoked <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Newt_Gingrich" title="Newt Gingrich">Newt Gingrich</a>'s "iron triangle" analogy (originally coined to describe Congressional <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Liberals" title="Liberals" class="mw-redirect">liberals</a> helping advocacy groups gain federal funds) to portray the environmental movement as doing the bidding of foundations.

<dd>"The foundations direct their funds to the second leg of the triangle, environmental groups with insider access to the third leg, executive branch agencies. This powerful 'iron triangle' unfairly influences federal policy to devastate local economies and private property."<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-24" title="">[25]</a></dd>

</dl>

Mr. Arnold is viewed favorable by other <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Conservative" title="Conservative">conservative</a> <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Think_tanks" title="Think tanks">think tanks</a> as well. In April of 2004, the "Earth Day Information Center", a project of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Center_for_Public_Policy_Research" title="National Center for Public Policy Research">National Center for Public Policy Research</a>; listed Arnold as one of eight "public policy experts" available for interviews for <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Earth_Day" title="Earth Day">Earth Day</a>. According to the media alert:

<dd>"Arnold is an expert in eco-terrorism, the funding of the establishment environmental movement, the Endangered Species Act, federal land management and property rights." <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-25" title="">[26]</a></dd>

</dl>

His last book attacked foundations funding environmental groups. For his next book, he stumped around energy industry conferences to tout 'Freezing in the Dark - The Green Energy Plan for Your Future'. In May of 2004, he addressed the GasMart 2004 conference in Denver. According to a media release prior to the conference:

<dl>

<dd>"An elite group of foundations is creating hysteria in the general public over environmental issues and undermining development of the energy infrastructure".</dd>

</dl>

According to the release, Arnold would advise participants that the energy industry was not doing enough to aggressively counter environmental groups:

<dd>"Industry is not doing anything but defense, and in football, the defensive team doesn't score any touchdowns. Anything you do that isn't aimed at putting these groups out of business is a total waste of time. You cannot fight this huge amount of money if you don't frontally attack," the media release stated.<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-26" title="">[27]</a> At the actual conference Mr. Arnold was reported as stating that industry needed to "point the finger" at activist groups responsible for shutting down an gas and oil projects. Natural Gas Week reported Arnold warned companies against developing 'partnerships' with environment groups. "Instead, he said, the energy industry must learn to develop a corps of supporters, mobilize them when the time comes, and learn 'to fight when it comes to fight'." <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-27" title="">[28]</a></dd>

</dl>

According to the December 2003 edition of Oil & Gas Investor, Mr. Arnold spoke to the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Independent_Petroleum_Association_of_America" title="Independent Petroleum Association of America">Independent Petroleum Association of America</a> (IPAA), warning them against foundation funding of environmental groups in the U.S. and overseas:

<dd>"You may say 'Thank God we're going overseas.' Well, you won't be alone," the magazine reported. Arnold warned that in Russia there are more than 90 environmental activist groups.</dd>

</dl>

Arnold told the IPAA that its plans for a PR campaign to allow exploration in the Rockies wouldn't be easy.

<dd>"You are a day late and a dollar short. Who loves big corporations? You don't hug trees. You don't even kiss babies."</dd>

</dl>

Mr. Arnold advised that it would need professional assistance if it was going to win in the Rockies:

<dd>"If you think you're going to do this with just your friends, count your friends. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-28" title="">[29]</a></dd>

</dl>

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Ron Arnold & Teresa Heinz Kerry</h3>

See also <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold_and_Teresa_Heinz_Kerry" title="Ron Arnold and Teresa Heinz Kerry">Ron Arnold and Teresa Heinz Kerry</a>.

<h2 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Ron Arnold & animal rights</h2>

See also <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Conservatives_target_the_People_for_the_Ethical_Treatment_of_Animals" title="Conservatives target the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals">Conservatives target the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals</a>.

<h2 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Contact</h2>

Phone: 425-454-9470 <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_note-29" title="">[30]</a>

<h2 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Articles & sources</h2>

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">SourceWatch articles</h3>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alan_Gottlieb" title="Alan Gottlieb">Alan Gottlieb</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Astroturf" title="Astroturf">Astroturf</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Conservatives_target_the_People_for_the_Ethical_Treatment_of_Animals" title="Conservatives target the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals">Conservatives target the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Criminalising_civil_disobedience" title="Criminalising civil disobedience">Criminalising civil disobedience</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Disinformation" title="Disinformation">Disinformation</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Earth_Liberation_Front" title="Earth Liberation Front">Earth Liberation Front</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Eco-terrorism" title="Eco-terrorism">Eco-terrorism</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Eco-terrorism_hoaxes" title="Eco-terrorism hoaxes">Eco-terrorism hoaxes</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ecoterrorism_Prevention_Act_of_2004" title="Ecoterrorism Prevention Act of 2004">Ecoterrorism Prevention Act of 2004</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Environmentalism" title="Environmentalism">Environmentalism</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Environmental_activists_who_have_been_injured_or_killed" title="Environmental activists who have been injured or killed" class="mw-redirect">Environmental activists who have been injured or killed</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Earth_Liberation_Front" title="Earth Liberation Front">Earth Liberation Front</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_Warming" title="Global Warming" class="mw-redirect">Global Warming</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Intimidating_democracy" title="Intimidating democracy">Intimidating democracy</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Intimidating_foundations" title="Intimidating foundations">Intimidating foundations</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Intimidating_public_interest_groups" title="Intimidating public interest groups">Intimidating public interest groups</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=RANamuck" title="RANamuck">RANamuck</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Undue_Influence" title="Undue Influence">Undue Influence</a></li>

</ul>

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">References</h3>

<li id="cite_note-0"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-0" title="">â</a> <a href="http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Ron_ArnoldBiography:" class="external text" title="http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Ron_ArnoldBiography:" rel="nofollow">Ron Arnold</a>, Absolute Astronomy, accessed January 2009</li>

<li id="cite_note-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-1" title="">â</a> <a href="http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Center_for_the_Defense_of_Free_Enterprise#cite_ref-0" class="external text" title="http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Center_for_the_Defense_of_Free_Enterprise#cite_ref-0" rel="nofollow">Center for Defense of Free Enterprise</a>, Spin Profiles, accessed January 2010</li>

<li id="cite_note-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-2" title="">â</a> Jim Halpin, Paul de Armond <a href="http://www.sweetliberty.org/mof.htm" class="external text" title="http://www.sweetliberty.org/mof.htm" rel="nofollow">Alan Gottlieb: The Merchant of Fear</a>, Sweet Liberty, 1994, 1995</li>

<li id="cite_note-3"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-3" title="">â</a> <a href="http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Center_for_the_Defense_of_Free_Enterprise#cite_ref-0" class="external text" title="http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Center_for_the_Defense_of_Free_Enterprise#cite_ref-0" rel="nofollow">Center for Defense of Free Enterprise</a>, Spin Profiles, accessed January 2010</li>

<li id="cite_note-4"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-4" title="">â</a> William Kevin Burke <a href="http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v07n2/wiseuse.html" class="external text" title="http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v07n2/wiseuse.html" rel="nofollow">The Wise Use Movement: Right-Wing Anti-Environmentalism</a>, The Public Eye, 1993</li>

<li id="cite_note-5"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-5" title="">â</a> William Kevin Burke <a href="http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v07n2/wiseuse.html" class="external text" title="http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v07n2/wiseuse.html" rel="nofollow">The Wise Use Movement: Right-Wing Anti-Environmentalism</a>, The Public Eye, 1993</li>

<li id="cite_note-6"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-6" title="">â</a> <a href="http://www.indypendent.org/2007/09/15/the-birth-of-a-buzz-word-eco-terrorism/" class="external text" title="http://www.indypendent.org/2007/09/15/the-birth-of-a-buzz-word-eco-terrorism/" rel="nofollow">The Birth of a Buzz-Word: Eco-Terrorism" (Ron Arnold response to article)</a>, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Indymedia" title="Indymedia">Indymedia</a>, September 2007</li>

<li id="cite_note-7"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-7" title="">â</a> 2,4,5-T comprised half of the chemical mixture found in the notorious Agent Orange, the other being 2,4,D <a href="http://www.diggerhistory.info/pages-conflicts-periods/vietnam/agent-orange.htm" class="external text" title="http://www.diggerhistory.info/pages-conflicts-periods/vietnam/agent-orange.htm" rel="nofollow">Agent Orange and other chemicals</a>, Digger History, accessed January 2010</li>

<li id="cite_note-8"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-8" title="">â</a> "'Green campaign just cover' says 'Hit man'", New Zealand Herald, March 19, 1986</li>

<li id="cite_note-9"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-9" title="">â</a> David Helvarg The War Against the Greens: The Wise-Use Movement, The New Right, and the Browning of America, pg, 407-8, May 2004, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Special:BookSources/9781555663285" class="internal">ISBN 978-1555663285</a></li>

<li id="cite_note-10"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-10" title="">â</a> William Kevin Burke <a href="http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v07n2/wiseuse.html" class="external text" title="http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v07n2/wiseuse.html" rel="nofollow">The Wise Use Movement: Right-Wing Anti-Environmentalism</a>, The Public Eye, 1993</li>

<li id="cite_note-11"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-11" title="">â</a> Outside Magazine, December 1991</li>

<li id="cite_note-12"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-12" title="">â</a> William Kevin Burke <a href="http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v07n2/wiseuse.html" class="external text" title="http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v07n2/wiseuse.html" rel="nofollow">The Wise Use Movement: Right-Wing Anti-Environmentalism</a>, The Public Eye, 1993</li>

<li id="cite_note-13"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-13" title="">â</a> Timothy Egan <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/19/us/fund-raisers-tap-anti-environmentalism.html?pagewanted=2" class="external text" title="http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/19/us/fund-raisers-tap-anti-environmentalism.html?pagewanted=2" rel="nofollow">Fund Raisers Tap Anti- Environmentalism</a>, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=New_York_Times" title="New York Times">New York Times</a>, pg 2, December 19, 1991</li>

<li id="cite_note-14"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-14" title="">â</a> Timothy Egan <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/19/us/fund-raisers-tap-anti-environmentalism.html" class="external text" title="http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/19/us/fund-raisers-tap-anti-environmentalism.html" rel="nofollow">Fund Raisers Tap Anti- Environmentalism</a>, New York Times, pg 1, December 19, 1991</li>

<li id="cite_note-15"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-15" title="">â</a> Katherine Long, "A grinch who loathes green groups: our goal is to destroy the environmental movement' says affable Ron Arnold, champion of Wise Use'", Toronto Star, December 21, 1991</li>

<li id="cite_note-16"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-16" title="">â</a> New, militant antienvironmentalists fight to return nature to a back seat., Boston Globe, January 13, 1992</li>

<li id="cite_note-17"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-17" title="">â</a> David Helvarg The War Against the Greens: The Wise-Use Movement, The New Right, and the Browning of America, pg 7, May 2004, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Special:BookSources/9781555663285" class="internal">ISBN 978-1555663285</a></li>

<li id="cite_note-18"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-18" title="">â</a> Marc Morano <a href="http://www.cdfearchives.org/morano.htm" class="external text" title="http://www.cdfearchives.org/morano.htm" rel="nofollow">Eco-Terror Expert Calls For Inquiry of Green Anarchists</a>", CNSNews.com, July 18, 2002</li>

<li id="cite_note-19"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-19" title="">â</a> <a href="http://www.cdfe.org/arnold_named_as_consultant.htm" class="external text" title="http://www.cdfe.org/arnold_named_as_consultant.htm" rel="nofollow">Ron Arnold named as ecoterrorism expert in major study: Researchers will examine planning and preparation of terrorist attacks</a>", <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Center_for_the_Defense_of_Free_Enterprise" title="Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise">Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise</a>, 2003</li>

<li id="cite_note-20"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-20" title="">â</a> Dean Kuipers, "<a href="http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/04/286197.shtml" class="external text" title="http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/04/286197.shtml" rel="nofollow">Guru of Wise Use: the spiritual father of the Bush Administration's environmental policies says we shouldnlt be timid about timber</a>", The Playboy Forum", May 1, 2004.</li>

<li id="cite_note-21"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-21" title="">â</a> Dean Kuipers, "<a href="http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/04/286197.shtml" class="external text" title="http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/04/286197.shtml" rel="nofollow">Guru of Wise Use: the spiritual father of the Bush Administration's environmental policies says we shouldnlt be timid about timber</a>", The Playboy Forum", May 1, 2004.</li>

