Washington's environmental community was the first to notice the
amendment and sound the alarm. Staffers at
Earthworks, the
Wilderness
Society, and other green advocacy groups identified lands in the
crosshairs and called allies in the Senate, where the measure could
still be defeated. It didn't take much prodding before western Democrats
were united against the provision. But to stop the land sales,
Republican senators would also need to speak out. That was a harder
sell. Many conservatives accept large campaign contributions from
mining, oil, and gas companies, and they tend to favor more
industry access to public lands and resources. In addition, western
Republicans don't take advice from national environmental groups, whose
members tend to be urban and suburban liberals--not exactly their
voters.
But there are outdoor organizations whose members include voters who
can draw conservatives' attention. After an Earthworks staffer tipped
off a counterpart at
Trout Unlimited, the sportsmen's group (whose
membership is two to one Republican) emailed its roughly 100,000 members
and contacted regional editorial boards to spotlight the fight. News
spread like wildfire--western sportsmen were outraged that public lands
where they hunt and fish might be put on the auction block. Once they
knew the stakes, local hook-and-bullet organizations held phone-bank
days, organized letter-writing campaigns, and scheduled visits to
regional Senate offices. A petition signed by 758 sportsmen's clubs
affiliated with National Wildlife Federation, from the Great Falls Bowhunters Association to the Custer Rod and Gun Club, landed on elected
officials' desks in Washington just weeks later. "These lands, so
important to sportsmen and women, are open to every American, rich and
poor alike," the letter read. "We believe it is wrong to put them up for
mining companies and other commercial interests to buy at cut-rate
prices."
The outcry from rural and exurban voters achieved what no amount of
lobbying from environmentalists in Washington alone could have. Within
weeks, western Republican senators renounced the measure on the Senate
floor and to their hometown newspapers. As Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.)
told the Billings Gazette, "The local folks most impacted by a
sale have to be on board." The measure was then effectively dead--within
weeks the language was withdrawn from the House bill.
This victory marked a telling moment of cooperation between hunters
and environmentalists, a working partnership once as unlikely as
Madeleine Albright and Jesse Helms. Environmental policies have become
increasingly popular over the past few years. Seventy-five percent of
Americans in a 2005 Harris poll agreed with the statement, "Protecting
the environment is so important that requirements and standards cannot
be too high, and continuing environmental improvements must be made
regardless of cost." Yet a shrinking minority of voters are willing to
associate themselves with the loaded term "environmentalist." In the
same poll, only 12 percent claimed that label. Americans like green, but
they are less fond of greens. And that has been doubly true for
outdoorsmen.
Over the past five years, though, Bush administration policies in the
west--accelerating drilling on public lands and waiving protections on
water quality and wildlife--have given this odd couple a common enemy.
"The White House's pillaging of public lands has driven hunters and
ranchers into the trenches with environmentalists," says David
Alberswerth of the Wilderness Society. "There's absolutely no question
about what's brought us closer together," agrees Oregon hunter and
prominent outdoor columnist Pat Wray. "It's the Bush administration."
This is particularly true in western states like Montana, where the
Wilderness Society worked alongside local hunters and outfitters in 2004
to overturn plans to allow drilling in the Rocky Mountain Front, a
unique big-game habitat known as "America's Serengeti." Similar
coalitions have formed around New Mexico's Valle Vidal, Colorado's Roan
Plateau, Wyoming's Powder River Basin, and elsewhere--uniting the
environmentalists' policy, legal, and media expertise with sportsmen's
deep knowledge of a particular place and ability to