<li id="cite_note-22"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-22" title="">â</a> Sean Paige <a href="http://www.undueinfluence.com/insight.htm" class="external text" title="http://www.undueinfluence.com/insight.htm" rel="nofollow">Arnold Pulls Back the Veil of 'Green' Tyranny</a>, Insight on the News, October 16, 2000</li>

<li id="cite_note-23"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-23" title="">â</a> Sean Paige <a href="http://www.undueinfluence.com/insight.htm" class="external text" title="http://www.undueinfluence.com/insight.htm" rel="nofollow">Arnold Pulls Back the Veil of 'Green' Tyranny</a>, Insight on the News, October 16, 2000</li>

<li id="cite_note-24"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-24" title="">â</a> Ron Arnold, <a href="http://bulk.resource.org/gpo.gov/hearings/106h/67408.txt" class="external text" title="http://bulk.resource.org/gpo.gov/hearings/106h/67408.txt" rel="nofollow">Ron Arnold Testimony: U. S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health</a>", 106th Congress, 2nd session, February 15, 2000</li>

<li id="cite_note-25"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-25" title="">â</a> <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Earth_Day" title="Earth Day">Earth Day</a> Information Center: Free 'Earth Day Interview Locator Service' and Earth Day Fact Kit Available to Journalists: Experts Available for Earth Day 2004", <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=U.S._Newswire" title="U.S. Newswire">U.S. Newswire</a>, April 19, 2004</li>

<li id="cite_note-26"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-26" title="">â</a> 'Undue Influence' Author to Address GasMart 2004 audience - hosted by Natural Gas Intelligence", Media Release, Businesswire, March 23, 2004</li>

<li id="cite_note-27"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-27" title="">â</a> John A. Sullivan, "Strong Message Needed to Fight Greens' Anti-Industry Agenda", Natural Gas Week, May 21, 2004.</li>

<li id="cite_note-28"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-28" title="">â</a> Nissa Darbonne, "Oil industry launching anti-development counter-campaign", Oil & Gas Investor, Volume 23, No. 12; December, 2003, page 9. ISSN 07445881</li>

<li id="cite_note-29"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold#cite_ref-29" title="">â</a> <a href="http://www.indypendent.org/2007/09/15/the-birth-of-a-buzz-word-eco-terrorism/" class="external text" title="http://www.indypendent.org/2007/09/15/the-birth-of-a-buzz-word-eco-terrorism/" rel="nofollow">The Birth of a Buzz-Word: Eco-Terrorism" (Ron Arnold response to article)</a>, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Indymedia" title="Indymedia">Indymedia</a>, September 2007</li>

</ol>

</div>

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">External articles</h3>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bill_Berkowitz" title="Bill Berkowitz">Bill Berkowitz</a>, "<a href="http://www.tompaine.com/articles/terrorist_tree_huggers.php" class="external text" title="http://www.tompaine.com/articles/terrorist_tree_huggers.php" rel="nofollow">Terrorist Tree Huggers: Ron Arnold, Father of the 'Wise Use' Movement, sets his Sights on 'Eco-Terrorists'</a>", TomPaine, June 25, 2004.</li>

<li><a href="http://www.prwatch.org/documents/clear_v9n1.html" class="external text" title="http://www.prwatch.org/documents/clear_v9n1.html" rel="nofollow">Special Alert: Post 9/11 Anti-Environmentalism Threatens Green Activism</a>, Clear View, Volume 9 Number 1, January 23, 2002</li>

</ul>

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">External resources</h3>

<li>Brian Glick, Abbie Smith <a href="http://www.amazon.com/War-Home-against-activists-Pamphlet/dp/0896083497" class="external text" title="http://www.amazon.com/War-Home-against-activists-Pamphlet/dp/0896083497" rel="nofollow">War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do about It</a>, South End Press, July 1999, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Special:BookSources/9780896083493" class="internal">ISBN 978-0896083493</a></li>

</ul>

<h4 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Books & Publications by Ron Arnold</h4>

<li>Ron Arnold <a href="http://www.amazon.com/At-eye-storm-James-environmentalists/dp/0895266342" class="external text" title="http://www.amazon.com/At-eye-storm-James-environmentalists/dp/0895266342" rel="nofollow">At the Eye of the Storm: James Watt and the Environmentalists</a>, Regnery Gateway, 1982, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Special:BookSources/9780895266347" class="internal">ISBN 978-0895266347</a></li>

<li>Ron Arnold,"<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/093957120X/qid%3D1013227384/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F0%5F1/freeenterpris-20/104-9962711-2123927#product-details" class="external text" title="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/093957120X/qid%3D1013227384/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F0%5F1/freeenterpris-20/104-9962711-2123927#product-details" rel="nofollow">Undue Influence Wealthy Foundations, Grant-Driven Green Groups, and Zealous Bureaucrats That Control Your Future</a>, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Free_Enterprise_Press" title="Free Enterprise Press">Free Enterprise Press</a>, October 1999.</li>

<li>Ron Arnold, "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0939571188/ref=ase_freeenterpris-20/104-9746763-3246345?v=glance&s=books#product-details" class="external text" title="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0939571188/ref=ase_freeenterpris-20/104-9746763-3246345?v=glance&s=books#product-details" rel="nofollow">EcoTerror The Violent Agenda to Save Nature - The World of the Unabomber</a>", Free Enterprise Press, April 1997</li>

<li>Ron Arnold, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alan_Gottlieb" title="Alan Gottlieb">Alan Gottlieb</a>, "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/093957117X/ref=ase_freeenterpris-20/102-2187995-1871331?v=glance&s=books#product-details" class="external text" title="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/093957117X/ref=ase_freeenterpris-20/102-2187995-1871331?v=glance&s=books#product-details" rel="nofollow">Trashing the Economy How Runaway Environmentalism is Wrecking America</a>", Merril Press, 2nd edition, October 1998</li>

<li>Ron Arnold, "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0939571145/qid%3D1013228349/sr%3D1-1/freeenterpris-20/freeenterpris-20/104-5565887-1669556" class="external text" title="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0939571145/qid%3D1013228349/sr%3D1-1/freeenterpris-20/freeenterpris-20/104-5565887-1669556" rel="nofollow">Ecology Wars Environmentalism as if People Mattered</a>", Merril Press; Reissue edition, October 1998.</li>

<li>Politically Correct Environment, 1996</li>

<li>Battered Communities, 1998</li>

<li>Ron Arnold, "<a href="http://www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pubs.asp?ID=102" class="external text" title="http://www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pubs.asp?ID=102" rel="nofollow">Tides Foundation's Activist Network exerts 'undue influence'</a>", Foundation Watch, April 2000.</li>

<li>Ron Arnold "<a href="http://www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pubs.asp?ID=174" class="external text" title="http://www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pubs.asp?ID=174" rel="nofollow">The Heinz foundations and the Kerry campaign: one has money, the other needs money</a>", Foundation Watch, Capital Research Center, April 2004.</li>

<li>Ron Arnold, "<a href="http://www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/05_04_FW.pdf" class="external text" title="http://www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/05_04_FW.pdf" rel="nofollow">The Pew Charitable Trusts: global warming power nexus</a>", Foundation Watch, Capital Research Center, May 2004.</li>

</ul>

<div class="printfooter" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Retrieved from "<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold">http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold</a>"</div>

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</div>

----

<a href="http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v07n2/wiseuse.html">http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v07n2/wiseuse.html </a>1992?

==

wingnuts aLL

<h1 class="title">Wingnuts in Sheep's Clothing</h1>

</div>

Meet the kooks and corporations behind the astroturf group called ECO.

â By <a href="http://motherjones.com/authors/keith-hammond">Keith Hammo</a>

</div>

Thu Dec. 4, 1997 1:00 AM PST

</div>

It's not easy being green -- the brown opposition is well-funded and sneaky, with <a href="http://motherjones.com/news/feature/1997/11/silverstein.html">fake populist tactics</a> that make it hard to spot the wolf in sheep's clothing. To learn more about the astroturf groups who are lobbying against the Kyoto global warming treaty, we contacted the Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy and Research (CLEAR). A project of the Environmental Working Group in Washington, D.C., CLEAR ferrets out anti-environmental groups and their funders: the mining, logging, petrochemical, and land-developing industries who profit from pollution and wilderness destruction. Starting with Henry Lamb's perversely named Environmental Conservation Organization, we trace here the interlocking directorates -- and corporate sponsors -- of some of the extremist groups who'll give up their carbon-spewing smokestack when you pry it out of their cold, dead hands:</div>

</div>

CHART COMPILED BY DAN BARRY, CLEARINGHOUSE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ADVOCACY AND RESEARCH (CLEAR)

Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO) The brainchild of property-rights firebrand Henry Lamb, ECO is an anti-environmental umbrella outfit counting <a href="http://wyl.ewg.org/pub/static/CLEAR/ECORG.nhtml">more than 300</a> Wise Use groups as members, with a phone and fax network and a monthly newsletter called Eco-logic, which promotes Wise Use efforts to stop the global warming treaty, and Lamb's conspiracy theories of a United Nations New World Order. Funded by: Allnet Telecommunications, Land Improvement Contractors of America, American Farm Bureau Federation.

Henry Lamb A former executive with the Land Improvement Contractors of America, Lamb co-founded Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO) in 1990 as a front group for land developers to fight Clean Water Act protections for wetlands, then turned it into a network for Wise Use groups nationwide. He recently co-founded Sovereignty International Inc., an anti-United Nations property-rights group. Prominent in the anti-environmental and property-rights movements, Lamb publishes newsletters and gives radio interviews attacking the U.N.'s Man and the Biosphere Program, World Heritage Treaty, Convention on Biological Diversity, and Convention on Climate Change.

Staff Member of:

Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), Executive Vice President

Board Member of:

Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), Board of Directors

National Wilderness Institute, National Advisory Board

Sovereignty International, Chairman of the Board

Steve Symms The former U.S. senator from Idaho, elected in the 1980 "Reagan Revolution," was the voice of the anti-environmental movement on Capitol Hill and the champion of various failed "takings" bills. His signal achievement was a bill that built new off-road vehicle (ORV) trails in the national forests. Retired in 1992, today he sits on the boards of a half-dozen of the most arch-conservative, anti-environmental groups in the country. Symms' specialty is defending individual property rights at any cost.

Staff Member of:

Freedom Alliance, President

Board Member of:

Defenders of Property Rights, National Advisory Board

Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), Board of Advisors

National Wilderness Institute, National Advisory Board

Freedom Alliance, Board

American Conservative Union, Board of Directors

American Policy Center, Chair of the Board

Nancie Marzulla A Justice Department attorney in the Reagan administration and a veteran of the Wise Use litigators the Mountain States Legal Foundation, Nancie Marzulla co-founded the Defenders of Property Rights (DPR) in 1991 with her husband Roger, who served as assistant attorney general under Ed Meese.

Staff Member of:

Defenders of Property Rights, President and Chief Legal Counsel

Board Member of:

Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), Board of Advisors

American Land Foundation, Property Rights Task Force Member

Fred Singer A former University of Virginia professor and former chief scientist for the U.S. Department of Transportation, Dr. S. Fred Singer is one of a half-dozen preeminent doubters of ozone depletion and global warming science. Singer claims science skeptics like him are being silenced by a conspiracy of feds, enviros, and liberal journalists. Today he heads the Science and Environmental Policy Project, advises several corporate-funded science mills, and rails against global warming science. For this he's amply rewarded: In 1994 Nightline revealed that Singer has accepted consulting fees from Exxon, Shell, Arco, Unocal, and Sun Oil.

Staff Member of:

Science and Environmental Policy Project, Director

Board Member of:

American Council on Science and Health, Board of Scientific and Policy Advisors

The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, Scientist Advisor

Cato Institute, Editorial Advisory Board

Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), Board of Advisors

National Policy Forum, Member of Environment Committee

Science and Environmental Policy Project, Board of Directors

Hugh Ellsaesser A meteorologist and guest scientist at California's Lawrence Livermore nuclear laboratory, Dr. Hugh Ellsaesser is another widely quoted global warming skeptic. He doesn't deny that CO2 buildup causes global warming -- he argues that we should just sit back and enjoy it. He's also a scientific advisor to the Lyndon LaRouche group 21st Century Science Associates, which publishes an anti-environmental magazine promoting LaRouche's wacky <a href="http://www.publiceye.org/pra/larouche/nclc3.html">Neo-Nazi</a> cult.

Board Member of:

21st Century Science Associates, Scientific Advisory Board

Consumer Alert, Advisory Board

Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), Board of Advisors

George C. Marshall Institute, Science Advisory Board

The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, Advisor

Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, Scientific Advisor

<a href="http://www.libertymatters.org/Soveregn.htm">Sovereignty International Inc.</a>

Property-rights group Sovereignty International Inc. (SII) is a leading promoter of United Nations paranoia, claiming that environmental regulations are part of a plot to establish a "one world government" -- a theme echoed by militia groups nationwide. SII was founded by ECO's Henry Lamb; the American Sheep Industry Association's Tom McDonnell, who has collaborated with LaRouche propagandist Rogelio Maduro to attack U.N. biodiversity programs; and Dr. Michael Coffman, who did a speaking tour this summer sponsored by the John Birch Society. His topic: The U.N.-corporate-environmentalist conspiracy to seize control of private land in America, hand it over to wild animals, and herd all the humans into crowded communities. SII's <a href="http://www.libertymatters.org/Soveregn.htm">Web site</a> consists of a single malfunctioning page on the server of Liberty Matters, a property-rights project. Funded by: Unknown.

<a href="http://www.nwi.org/">National Wilderness Institute</a>

Dedicated to wilderness destruction, NWI boasts a board of heavy hitters including Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), Reps. Dick Armey (R-Texas) and Richard Pombo (R-Calif.), and former Bureau of Land Management honcho Don Hodel, architect of the famed Hodel policy which allowed county governments to bulldoze new roads across federal wilderness lands. Today NWI attacks the Endangered Species Act and the U.N. Biodiversity Convention, defends the petroleum economy, and publishes <a href="http://www.nwi.org/resource.html">NWI Resource</a> magazine, with articles like "The Magic of Property Rights" and "Ecosystems: Where Do They End?" Funded by: Hardwood Manufacturers Association.

<a href="http://www.conservative.org/">American Conservative Union</a>

With board members like Ralph Reed, Becky Norton Dunlop, Tom Clancy, Jesse Helms, and Newt mentor Grover Norquist, you pretty much know where the ACU is coming from, but on global warming they've staked out a <a href="http://www.conservative.org/conservative/press/Press103097.html">unique position</a>: "I can just see it now -- some guy in the Pentagon says, 'I'm sorry, Mr. President. If you want to send that extra carrier battle group into the area, we'll have to shut down the electric power grid to California for two weeks to stay under our emission caps.'" Funded by: Unknown.

<a href="http://www.americanpolicy.org/">American Policy Center</a>

Chaired by another extreme-right demagogue, Thomas DeWeese, this property-rights propaganda mill makes no bones about it: There is no global warming, there's a global leftist conspiracy to deceive the American people and wreck our economy -- for reasons that remain unclear. To protest the treaty negotiations in Kyoto, APC has called a nationwide "<a href="http://www.americanpolicy.org/plate.main/StrikeForliberty/StrikeLtr.html">Strike for Liberty</a>" on Dec. 6; patriotic citizens "can participate simply by wearing red, white and blue arm bands, or driving their cars with the lights on, blowing the horn." Web site bonus: An <a href="http://www.americanpolicy.org/plate.main/StrikeForliberty/AlGore.html">amazing screed</a> accusing Al Gore of genocide. APC also publishes EPA Watch, a survey of environmental regulatory activities, and Foreign Policy Focus,an anti-U.N. nativist newsletter. Funded by: Unknown.

Freedom Alliance

Founded by Oliver North, the Freedom Alliance passes as a right-wing think-tank and citizens group, but mostly it's the direct-mail fundraising machine that grew out of Ollie North's legal defense mailings in the Iran-contra affair. Its newsletter, The Free American, promotes North's political ambitions and attacks gays and other unholy types. In one issue, Freedom Alliance president and former Senator Steve Symms attacked the Supreme Court for overturning Colorado's anti-gay Amendment 2 ballot measure: "Now, because of their perverted lifestyle, a minority of citizens is granted special treatment in soliciting state contracts. Does this make sense?" Funded by: Unknown.

<a href="http://www.defendersproprights.org/">Defenders of Property Rights</a>

Founded by Reagan Justice Department lawyers Roger and Nancie Marzulla in 1991, Defenders of Property Rights is part of a national network of right-wing law firms and legal foundations that serve as a pro bono Wise Use legal defense fund. DPR pursues anti-environmental lawsuits through the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, a conservative court whose 16 judges were all appointed by Reagan and Bush; DPR's directors reportedly plan strategy at an annual meeting sponsored by the Heritage Foundation. Funded by: Carthage Foundation, Hardwood Manufacturers Association.

American Land Foundation

Founded by property rights leader Dan Byfield, ALF (formerly the Farm Credit Property Rights Foundation) underwrites anti-environmental research and boasts a who's who of the movement on its property rights task force. Last year ALF <a href="http://www.libertymatters.org/Press%20release%20Final.html">teamed</a> with two other Wise Use groups to form <a href="http://www.libertymatters.org/">Liberty Matters Inc.</a>, yet another Wise Use networking effort, with a fax news service and a focus on feeding stories to small-town and conservative media about the evils of environmentalism, especially when it bears the taint of the U.N. Today Liberty Matters sponsors two segments -- and chooses the guests -- on the program "Morning View" on Paul Weyrich's conservative NET cable channel. Appearing this Friday: Dr. Michael Coffman of Sovereignty International. Funded by: Unknown

<a href="http://www.acsh.org/">American Council on Science and Health</a>

Led by Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, this corporate-funded science mill stoutly defends silicone breast implants, DDT, and of course, the polluting technologies that cause global warming. In a <a href="http://www.acsh.org/publications/reports/global.html">new report</a>, ACSH scientists accept global warming as real, but argue that we should just "adapt" to climate change and learn to live with any increase in catastrophic weather and infectious diseases -- for the sake of the "global economic system." Incredibly, one of the authors is an M.D. Funded by: <a href="http://wyl.ewg.org/FoxProCGI.acgi%24run_module%3Fdata_code%3DCLEAR%26extra_code%3Dgroup_code%3DORG176%26the_type%3DGroup%26">Scores of major corporations</a> and conservative foundations, including Exxon, Mobil, Ford, and the Olin and Scaife foundations.

<a href="http://www.cato.org/">Cato Institute</a>

This libertarian think-tank is well-known for defending private property and the unmitigated free market. It's also home to <a href="http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-pm110697.html">Dr. Patrick Michaels</a>, a leading skeptic who argues that global warming models are fatally flawed, and that we should take no action because new technologies will soon replace those that emit greenhouse gases. Funded by: <a href="http://wyl.ewg.org/FoxProCGI.acgi%24run_module%3Fdata_code%3DCLEAR%26extra_code%3Dgroup_code%3DORG396%26the_type%3DGroup%26">Scores</a> of major corporations and conservative foundations, including Amoco, ARCO, Dow Chemical, and the Koch family foundation.

<a href="http://www.his.com/%7Esepp/">Science and Environmental Policy Project</a>

This corporate science mill began in 1990 as an offshoot of the Moonie-funded think-tank Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy. Its goal is to discredit global warming, ozone depletion, and acid rain. Its director, physicist Dr. S. Fred Singer, is a former chief scientist for the Department of Transportation who has received thousands of dollars in "consulting fees" from Exxon, Shell, Arco, Unocal, and <a href="http://motherjones.com/news_wire/sunoco.html">Sunoco</a>. Singer lambastes global warming science in regular <a href="http://www.his.com/%7Esepp/glwarm/glwarm.html">editorials</a> in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Times. Funded by: Monsanto, Texaco, Philip Morris, and the Bradley, Forbes, and Smith Richardson foundations.

<a href="http://www.junkscience.com/">The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition</a>

TASCC director Steven Milloy, a cheerleader for rolling back environmental regulations in the 104th Congress, calls himself "The Junkman," and his Web site "Junk Science" sounds that familiar refrain: Thousands of scientists are wrong about global warming, and a handful of polluter-funded scientists have it all figured out. Funded by: 3M, Amoco, Chevron, Dow, Exxon, General Motors, Philip Morris and other big corporations.

21st Century Science Associates

This Lyndon LaRouche group publishes the anti-environmental magazine 21st Century Science & Technology, which in addition to promoting LaRouche's wacky <a href="http://www.publiceye.org/pra/larouche/nclc3.html">Neo-Nazi</a> cult and global conspiracy theories, is home to associate editor Rogelio Maduro, author of The Holes in the Ozone Scare. That book became Rush Limbaugh's ozone bible. Funded by: Unknown.

<a href="http://www.consumeralert.org/index.htm">Consumer Alert</a>

This astroturf group calls global warming science "scare stories" and funds the Web site <a href="http://www.globalwarming.org/index.htm">Globalwarming.org</a>, with a bi-weekly update called "May Cooler Heads Prevail." Consumer Alert's networking project, the <a href="http://www.consumeralert.org/NCC/index.htm">National Consumer Coalition</a>, formed the so-called Cooler Heads Coalition in May, "to dispel the myths of global warming." Cooler Heads is run by a vice president from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a longtime sponsor of the Wise Use movement. Funded by: American Cyanamid, Chemical Manufacturers Association, Chevron, Monsanto, Philip Morris, and other big corporations. BERMAN?

<a href="http://www.marshall.org/">George C. Marshall Institute</a>

As David Helvarg <a href="http://motherjones.com/news/feature/1997/11/index.html">reported</a> in last week's MoJo Wire, the George C. Marshall Institute is another conservative think-tank, a long-time "Star Wars" promoter and the first player to attack the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's <a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/cc95/cont-95.htm">1995 finding</a> that human activity is probably changing the climate already. Funded by: Scaife and Bradley foundations.

Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow

A pseudoscience think-tank funded in part by the nuclear industry, CFACT says the real disaster would be the Climate Change Treaty, because "any proposed cuts in greenhouse gases...would have a major, indeed catastrophic, negative impact on people worldwide." CFACT's president David Rothbard defends <a href="http://motherjones.com/news_wire/velsicol.html">organochlorine pesticides</a>, champions the bovine growth hormone BST, and calls environmentalists "green locusts." Funded by: Carthage Foundation, U.S. Council on Energy Awareness.

ALSO AMONG THE LEADING OPPONENTS TO THE GLOBAL WARMING TREATY:

Coalition for Vehicle Choice

Competitive Enterprise Institute

Frontiers of Freedom Institute

National Center for Public Policy Research

People for the West!

Robert Balling, Jr.

Dr. Patrick Michaels

</div>

<h1 id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Sagebrush rebels</h1>

<div id="siteSub" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</div>

<div id="jump-to-nav" class="mw-jump">Jump to: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#mw-head">navigation</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#p-search">search</a></div>

<h2>Contents</h2>

</div>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#Public_lands_history">1 Public lands history</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-2"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#Congressional_support_for_the_Sagebrush_Rebellion">2 Congressional support for the Sagebrush Rebellion</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-3"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#References">3 References</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-4"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#Further_reading">4 Further reading</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-5"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#External_links">5 External links</a></li>

</ul>

</td></tr></tbody></table>

Sagebrush rebels is a group that attempted to influence environmental policy in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_West" title="American West" class="mw-redirect">American West</a> during the 1970s and 1980s, surviving into the 21st century in public lands states (generally, the 13 western states where federal land holdings include 30% to more than 50% of a state's area), and surviving in organized groups pressuring public lands policy makers, especially for grazing of sheep and cattle on public lands, and for mineral extraction policies.

An extension of the older controversy of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.state" title="U.S. state">state</a> vs. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_government_of_the_United_States" title="Federal government of the United States">federal</a> powers, Sagebrush Rebels wanted the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_government_of_the_United_States" title="Federal government of the United States">federal government</a> to give more control of government owned Western lands to state and local authorities. This was meant to increase the growth of Western economies. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan" title="Ronald Reagan">Ronald Reagan</a> declared himself a sagebrush rebel in an August 1980 campaign speech in Salt Lake City, Reagan told the crowd, "I happen to be one who cheers and supports the Sagebrush Rebellion. Count me in as a rebel."<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#cite_note-0">[1]</a> Reagan was faced with opposition with conservation organizations. This struggle persists today after changing form, with the "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_use" title="Wise use">wise use</a> movement" in 1988. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H.W._Bush" title="George H. W. Bush">George H. W. Bush</a> helped work around restrictive environmental laws to help mining, ranching, and real estate developing industries that created jobs in the states.

The term "Sagebrush Rebellion" was coined during fights over designation of National Wilderness lands, especially in western states, and especially after the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Forest_Service" title="National Forest Service" class="mw-redirect">National Forest Service</a> (NFS) and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Land_Management" title="Bureau of Land Management">Bureau of Land Management</a> (BLM) conducted required surveys of plots of public lands of at least 5,000 acres (20 km²) that were unroaded, after 1972, for potential designation as part of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Wilderness_Preservation_System" title="National Wilderness Preservation System">National Wilderness Preservation System</a>. This process was known as the Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE, or later, RARE I). The process developed significant opposition by environmental groups and by public lands users, and was challenged in federal court. Results of RARE I were tabled by the courts for lack of uniform criteria for evaluation of lands and other procedural problems, and a second review started in 1977, known as RARE II, involving more than 60 million acres (240,000 km²) of wildland under federal jurisdiction. RARE II was completed in 1979. Controversy, and lack of support from the Reagan administration starting in 1981, largely sidelined a formal, national wilderness assessment. Congress has designated several wilderness areas since 1981, sometimes using data acquired through the RARE processes.[OYSTER BAY DRAKE MOD INCARNASTION?

The National Wilderness Preservation System grew out of recommendations of a Kennedy-administration Presidential Commission, the Outdoor Recreational Resources Review Commission (ORRRC)<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#cite_note-1">[2]</a> chaired by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Rockefeller" title="Laurence Rockefeller" class="mw-redirect">Laurence S. Rockefeller</a>, whose 1962 report suggested legislation to protect recreational resources in a "national system of wild and scenic rivers," a national wilderness system, a national trails system, the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, and recreation areas administered by then-existing public lands agencies beyond National Parks and National Monuments (both of which are administered in the Department of the Interior by the National Parks Administration).

Much of the wildland was sagebrush, which some wanted to use for grazing, off-road vehicle use, and other development instead of wilderness conservation. These "rebels" urged that, instead of designating more federal wilderness protection, some or much of the land be granted to states or private parties. They took on the phrase "Sagebrush Rebellion" to describe their opposition to closure of these lands.

<h2>Public lands history</h2>

Complaints about federal management of public lands constantly roil relations between public lands users—ranchers, miners, researchers, off-road vehicle (ORV) enthusiasts, hikers, campers and conservation advocates—and the agencies. Ranchers complain that grazing fees are too high, that grazing regulations are too onerous, and that promised improvements to grazing on federal lands does not occur. Miners complain of restricted access to claims, or to lands to prospect. Researchers complain of the difficulty of getting research permits, only to encounter other obstacles in research, including uncooperative permit holders and, especially in archaeology, vandalized sites with key information destroyed. ORV users want free access, hikers and campers and conservationists complain grazing is not regulated enough, some mineral lease holders abuse other lands, and ORV use destroys the resource. Each of these complaints has a long history.

In order to encourage settlement of western lands, Congress passed the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrell_Act" title="Morrell Act" class="mw-redirect">Morrell Act</a> in 1862, granting parcels in 40-acre (160,000 m2) increments to homesteaders who could maintain a living on land for a period of time. Congress also made huge land grants to various railroads working to complete a transcontinental rail system. Much of these latter grants intentionally included mineral- and timber-rich lands, so that the railroads could get financing to build. Again, the hypothesis was that the railroads would sell off the land to get money.

Ultimately, however, it turned out that much land west of the Missouri River was too wild for homesteading, because of mountainous terrain or lack of available water. By the early 20th century, the federal government held significant portions of most western states that had simply not been claimed for any use. Conservationists prevailed on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt" title="Theodore Roosevelt">President Theodore Roosevelt</a> to set aside lands for forest preservation, and for special scientific or natural history interest. Much land still remained unclaimed, even after such reserves were initially set up. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Interior" title="Department of Interior" class="mw-redirect">Department of Interior</a> held millions of acres in the western states (with Arizona and New Mexico joining the union by 1913). <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover" title="Herbert Hoover">President Hoover</a> proposed to deed these lands to the states in 1932, but the states complained that the lands had been overgrazed and would in other ways impose a burden on cash-strapped state budgets. The Bureau of Land Management was created to manage much of that land.

<h2>Congressional support for the Sagebrush Rebellion</h2>

Various bills to transfer federal public lands to western states had been proposed after 1932, all failing to garner much attention, let alone action. Among key objections to such transfers were the increasing value to the federal treasury of mineral lease receipts, and complaints that the "crown jewels" of the national lands holdings, the National Parks, could not be managed adequately or fairly by individual states. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone" title="Yellowstone" class="mw-redirect">Yellowstone</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yosemite_National_Park" title="Yosemite National Park">Yosemite National Parks</a> were considered to be national treasures, and few legislators would concur with turning them over to the states.

The spark that turned these complaints into a "rebellion" was the enactment in 1976 of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Land_Policy_and_Management_Act" title="Federal Land Policy and Management Act">Federal Land Policy and Management Act</a> (FLPMA), which sought to establish a system of land management by the BLM, recognizing that most of the BLM holdings would not be turned into private hands. While FLPMA required BLM to plan land use accommodating all users, specifically naming ranching, grazing, and mining, it also introduced formal processes to consider preservation of the land from ranching, grazing and mining. Western land users regarded the act as a bureaucratic power grab at best, or the imposition of a totalitarian socialist regime at the radical worst.

Newly-elected <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrin_Hatch" title="Orrin Hatch">Senator Orrin Hatch</a>, R-Utah, joined in land transfer legislation in 1977, after loud complaints from ranchers and oilmen from Utah, coupled with strong support from several Utah county governments. By late 1979 Hatch was the one legislator most interested in land transfers. He sought to introduce a transfer bill that would get hearings and potential action. Upon advice of members of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Utah_Wilderness_Commission&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Utah Wilderness Commission (page does not exist)">Utah Wilderness Commission</a>, appointed by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_M.Matheson%28Utah_governor%29" title="Scott M. Matheson (Utah governor)" class="mw-redirect">Utah Governor Scott Matheson</a>, Hatch agreed to leave National Parks and National Monuments in federal hands, and he drafted a bill that would allow states to apply for control over selected parcels. With 16 cosponsors, he introduced the bill in 1980, and again in 1981. Partly because Hatch's bill dealt with major objections to previous bills, news outlets for the first time covered the bill as if it had a serious chance of passing. This provided a huge morale boost to long-aggrieved public lands users other than conservationists, and started a two-year newspaper, radio and television fight for the legislation.

Ultimately Hatch's bill got little more than press attention. The election of Ronald Reagan as president put a friend to the Sagebrush Rebels in the White House. Reagan appointees slowed down or closed down wilderness designation legislation, and by Reagan's second term, the Sagebrush Rebellion was back to simmering on the back burner of federal land management agencies.

<h2>References</h2>

</td><td class="mbox-text">This article needs additional <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources#Inline_citations" title="Wikipedia:Citing sources">citations</a> for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability" title="Wikipedia:Verifiability">verification</a>. Please help <a class="external text" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sagebrush_rebels&action=edit">improve this article</a> by adding citations to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources" title="Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources">reliable sources</a>. Unsourced material may be <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Citation_needed" title="Template:Citation needed">challenged</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Burden_of_evidence" title="Wikipedia:Verifiability">removed</a>. (October 2010) </td></tr></tbody></table>

<li id="cite_note-0"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#cite_ref-0">^{</a></span}> Coates, James, "Sagebrush Rebellion On Hold, Group Lights Other Legal Fires," Chicago Tribune, Mar. 16, 1996 <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-03-16/news/8601190635_1_sagebrush-rebellion-national-parks-sierra-club">http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-03-16/news/8601190635_1_sagebrush-rebellion-national-parks-sierra-club</a></li>

<li id="cite_note-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_rebels#cite_ref-1">^{</a></span}> See William K. Reilly's forward to the Report of the President's Commission on Americans Outdoors, a 1987 report, in the Island Press edition (1987) p. ix.</li>

</ol>

</div>

<h2>Further reading</h2>

<ul>

<li>R. McGreggor Cawley, Federal Land, Western Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion and Environmental Politics, University of Kansas Press, 1993.</li>

<li>Wayne Hage, Storm Over the Rangelands: Private Rights in Federal Lands, 1989. (A defense of grazing rights).</li>

<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kemmis" title="Daniel Kemmis">Daniel Kemmis</a>, This Sovereign Land: A New Vision for Governing the West, Island Press, 2001. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/1559638427" class="internal mw-magiclink-isbn">ISBN 1-55963-842-7</a></li>

<li>Robert Henry Nelson, Public Lands and Private Rights: The failure of scientific management, Rowman & Littlefield, 1995.</li>

</ul>

<h2>External links</h2>

<ul>

<li><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.library.unr.edu/specoll/mss/85-04.html">"A Guide to the Records of The Sagebrush Rebellion, Collection No. 85-04</a> at the University of Nevada - Reno Libraries Special Collections</li>

<li><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://archives.auraria.edu/sagebrsh/sagebrsh.html">"SageBrush Rebellion Collection No. 32"</a> at the University of Colorado Denver Library</li>

<li><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.foresthistory.org/Research/usfscoll/policy/States%27_Rights/1980_Sagebrush.html">"1980 Sagebrush Rebellion"</a> from the Forestry History Society</li>

<li><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/PVCC/mbase/docs/sagebrush.html">Text of a 1980 article in U.S. News and World Report</a> from the University of Virginia Digital History Center</li>

</ul>

</div>

<a href="http://www.cdfe.org/wiseuse.htm">Wise Use Articles of Faith</a> -- ( from Overcoming Ideology, by Ron Arnold)

1) Humans, like all organisms, must use natural resources to survive. . . .

2) The earth and its life are tough and resilient, not fragile and delicate. . . .

3) We only learn about the world through trial and error. . . .

4) Our limitless imaginations can break through natural limits to make earthly goods and carrying capacity virtually infinite. . . .

5) Humanity's reworking of the earth is revolutionary, problematic and ultimately benevolent. . . .

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_Use">Wise Use Critics </a>such as Carl Deal, author of The Greenpeace Guide to Anti-Environmental Organizations, and Political Research Associates, charge that many Wise Use organizations 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 and how the Bush administration has weakened restrictions on polluters in his 2004 book Crimes Against Nature. . . .

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_Use">Major organizations promoting Wise Use ideas</a> 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. . . . Coors also chose MSLF President James Watt as Secretary of the Interior. . . . "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 who interfere with polluter profits" (Crimes 29). . . . 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.

<a href="http://earthfamilybeta.blogspot.com/2005/09/susan-bright.html">Susan Bright, 2006</a>

<h1 id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Intimidating public interest groups</h1>

<div id="jump-to-nav" class="mw-jump" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Jump to: <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Intimidating_public_interest_groups#mw-head">navigation</a>, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Intimidating_public_interest_groups#p-search">search</a></div>

The dramatic increase in the number and influence of public interest groups over recent years has alarmed conservative groups. In response, there has been a flurry of attempts to establish on-line databases to monitor non-profit groups. For all the bluster accompanying these projects, few have amounted to much.

Another strand in their strategy has been developing the intellectual rationale and rhetoric on how curtailing non-profit groups is consistent with maintaining a healthy democracy.

The <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Capital_Research_Center" title="Capital Research Center">Capital Research Center</a>'s <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Green_Watch" title="Green Watch">Green Watch</a> - which gained $50,000 in funding from ExxonMobil in 2002 and 2003 - is perhaps the most effective at profiling the "liberal environmentalist movement". <a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://www2.exxonmobil.com/files/corporate/public_policy1.pdf">[1]</a><a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/files/corporate/giving_report.pdf">[2]</a>

Others, such as <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/ActivistCash.com" title="ActivistCash.com">ActivistCash.com</a> purport to 'expose' activist groups, while in reality providing little more than information that is publicly available. The ActivistCash.com website was launched in December 2001 with profiles on only 16 activist groups. By January 2003 it had crept up to only 33. In the next eighteen months to June 2004 only an additional six groups had been added to the database.

<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Public_Interest_Watch" title="Public Interest Watch">Public Interest Watch</a> (PIW) was launched in September 2002 by <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Mike_Hardiman" title="Mike Hardiman">Mike Hardiman</a>. Hardiman, the principal of the public relations and lobbying company <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Hardiman_Consulting" title="Hardiman Consulting">Hardiman Consulting</a>, was also a lobbyist for the 'wise use' group, the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Land_Rights_Association" title="American Land Rights Association">American Land Rights Association</a>. The group seems to have been primarily a vehicle to attack Greenpeace. On the basis of a review of IRS 990 forms, PIW filed a complaint with the IRS urging an investigation claiming that the perfectly legal transfer of funds between 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) arms amounted to 'money laundering'. Hardiman resigned in January 2004 . In March 2004 <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lewis_Fein" title="Lewis Fein">Lewis Fein</a> was appointed as an interim Executive Director.

However, PIW appears to be a phantom organisation. Asked if the organization had had filed an IRS return Fein said "I believe so". Nor was he able to state who the Board members were or whether the address listed on the website was in fact an office address rather than the residential address of a board member.

In May 2003 the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/National_Center_for_Public_Policy_Research" title="National Center for Public Policy Research">National Center for Public Policy Research</a>, established the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Envirotruth" title="Envirotruth">Envirotruth</a> website, which it claims "sheds light on the environmentalist movement, offering information about their tactics, terrorist acts and fundraising machines." Like most of the other profiling sites, it is long on hype and short on details. In 2003 <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Exxon_Mobil" title="Exxon Mobil">Exxon Mobil</a> contributed $30,000 to underwrite the project. <a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/files/corporate/giving_report.pdf">[3]</a>

The <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Center_for_the_Defense_of_Free_Enterprise" title="Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise">Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise</a>'s <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/RANamuck" title="RANamuck">RANamuck</a> website targeting the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network has not been updated since September 2002. Similarly, its <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=PETA_Probe&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="PETA Probe (page does not exist)">PETA Probe</a> site was last actively updated in late 2002.

In June 2003, with a great deal of fanfare, the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Enterprise_Institute" title="American Enterprise Institute">American Enterprise Institute</a> unveiled <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/NGOWatch.org" title="NGOWatch.org">NGOWatch.org</a>, a joint project with the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Federalist_Society_for_Law_and_Public_Policy_Studies" title="Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies">Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies</a>. The site, they claimed, would "expose the funding, operations and agendas of international NGOs". However, one-year later sections of the site remain "under construction" while the actual profiles on groups are spartan.

The launch of the NGOwatch site co-incided with a conference on NGO's co-hosted with the Australian conservative think tank, the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Institute_of_Public_Affairs" title="Institute of Public Affairs">Institute of Public Affairs</a> (IPA) The IPA itself launched a specialist newsletter, NGO Watch, in April 2001 to profile human rights, development and environmental organisations. However, faced with little subscriber support, the October 2002 edition was the last. "It just wasn't financially sustaining, there weren't enough buying the product," said IPA Senior Fellow, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Gary_Johns" title="Gary Johns">Gary Johns</a> told Inter-Press Service.

While some of these projects have floundered or been abandoned by their sponsors it would be a mistake to conclude they have no effect. In part, their role is to create a climate in which non-profits divert scarce resources away from their core mission or soften their advocacy.

While there are thousands of non-profit environmental and other non-profit groups, only a handful appear to have been singled out for specific attention. The key groups featured by one or more of these groups are:

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Conservatives_target_the_Sierra_Club" title="Conservatives target the Sierra Club">Conservatives target the Sierra Club</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Conservatives_target_the_Natural_Resources_Defense_Council" title="Conservatives target the Natural Resources Defense Council">Conservatives target the Natural Resources Defense Council</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Conservatives_target_Greenpeace" title="Conservatives target Greenpeace">Conservatives target Greenpeace</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Conservatives_target_the_Rainforest_Action_Network" title="Conservatives target the Rainforest Action Network">Conservatives target the Rainforest Action Network</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Conservatives_target_the_Dogwood_Alliance" title="Conservatives target the Dogwood Alliance">Conservatives target the Dogwood Alliance</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Conservatives_target_the_Environmental_Working_Group" title="Conservatives target the Environmental Working Group">Conservatives target the Environmental Working Group</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Conservatives_target_the_People_for_the_Ethical_Treatment_of_Animals" title="Conservatives target the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals">Conservatives target the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals</a></li>

</ul>

<h2 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Other SourceWatch resources</h2>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Intimidating_democracy" title="Intimidating democracy">Intimidating democracy</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Intimidating_foundations" title="Intimidating foundations">Intimidating foundations</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Criminalising_civil_disobedience" title="Criminalising civil disobedience">Criminalising civil disobedience</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Trade_Practices_Amendment%28Small_Business_Protection%29_Bill_2007%28Australia%29" title="Trade Practices Amendment (Small Business Protection) Bill 2007 (Australia)">Trade Practices Amendment (Small Business Protection) Bill 2007 (Australia)</a></li>

</ul>

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">External links</h3>

<li>Interview with Bob Burton, June 10, 2004.</li>

<li>Bob Burton, "Calls to Reign in NGOs Dismissed by Critics", Inter-Press Service, April 9, 2004.</li>

<li>Gary Johns and John Roskam, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.facs.gov.au/internet/facsinternet.nsf/aboutfacs/programs/community-managing_relations_with_ngo.htm">The Protocol: Managing Relations with NGOs</a>", Institute of Public Affairs, April 2004.</li>

<li>Michael Marx, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://businessethicsnetwork.org/nl_q1_05_thinking.html">Thinking Like a Network Series: Preparing for the Backlash to Marketplace Campaigns</a>", Business Ethics Network Newsletter, May 2005.</li>

</ul>

</div>

<div id="mw-normal-catlinks" class="mw-normal-catlinks">-----</div><div id="mw-normal-catlinks" class="mw-normal-catlinks">UR AG21?

<h1 id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading">Environmental Conservation Organization</h1>

<div id="jump-to-nav" class="mw-jump">Jump to: <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Environmental_Conservation_Organization#mw-head">navigation</a>, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Environmental_Conservation_Organization#p-search">search</a></div>

Environmental Conservation Organization is a US-based organisation that was "founded in 1988 when 17 national organizations met in Chicago to devise a strategy to protect private property rights from erosion by excessive environmental regulations". <a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://www.eco.freedom.org/whoweare.html">[1]</a>

ECO is a <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/The_U.S._tax_code_and_non_profits" title="The U.S. tax code and non profits">501(C)4</a> not-for-profit organization

<h2>History</h2>

ECO is a conservative western US organization that publishes reports available for subscribing members. On its website it identifies its most popular reports -which reflect its conservative agenda - as:

<dl>

<dd>The Rise of Global Governance: "This report traces the development of global governance from Cecil Rhodes, through the creation and collapse of the League of Nations, through the creation of the Council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations, and all the way, decade by decade, through the rash of Global Conferences that dominated the 1990s. This report is well documented with 103 endnotes."</dd>

</dl>

<dl>

<dd>The Rise of Global Green Religion: "One of our most popular reports traces the creation of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE). Initiated by the Temple of Understanding, through the United Nations, with considerable help from Al Gore and Timothy Wirth, this campaign is reaching 67,000 churches in America, and is heavily influencing both domestic and international environmental policy."</dd>

</dl>

<dl>

<dd>Federal Land-use Control through Ecosystem Management:"In anticipation of ratification of the Convention on Biological Diversity, newly-elected Vice President Al Gore created a White House Task Force on Ecosystem Management. The Task Force coordinated a massive policy change to implement the requirements of the treaty. Those policies are now in force although the treaty was never ratified. This report documents specific policies recommended by various United Nations agencies that are now the policies of the federal government - even though the treaty has not been ratified." <a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://66.218.71.225/search/cache?va=Temple+of+Understanding,+United+Nations&ei=UTF-8&vm=p&n=20&fl=0&xargs=0&b=21&url=bP93bS2I7YsC:www.eco.freedom.org/preview/page3.html">[2]</a></dd>

</dl>

Eco×logic is a publication of the Environmental Conservation Organization

Board of Directors:

<ul>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ronnie_Merritt&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Ronnie Merritt (page does not exist)">Ronnie Merritt</a>, Chairman, Yeso, NM</li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Robert_E._Jones&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Robert E. Jones (page does not exist)">Robert E. Jones</a>, Vice-chairman, Dell City, TX</li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Henry_Lamb" title="Henry Lamb">Henry Lamb</a>, Executive Vice President, Hollow Rock, TN</li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=G.B.Oliver,III&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="G.B. Oliver, III (page does not exist)">G.B. Oliver, III</a>, Alamogordo, NM</li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Junior_Stoots&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Junior Stoots (page does not exist)">Junior Stoots</a>, Alamogordo, NM</li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jonna_Lou_Schafer&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Jonna Lou Schafer (page does not exist)">Jonna Lou Schafer</a>, Dell City, TX</li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jay_Walley&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Jay Walley (page does not exist)">Jay Walley</a>, Executive Director, Lincoln, NM</li>

</ul>

Advisors:

<ul>

<li>Dr. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=John_Cooper&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="John Cooper (page does not exist)">John Cooper</a>, Advisor, Wichita Collegiate School</li>

<li>Dr. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Hugh_W._Ellsaesser" title="Hugh W. Ellsaesser">Hugh Ellsaesser</a>, Advisor, Lawrence Livermore Labs (Ret.)</li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Larry_Pratt&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Larry Pratt (page does not exist)">Larry Pratt</a>, Advisor, Gun Owners of America</li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tom_McDonnell&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Tom McDonnell (page does not exist)">Tom McDonnell</a>, Advisor, American Sheep Industry Association</li>

<li>Dr. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/William_Hazeltine" title="William Hazeltine">William Hazeltine</a>, (Dec.)</li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Nancie_G._Marzulla&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Nancie G. Marzulla (page does not exist)">Nancie G. Marzulla</a>, Advisor, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Defenders_of_Property_Rights" title="Defenders of Property Rights">Defenders of Property Rights</a></li>

<li>Dr. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/S.Fred_Singer" title="S. Fred Singer">S. Fred Singer</a>, Advisor, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Science%26_Environment_Policy_Project&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Science & Environment Policy Project (page does not exist)">Science & Environment Policy Project</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Floy_Lilley&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Floy Lilley (page does not exist)">Floy Lilley</a>, J.D., Advisor, Chair of Free Enterprise, Univ. of Texas</li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Robert_Vicks&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Robert Vicks (page does not exist)">Robert Vicks</a>, (Dec.)</li>

</ul>

<h2>Contact Info</h2>

Environmental Conservation Organization

1200 North White Sands Boulevard #110

Alamogordo, New Mexico 88310

505-434-3195

Tennessee office

731-986-0099

web site: <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.eco.freedom.org">www.eco.freedom.org</a>

</div>

</div>

<h2 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">The Wise Use Movement</h2>

<h3 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Right-Wing Anti-Environmentalism</h3>

by <a href="http://www.publiceye.org/articles/view-selection-author.php?Author=William%20Kevin%20Burke">William Kevin Burke</a>

In the last days of the 1992 presidential campaign, George Bush denounced "environmental extremists" who sought to lock up natural resources and destroy the American way of life. At the heart of this imagined green conspiracy was the "Ozone Man," Senator Al Gore Jr., author of Earth in the Balance. Bush's attack on environmentalism failed to save his candidacy, but it was a high water mark for the political influence of the "Wise Use" movement, a network of loosely allied right-wing grassroots and corporate interest groups dedicated to attacking the environmental movement and promoting unfettered resource exploitation.

New organizing opportunities and media exposure of the movement's less savory connections have caused constant splintering within the movement. At present, the best way to recognize Wise Use groups is by the policies they support. Therefore, Wise Use will be used here to describe all organizations that promote the core Wise Use agenda: removing present environmental protections and preventing future environmental reforms in order to benefit the economic interests of the organization's members or funders.

Five years ago Wise Use was just the latest fundraising concept of two political entrepreneurs: Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb. Arnold once worked for the Sierra Club in Washington State. He has told reporters that he helped organize teaching expeditions to areas that became the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area. Alan Gottlieb is a professional fundraiser who has generated millions for various right-wing causes.

Wise Use groups are often funded by timber, mining, and chemical companies. In return, they claim, loudly, that the well-documented hole in the ozone layer doesn't exist, that carcinogenic chemicals in the air and water don't harm anyone, and that trees won't grow properly unless forests are clear-cut, with government subsidies. Wise Use proponents were buffeted by Bush's defeat and by media exposure of the movement's founders' connections to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church network (tainted by charges of cultism and theocratic neo-fascism), but the movement has quickly rebounded. In every state of the US, relentless Wise Use disinformation campaigns about the purpose and meaning of environmental laws are building a grassroots constituency. To Wise Users, environmentalists are pagans, eco-nazis, and communists who must be fought with shouts and threats.

Environmentalists often point to public opinion polls that show most Americans are willing to sacrifice some short-term economic gains to preserve nature. But the Wise Use movement is eroding the environmental consensus that dominated American politics from the Greenhouse Summer of 1988 until shortly after the media overload that greeted Earth Day 1990.

The term "Wise Use" was appropriated from the moderate conservationist tradition by movement founder Ron Arnold. In 1910, Gifford Pinchot, first head of the US Forest Service, called for national forestry policies based on the wise use of America's trees and minerals. That triggered a simmering feud between Pinchot and Sierra Club founder John Muir. Muir wanted to see wilderness valued for its own sake, as the spiritual center of the world. In theory, the current US system of combining national forests managed for resource extraction with wilderness areas managed for recreation is a compromise solution to this debate.

But Ron Arnold did not pick the term Wise Use because of an affinity to the moderate conservationism of Pinchot. In 1991, he told Outside magazine that he chose the phrase Wise Use because it was ambiguous and fit neatly in newspaper headlines. Such duplicitous and opportunistic tactics are a trademark of the Wise Use movement. "Facts don't matter; in politics perception is reality," Arnold told Outside.

For a number of years, Arnold was a registered agent for the American Freedom Coalition, a political offshoot of Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. The American Freedom Coalition takes credit for funding the first Wise Use conference in 1988. Aside from telling Outside he is willing to ignore facts to achieve his goals, Arnold proclaims at every opportunity that his mission is to destroy the environmental movement. "We're mad as hell. We're dead serious. We're going to destroy them," he told the Portland Oregonian. In the spring of 1995, Arnold told a Vermont audience that Wise Users do not want to negotiate with environmentalists.

Ron Arnold's big career break coincided with the coming of the Reagan presidency and Arnold's own rapid swing to the right. In 1981, he co-authored At the Eye of the Storm, a flattering biography of James Watt that the former Secretary of the Interior helped edit. Watt's attempts to dismantle environmental regulation and open federal lands to logging and mining produced short-term gains for corporate interests, but the long-term result of such policies was public revulsion and the explosive growth of the environmental movement during the 1980s.

Arnold's movement-building was enhanced when he joined forces with Alan Gottlieb. Gottlieb's Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise (CDFE) reportedly takes in about $5 million per year through direct mail and telephone fundraising for a variety of right-wing causes. Gottlieb seems to possess a genius for dancing along the edge of legal business practices. He purchased the building that houses CDFE's headquarters with money from two of his own non-profit foundations, then transferred the building's title to his own name so he could charge his foundations over $8,000 per month in rent. Gottlieb also spent seven months in prison for tax evasion.

In 1988, Gottlieb published Ron Arnold's book, The Wise Use Agenda, which outlines their movement's goals and aims. Few environmentalists would find fault with the spirit behind this quote from The Wise Use Agenda: "[Wise Use's] founders [feel] that industrial development can be directed in ways that enhance the Earth, not destroy it." But the Agenda itself is basically a wish list for the resource extraction industries. The Wise Use movement seeks to open all federal lands to logging, mining, and the driving of off-road vehicles. Despite much rhetoric about seeking ecological balance and environmental solutions, almost the only environmental problem The Wise Use Agenda addresses rather than dismisses is the threat of global warming from the build-up of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. The solution proposed is the immediate clear-cutting of the small portion of old growth timber left in the United States so that these forests can be replanted with young trees that will absorb more carbon dioxide.

Although the science cited by Wise Use sources is suspect, and their arguments are mostly retreads of corporate press releases, today nearly everyone on the right wants a piece of the Wise Use movement. Rush Limbaugh, Lyndon LaRouche, the National Farm Bureau Federation, and dozens of other organizations and public figures are adopting their own versions of Wise Use rhetoric.

Much of this popularity can be explained by the lingering economic recession of the early 1980s, which provided a receptive grassroots audience for the Wise Use claim that it is easier to force nature to adapt to current corporate policies than to encourage the growth of more environmentally sound ways of doing business. Wise Use pamphlets argue that extinction is a natural process; some species weren't meant to survive. The movement's signature public relations tactic is to frame complex environmental and economic issues in simple, scapegoating terms that benefit its corporate backers. In the movement's Pacific Northwest birthplace, Wise Users harp on a supposed battle for survival between spotted owls and the families of the men and women who make their livings harvesting and milling the old growth timber that is the owl's habitat. In preparation for President Clinton's forest summit in Portland, Oregon, Wise Use public relations experts ran seminars to teach loggers how to speak in sound bites. Messages such as "jobs versus owls" have been adapted to a variety of environmental issues and have helped spark an anti-green backlash that has defeated river protection efforts and threatens to open millions of acres of wilderness to resource extraction.

While attacking environmentalists, Wise Use statements borrow heavily from environmental rhetoric; this borrowed rhetoric often cloaks a self-serving economic agenda. The Oregon Lands Coalition in effect supports the timber industry by arguing that only people who cut down trees really love the wilderness. At the same time, the Wise Use movement opposes environmentalist efforts to find new careers for unemployed loggers who could be hired to begin restoring the stream beds ravaged by clear-cutting of forests.

Similarly, National Farm Bureau Federation publications repeatedly argue that farmers are the true stewards of the land. But the Farm Bureau lobbies for fewer restrictions on pesticide use and for the clearing of wetlands--not for government support for the alternative farming practices that the National Research Council's 1989 book, Alternative Agriculture, showed can reduce farming's impact on the environment while improving farmers' net incomes.

Both the National Farm Bureau Federation and the Oregon Lands Coalition later disavowed any association with Alan Gottlieb's Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise and the term Wise Use. Groups that portray themselves as moderate Wise Users, like the Farm Bureau and Alliance for America, now describe their approach with substitute terms like "multiple use," while still employing Ron Arnold's tactics and inviting him to speak at Wise Use conferences. This distancing is apparently due to Arnold's willingness to make extreme statements to the press and the baggage of his association with Rev. Moon's Unification Church.

"It shouldn't be surprising that there are these terminology wars, given that so much of this movement is about manipulating language and manipulating people's understanding of concepts like environmentalism," according to Tarso Ramos, who monitors Wise Use activity for the Western States Center in Portland, Oregon.

In fact, the Wise Use movement resorts to a bewildering range of subterfuges to mask its agenda. For instance, the developer-funded Environmental Conservation Organization and its member organization, the National Wetlands Coalition, want to make it easier for their funders to drain wetlands to build malls. To that end, Champion Paper and MCI fund the Evergreen Foundation, which spreads the word that forests need only clear-cutting and healthy doses of pesticides to become places of "beauty, peace and mystery."

In a similar example, the Sea Lion Defense Fund is the Alaska fishing industry's legal arm in its fight against government limits on harvests of pollock, one of the endangered sea lion's favorite foods. Oregonians for Food and Shelter and Vermont's Citizens for Property Rights cultivate a folksy grassroots image while promoting the agendas of developers or extractive industries. This was a tactic first advocated by Ron Arnold in a series of articles he wrote for Timber Management magazine in the early 1980s.

<h4 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Alliance for America</h4>

Since the first corporate check arrived, the Wise Use movement has been split by debates over who will control organizing strategy and funds. "[Wise Use] is not a disciplined ideological coalition. It is a multifaceted movement. There are factions within it. They fight. The objectives of various players are very different. Coalitions can be tenuous, but they are very effective," says Tarso Ramos. The Oregon Lands Coalition (OLC) is dominated by timber interests but also includes the National Farm Bureau Federation, pro-pesticide groups, and land-use planning activists representing developers.

In 1991, the OLC became a national organization by creating the Alliance for America. The Alliance's stated purpose is to "put people back in the environmental equation." The means to this end is to enlist grassroots groups in each state to fight environmentalists on a wide variety of issues. In 1991 and 1992, the Alliance staged "Fly-ins for Freedom" that brought supporters to Washington, DC, to lobby on behalf of logging, mining, and ranching interests.

From its founding, the Alliance for America's purpose was to unify grassroots anti-environmentalist organizations in all 50 states. In the western states, where the movement was born, the Wise Users tend to be freedom-loving, right-wing libertarians, yet they spend much of their time and energy working to protect government subsidies for ranchers, miners, and loggers.

A well-worn joke describes the typical westerner's attitude toward the federal government as "go away and give me more money." Groups like the Oregon Lands Coalition and People for the West strive to preserve government privileges, such as below-cost sales of timber from federal lands and the 1872 mining law that lets mining companies lease government mineral rights for as little as $2.50.

A more subtle approach was required to build support for Wise Use groups in eastern states, where the Wise Use movement's natural audience, primarily rural landowners, was not so accustomed to government largesse. The Alliance for America quickly found a slogan for its efforts to organize east of the Mississippi: private property rights.

<h4 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">The Theme of Private Property Rights</h4>

The Wise Use movement argues that regulations protecting environmentally sensitive areas on private property are unconstitutional "takings." They cite the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which states in part: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." That clause is the basis for the concept of eminent domain, which allows government entities to take land for public projects by paying property owners the land's fair market value.

Across the nation, the Wise Use movement is backing state legislation seeking to expand the legal concept of what constitutes a "government taking" to include all situations where possible profits from developing, mining, or logging private lands are limited by environmental regulations. The movement argues that if a regulatory agency wants to protect a wetland, for example, the agency must pay the wetlands owner what he or she might have made if the wetlands were drained in order to become a buildable site.

The private property rights strategy may prove Wise Use's best weapon. Despite their ability to draw attention and corporate money, western Wise Use organizations will remain vulnerable to negative press coverage because they are so often arguing for more government handouts for their corporate backers. But the call to protect private property rights from "government land grabs" or "unconstitutional takings" appeals strongly to rural landowners and small businesspeople, sectors of society that fear economic change and heavy-handed environmental reforms. "As an organizing strategy, takings is a kind of deviant genius," says Tarso Ramos. "It automatically puts environmentalists in the position of defending the federal government and appeals to anyone who has ever had any kind of negative experience with the federal government, which is a hell of a lot of people."

By the end of 1992, private property rights advocates had introduced legislation expanding the definition of takings in 27 states. If passed, these bills would rule that government regulatory actions, such as wetlands protection or even zoning restrictions, are "takings," and require that landowners be paid for the potential value of the land they lost due to government actions. A single lost takings case could bankrupt most state regulatory agencies. The takings movement would, if successful, effectively end environmental protection in the US. The only federal legal test of takings was Lucas v. South Carolina. Lucas, a developer, sued the state for the lost value of homes he had planned to build on land that South Carolina subsequently declared sensitive coastal habitat. The 1992 US Supreme Court ruling on the case is often trumpeted as a takings triumph by Wise Users, but was actually a split decision requiring that South Carolina prove the homes would have constituted a public nuisance before enforcing the regulation protecting the sea coast.

In Vermont, a failed takings law was nicknamed the "pout and pay" bill. Opponents argued that the bill would have encouraged owners of low-value properties to imagine fantastic development schemes that conflicted with zoning restrictions or wetlands protection, then present the federal government with the bill.

After a bitter legislative battle, Arizona Governor Fife Symington signed a takings bill into law in June 1992. Delaware also passed a takings bill in 1992. In 1993, Utah passed a takings bill. In Idaho and Wyoming, takings bills passed the state legislatures, but were vetoed by the governors of each state on the grounds that the laws would create unnecessary bureaucracy. Similar bills are pending in a number of states across the country.

It is at the grassroots, city, town, and county level in rural areas that the Wise Use movement has been most effective. State-level takings laws fare better than efforts to convince the federal government it has no right to regulate land use. American industry has never dared advocate total war on the environment, even if the argument can be made that at times standard industry practices have fit that description. But grassroots Wise Users are proving effective shock troops, using tactics inspired by Ron Arnold to reverse decades of environmental compromise and negotiation in a few months.

The private property rights call was first sounded in the Northeast by the John Birch Society. In 1990-91, John Birch Society members helped turn out hundreds of people to protest the Northern Forest Lands study, a joint effort by the federal government and the governments of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine to plan for the future of the vast woodland known as the Big North.

Now, New England's private property rights movement has outgrown its John Birch Society origins. Wise Use groups in every New England state have affiliated with the Alliance for America. In Vermont, Citizens for Property Rights has assembled a coalition of developers and far right politicians to crusade for the repeal of the state's progressive land-use laws. The Maine Conservation Rights Institute, based in the state's far northeast (a stronghold of Christian fundamentalism), promotes a typical Wise Use agenda, opposing wetlands and forest protection under the guise of conservation.

A western Massachusetts Wise Use group called Friends of the Rivers (FOR) blocked a US Park Service plan to designate the upper reaches of the Farmington River a federally protected "wild and scenic" river. With assistance from Alliance for America, FOR spread disinformation on the effects of wild and scenic designation. Its literature predicted businesses being forced to close, property values plummeting, and riverbank homes being taken by the government.

Friends of the Rivers' most vocal ally was Don Rupp, who is affiliated with Alliance for America. Rupp previously had led an unsuccessful struggle against wild and scenic designation of the Upper Delaware river in New York. Along the Delaware, Rupp warned of dire effects from wild and scenic designation that were virtually identical to the claims that appeared in Friends of the Rivers' literature. But no homes have been taken or landowners forced to move from Rupp's home territory. And after the Park Service stepped in to provide protection to the river property, land values along the Upper Delaware rose.

Friends of the Rivers' leaders included the Campetti family, owners of an oil distributor and off-road vehicle dealership, and Francis Deming, who operates his 100-acre property as a pay-as-you-go dumpsite. But despite this evident self-serving interest, FOR's claims frightened enough Massachusetts residents to cause three towns to vote against the wild and scenic designation of the Upper Farmington. FOR displayed posters claiming local wild and scenic supporter Bob Tarasuk was a paid government agent. Tarasuk had once spent a summer working for the Bureau of Land Management; he reports that harassing phone calls from opponents of wild and scenic designation eventually forced him to get an unlisted telephone number.

"There is no better tactic than to threaten someone's land. Get someone who lives on their land and that's all they have and then tell them that the government is coming to take it. Fear works. The Alliance for America knows this and I believe they coach [local groups]," Tarasuk said. "Your land has been stolen," read an FOR flier distributed along the Farmington.

In Connecticut, along the lower reaches of the Farmington River, a local river protection group called the Farmington River Watershed Association defeated FOR's efforts to prevent wild and scenic designation. Drawing on its strong local base, the Watershed Association (founded in 1953) rallied local citizens to support wild and scenic designation. Don Rupp's efforts to spread fearful tales about the Park Service were blunted by the fact that the city of Hartford has flooded several branches of the lower Farmington to create reservoirs. Connecticut residents saw wild and scenic designation as Federal protection from future dam projects.

The battle over New England's rivers reached a climax in March 1993, when the New Hampshire Landholders Alliance, an affiliate of the Alliance for America, convinced six of seven New Hampshire towns along the Pemigewasset River to vote against the river's proposed wild and scenic designation. Patricia Schlesinger of the Pemi River Council said that only 15 percent of the registered voters in the seven towns took part in the town meetings that decided the river's fate. "People felt intimidated and abused by fear-mongering and deceit. It was canned stuff, claims that the 'feds are going to take your land.' It was typical Wise Use tactics."

The founders of the New Hampshire Landholders Alliance, Cheryl and Don Johnson, have a profit motive to fight wild and scenic designation along the Pemi. Don Johnson works for Ed Clark, a local businessman who has unsuccessfully sought to build a small hydroelectric dam at a scenic area called Livermore Falls--a project that would be prohibited if wild and scenic status were secured. As a result of the defeat of the wild and scenic plan, the state of New Hampshire will lose $450,000 in federal aid to develop a park at Livermore Falls.

<h4 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Free Market Environmentalism</h4>

Environmentalists are conditioned by decades of using legislative processes to battle industry over the scale of development and resource exploitation in natural areas. But Wise Users don't contest the scope of environmental protection; they wage war on the notion that any ecological problems exist that cannot be solved by reliance on the free market. David Gurnsey, Maine Conservation Rights Institute's representative to the Northern Forest Lands Advisory Committee, did not criticize the conclusions of the Committee's biodiversity study--he claimed the whole concept of preserving biodiversity was a veiled effort to take land from private owners.

Wise Users often call environmentalists "watermelons": green on the outside, but red to the core. This association of environmentalists with the specter of communism is not mere grassroots name-calling. Corporate-funded, rightist libertarian think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation publish analysis and research supporting the Wise Use claim that green politics are the last vestige of communism's collectivist, One World Government plot to subjugate the planet. In its most extreme forms, this logic surfaces in the claim of Lyndon LaRouche's followers that Greenpeace's activists are eco-terrorists and pawns of the KGB. The Greenpeace-KGB connection, first trumpeted in LaRouche publications, resurfaced in the writings of Kathleen Marquardt, founder of Putting People First and winner of the Best Newcomer Award at the June 1992 Wise Use Leadership Conference .

In some respects, however, free market environmentalism as advocated by Cato's director of Natural Resource Studies, Jerry Taylor, or Reason Magazine editor, Virginia I. Postrel, has more merit than many environmentalists want to admit. For example, the biggest source of water pollution in America today is municipal wastewater facilities built with federal assistance. It was only after the end of federal subsidies for wastewater treatment that alternative clean-up methods like engineered wetlands were able to win out over traditional wastewater plants in many areas. But the Wise Use movement is not seeking to open opportunities for small businesses to profit while healing the planet. They want to dismantle government environmental protection while removing restrictions on industrial exploitation.

At the grassroots level, the Wise Users are taking on many of the typical characteristics of demagogic, paranoid right-wing movements, portraying environmentalists as in league with the federal government to destroy families. In Vermont, Citizens for Property Rights decorated a rally with effigies of their opponents dangling from nooses. Massachusetts' Friends of the Rivers claimed that environmental groups had paid off legislators to support wild and scenic designation of the Farmington River. In New Hampshire, opponents of grassroots Wise Users along the Pemigewassett River received threatening phone calls.

<h4 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Wise Use and the Right Wing</h4>

By 1993, the Wise Use movement had begun forming its first links with anti-gay activists and the Religious Right. In his report, God, Land and Politics, Dave Mazza of the Western States Center traced the growing association of two grassroots movements in Oregon. "Oregon's electoral process has seen the Wise Use Movement and the Religious Right movement coming together in a number of ways, intentionally or unintentionally pushing forward a much broader conservative social or economic agenda," Mazza concluded.

The Oregon Citizens' Alliance, which achieved a small measure of national fame by its advocacy of a state referendum effectively legalizing discrimination against gays and lesbians (Measure 9), is trying to climb on the state's crowded Wise Use bandwagon by sponsoring an initiative undermining Oregon's land-use planning laws. As the Wise Use movement continues to spread, it is becoming both more vociferous and sophisticated. The leaders of the Wise Use movement have demonstrated that they would rather intimidate environmentalists than negotiate compromises between economic and environmental interests. In practice, Wise Use is proving to be a slick new name for some of democracy's oldest enemies.

William Kevin Burke has written extensively about environmental issues. This article appeared in the June 1993 issue of The Public Eye. © 1995, William Kevin Burke.

===

It's too soon to say that southern Utah's bitter culture wars -- Old West versus New West, Sagebrush Rebels versus Enviro Warriors and Puppy Savers -- are over. But a kind of détente appears to be emerging.

About 63 percent of Utah's land belongs to the federal government -- the second- or third-highest percentage among all the states. In Kane County, the feds own about 83 percent.

And backcountry driving on that federal land is soaring. The number of all-terrain vehicles in Utah (also known as off-road vehicles, or ORVs, and including motorcycles and dune buggies) has more than tripled since 1998, amounting to nearly 180,000 today. Kane County residents are even more likely to own an ATV than the average Utahn, according to a survey by Utah State University, and ATVers usually recreate on federal land.

Those are some of the reasons why, in May 2009, people on 300-plus ATVs poured into the wide canyon of the Paria River, 40 miles east of Kanab and inside the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. In a protest organized by the local Tea Party enclave, the UT/AZ (that's "oo-taz") Patriots, they revved up and drove in the riverbed, disobeying a U.S. Bureau of Land Management policy that prohibits motorized recreation in the canyon.

According to many of the protesters, the route dates back more than a century, to when Mormon pioneers established a town in the canyon. They see it as a scenic way past the remnants of the settlement and an old movie set, north to some surviving small towns. "In the summertime, it's a great ride. You splash through like little kids," says Ray Wells, president of the Utah/Arizona ATV Club, who lives in Kanab and participated in the protest. "You ride in the river bottom most of the time, and you probably cross (the river) a couple of hundred times up and back, so any tracks that may ever be there, every time there's a flood, which is multiple times a year, they're gone."

The BLM tried to halt off-road traffic in the canyon and elsewhere in its first travel-management plan for the monument in 2000. Kane County sued, but an appeals court upheld the travel plan in 2009. Portions of the canyon pass through a wilderness study area and critical habitat for Mexican spotted owls. Other reaches don't meet state water-quality standards due to natural salinity, and a state report suggests continued traffic would further degrade water quality.

Wells and other off-road drivers view the BLM's closure of the Paria Canyon route as a test case, since it's a popular and highly visible trail with a history of use. Kane County's government -- and Utah's state government -- argue that the trail belongs to the county under Revised Statute 2477, a rule tucked inside the 1866 Lode Mining Act, which granted rights of way to counties and states "for the construction of highways over public lands, not reserved for public uses." The rule was originally intended to encourage the development and mineral exploration of the Western frontier, but the modern Sagebrush Rebellion has made it notorious.

The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 prohibited new RS 2477 roads, in order to preserve remaining wild landscapes, while allowing counties or states to make claims to older roads if they could prove continuous use. Since then, D.C. policy-makers have batted around interpretations of the law. When the Sagebrush Rebellion ignited in the 1980s -- in support of resource extraction and local control of public lands -- President Ronald Reagan's Interior Department loosely construed RS 2477 to allow primitive trails to be claimed as county rights of way. In the '90s, President Clinton's Interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, who was instrumental in the creation of Grand Staircase-Escalante and 15 other national monuments, leaned the other way, imposing a moratorium on processing almost all RS 2477 claims.

If counties and states can claim ownership, they can set rules about access. And the implications are even wider: Roads in rural areas impede the designation of new wilderness areas, which prohibit motorized travel and most resource development.

"I think the RS 2477 issue is really a stand-in for every other federal public-land issue," says Heidi McIntosh, associate director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), which has battled Kane County in court over roads issues. "It's not really about roads, and it's not really about transportation, because the RS 2477s that are controversial are the dirt two-tracks and trails that are dangerous to drive and lead nowhere."

But ATVers enjoy navigating those risky routes to nowhere. Many southern Utahns already blamed the federal government for the shutdown of uranium mines and timber operations. Clinton simply ignited more anger by creating the monument, and some key local leaders fanned the flames.

Mike Noel, a native Utahn who holds a bachelor's degree in zoology and a master's in plant ecology, has lived in the Kanab area for more than 30 years. He's been a Mormon bishop, a basketball coach and a Boy Scout leader, and has run a small cattle ranch, a local restaurant and the local water conservancy district. He has relatives who died of cancer linked to fallout from atomic bomb tests in Nevada, and he's advocated for more benefits for such "downwinders." He was doing environmental impact analyses for the BLM when the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument was created. Noel resented the fact that the feds hadn't consulted with local officials; he also objected to the monument's prohibition of a big coal mine proposed for the Kaiparowits Plateau. He quit his BLM job and channeled his anger into activism in the late 1990s, organizing local chapters of People for the USA, a grassroots group that became one of the loudest mouthpieces of the Sagebrush Rebellion.=recovered from margin:SWctchThe so-called "Wise Use" movement is an <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Front_group" class="mw-redirect" title="Front group">industry-front</a> and anti-environmentalist organization founded by<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold" title="Ron Arnold">Ron Arnold</a> in the late 1980s, primarily dealing with timber and mining issues in the western US. It inspired a number of spin-off groups, including the "<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Share&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Share (page does not exist)">Share</a>" groups in the Canadian province of British Columbia (B.C.), which give the appearance of being grass-roots community organizations, but are in fact organized and funded by major corporations. (For example, the "<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=B.C._Forest_Alliance&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="B.C. Forest Alliance (page does not exist)">B.C. Forest Alliance</a>" was chaired for its initial period by an executive of <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Burson-Marsteller" title="Burson-Marsteller">Burson-Marsteller</a>.) This type of "fake grass-roots" group led to their description of the advocacy as being an <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Astroturf" title="Astroturf">astroturf</a> campaign. "Wise Use groups are often funded by timber, mining, and chemical companies. In return, they claim, loudly, that the well-documented hole in the ozone layer doesn't exist, that carcinogenic chemicals in the air and water don't harm anyone, and that trees won't grow properly unless forests are clear-cut, with government subsidies. Wise Use proponents were buffeted by Bush's defeat and by media exposure of the movement's founders' connections to the Rev. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Sun_Myung_Moon" title="Sun Myung Moon">Sun Myung Moon</a>'s <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Unification_Church" title="Unification Church">Unification Church</a> network (tainted by charges of cultism and theocratic neo-fascism), but the movement has quickly rebounded. In every state of the US, relentless Wise Use disinformation campaigns about the purpose and meaning of environmental laws are building a grassroots constituency. To Wise Users, environmentalists are pagans, eco-nazis, and communists who must be fought with shouts and threats."<a href="http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v07n2/wiseuse.html" class="external autonumber" title="http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v07n2/wiseuse.html" rel="nofollow">[1]</a><table class="toc" id="toc" summary="Contents" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><tbody><tr><td><div id="toctitle"><h2>Contents</h2></div><ul><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wise_Use_Movement#Case_studies">1 Case studies</a></li><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wise_Use_Movement#Other_SourceWatch_resources">2 Other SourceWatch resources</a></li><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wise_Use_Movement#Books_about_the_Wise_Use_movement">3 Books about the Wise Use movement</a></li><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wise_Use_Movement#External_links">4 External links</a></li></ul></td></tr></tbody></table><a id="Case_studies" name="Case_studies"> </a><h2 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Case studies</h2><ul style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wise_Use_Movement/Behind_the_Wise_Use_Movement%27s_victory_in_Klamath" title="Wise Use Movement/Behind the Wise Use Movement's victory in Klamath">Wise Use Movement/Behind the Wise Use Movement's victory in Klamath</a></li></ul>http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wise_Use_Movement/Behind_the_Wise_Use_Movement%27s_victory_in_Klamath<ul style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=The_Militia_Movement_and_Klamath_Falls" title="The Militia Movement and Klamath Falls">The Militia Movement and Klamath Falls</a></li></ul><a id="Other_SourceWatch_resources" name="Other_SourceWatch_resources"> </a><h2 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Other SourceWatch resources</h2><ul style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/upload/6/6c/WiseUse93.pdf" class="external text" title="http://www.SourceWatch.org/upload/6/6c/WiseUse93.pdf" rel="nofollow">1993 Wise Use Leadership conference agenda - download 140k file</a></li></ul><a id="Books_about_the_Wise_Use_movement" name="Books_about_the_Wise_Use_movement"> </a><h2 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Books about the Wise Use movement</h2><ul style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><li>David Helvarg, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1555663281/qid=1082395310/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-7528106-2029765?v=glance&s=books" class="external text" title="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1555663281/qid=1082395310/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-7528106-2029765?v=glance&s=books" rel="nofollow">The War Against the Greens: The "Wise-Use" Movement, the New Right, and the Browning of America</a>, Sierra Club Books, First edition 1994. Second edition 1998.<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-War-Against-Greens-Wise-Use/dp/1555663281#reader_1555663281">http://www.amazon.com/The-War-Against-Greens-Wise-Use/dp/1555663281#reader_1555663281</a></li></ul><a id="External_links" name="External_links"> </a>An excerpt from The War Against the Greens takes a hard look at the Wise Use movement By David Helvarg The War Against theGreens, by David Helvarg,Johnson Books, 384 pgs.,2004 revised edition. In 1988, the Wise Use movement was founded out of fear that George Bush Sr. was going to live up to his campaign pledge to be “the environmental president.” This cabal of anti-environmental activists, organized by federally subsidized industries dependent on public lands, issued a natal document, the Wise Use Agenda. It called for, among other things: drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, logging Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, opening wilderness to energy development, gutting the Endangered Species Act, and privatizing national parks. Today, the reactionary Wise Use Agenda has become the environmental policy of the administration of George Bush Jr. One of Wise Use’s major contributions to politics has been its deliberate distortion of language, the adaptation of green-sounding names as industry camouflage: the Environmental Conservation Organization (wetlands developers), Concerned Alaskans for Resources and the Environment (the timber industry), and the Greening Earth Society (coal-fired utilities arguing the benefits of global warming). Today, the administration’s anti-environmental legislation goes by names like “Healthy Forests” and “Clear Skies,” while a combination of industry lobbyists and true believers argue that the same unfettered markets that gave us choking smog and burning rivers in the past have been transformed into the “new environmentalism” of the 21st century. I recently read a government energy report that talked of “the sustainable use of non-renewable resources,” and attended a Boston conference where I met consultants who help developers deal with “environmentally challenged sites.” Translation: wild places containing rare and endangered species or legally protected wetlands. Early in the Bush-Cheney administration, the vice president argued that though conservation might be a “personal virtue,” it is not “a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy” (which, of course, no one had argued that conservation alone was). The White House energy plan did offer a billion dollars to develop renewable power sources, but only if the money came from revenues generated by drilling the Arctic Refuge. That sounded like a gleeful spin on the Wise Use agenda, more red meat for the far right’s political base. By 2004, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham was promoting development of hydrogen fuel-cell technology. The administration plan differed markedly from a plan being promoted by the European Union. While the Europeans envision hydrogen fuel-cell storage systems built on renewable energy sources like wind and solar, the Bush plan calls for the hydrogen to be generated by nuclear and coal-fired power plants. The difference, of course, is whether you see hydrogen fuel cells as part of a necessary transition strategy out of a carbon-based economy or merely as a neat new technology for charging up your SUV. In the immediate wake of 9/11, the American public appeared ready to make sacrifices and embrace change as they reconsidered their obligations as citizens of a democracy. Instead, the president went on TV and suggested we go shopping. While a few politicians like Sen. John Kerry and media outlets like USA Today argued it was time to move beyond oil and the corrupt terror regimes that produce it, major environmental organizations scrambled to avoid any negative references to the commander in chief. Partly as a result of this timidity, the critical mass needed to mobilize the public failed to materialize. Seeing themselves as hard-headed pragmatists, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their neo-conservative friends Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pearle, and Paul Wolfowitz believe we really don’t need to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels from repressive and unstable regimes like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Rather, we need “unilateral” policies to secure and supplement these supplies, even if that means the military occupation of Iraq and industrialization of America’s last wild lands and waters. In the face of a scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is real and under way and will result in up to a 10 degree Fahrenheit warming and a two- to three-foot sea-level rise by the end of this century, the administration continues to follow the Wise Use path of denial and denigration. They insist that creating incentives to reduce greenhouse pollution (as Europe has done) would severely damage the U.S. economy. You can almost hear the whaling barons of the 19th century arguing that the end of whaling will mark the end of mechanization as industry’s whale-oil lubricated machines grind to a halt. Of course, the introduction of “rock oil” or petroleum actually resulted in the unprecedented growth of the U.S. economy, just as the introduction of renewable-energy technologies is likely to lead to a global expansion of entrepreneurial innovation, competition, and enterprise. Just before the turn of the 21st century, I visited a couple of deep-drilling oil rigs far out in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a loud, thrilling experience watching the platforms’ roughnecks and roustabouts pulling energy from far below the earth and the deep blue sea. It was the kind of heroic but dated scene you might have encountered had you boarded one of the last wooden whaling ships at the turn of the 20th century. The future of energy production —or not? Unfortunately, by favoring their own outmoded petroleum industry, George Bush and Dick Cheney may be undermining America’s competitive position in the world. Today, European energy companies like Shell and BP are investing billions in new energy technologies. Shell believes that solar and other renewables will constitute a third of all new energy production by 2050, while BP’s CEO thinks that year will see 50 percent of global energy demand met by non-carbon renewables. Even if there are short-term costs and dislocations associated with a rapid energy transition, every decade of delay is certain to multiply other economic and human costs. A recent United Nations “CEO Briefing” prepared by Munich Re, a major European reinsurance company, estimates that worldwide insurance losses from severe weather linked to climate change are now running at $150 billion a year and will soon double. Meanwhile, the U.N. World Health Organization estimates that 150,000 people died as the direct result of climate change in 2000. I’ve seen and reported on dramatic climate impacts already taking place, from the Antarctic Peninsula to the coral reefs of Florida, Fiji, and Australia. As climate change alters and damages unique habitats and the species that depend on them, it becomes ever more important that we conserve and protect what’s left, and that we fully value the economic, social, and spiritual worth of our last wild places. A wetland that’s not filled in for a shopping center or damaged by water diversions can, for example, recharge a local aquifer in times of drought. It can provide habitat for wildlife and recreation, act as a nursery for marine fisheries, filter pollution, and inspire diverse human cultures, ranging from the Cajun of Louisiana to the “Swamp Arabs” of southern Iraq. What Wise Users fail to understand is that saving wilderness, whole and undivided, is really about saving ourselves. Only a radical reorganization of the way we see ourselves and our role in the natural world can help turn this backlash around. We need to begin a rapid transition from oil and gas to sun, wind, tides, geothermal, and hydrogen energy. We need to revitalize our urban centers and our sense of community while protecting agricultural lands and greenbelts. Even onetime property-rights strongholds like Boise, Idaho, are now recognizing this by voting for growth limits and open-space protections. We need to strengthen the Endangered Species Act to protect our fellow creatures long before they reach a critical state and to ensure we maintain the full diversity and promise of life on our blue-marble planet. We need to establish global standards for the environment, labor, and human rights at least as strong as those for global trade and banking. Although it’s no guarantee in and of itself, I’ve seen how democratic change can inspire (and be inspired by) ecological movements in places ranging from Poland to Korea and from Bolivia to Mexico and Chile. Ironically, it’s the undermining of democracy in America by a lobbying and election finance system indistinguishable from brown-bag bribery that now poses the greatest environmental threat to our future. We live in a time when too many politicians and business leaders no longer fear being caught in a conflict of interest because they’ve moved beyond a sense of shame. Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. We need the tonic of wilderness.” As a dedicated diver and bodysurfer, I would add only that heaven is also under our flippers. Whenever the forces of heedless industrial sprawl seem overwhelming, a hike around Point Reyes or a bodysurfing session in the wild waters off Northern California refreshes my spirit. It’s an ice-cold tonic. All I have to do is imagine the noise, traffic, and congestion that aren’t there thanks to the efforts of all those dedicated citizens who came before. Wilderness lands and waters, from New Jersey’s damaged Meadowlands to Alaska’s rugged coastal plains, can revive us and endure with us, but only if we choose to stay engaged in the increasingly politicized struggle necessary to protect them. Our choice lies either in surrender to the nihilistic backlash that says, “Take what you can get while you can get it,” or in our rededication to a faith that says we can still leave our kids and future generations a good life in a good land. The outcome hangs upon the understanding, heart, and will of the American people. It’s a thin reed of hope, especially in the wake of the 2004 election. Still, it’s worked so far. ---"Far fewer than a hundred thousand" Americans, Helvarg maintains, contribute to or actively participate in antienvironmental groups, yet the Wise Use/Property Rights philosophy these groups espouse has encouraged, if not caused, a "startling increase in intimidation, vandalism, and violence directed against grassroots environmental activists." Helvarg traces historical American attitudes toward the environment and the development, during the Reagan-Bush years, of the Wise Use Movement. He spells out the role in that movement of timber, mining, and grazing interests in the West and land developers in the East, and the Beltway contributions of free-market think tanks, New Right lobbyists, industry-front groups, and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. The success of this antienvironmental backlash in achieving media credibility and its legal tactics--SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation)--and theories (especiallyRichard Epstein's "takings" doctrine) are among Helvarg's more interesting subjects. His most sensational stories, however, give specifics on the harassment of and the violence against green activists around the country and the sorry tale of the FBI's simultaneous fantasizing about "ecoterrorism" and their reluctance to pursue antienvironmental violence. This is a revealing investigation of the people and the ideas at the heart of the numerically weak but politically strong Wise Use/Property Rights Movement. ch 10 on militias; noose for auobon woman testify at cty mtg; militias in 94 but not in news till okla coty in 95; big overlap w/ Wise use.  Joint US Cdn park New world Order plot<h2 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">External links</h2><ul style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><li>David Lavigne, The return of Big Brother, BBC Wildlife, May 2004, pages 70-72. (Not currently available online).</li></ul>

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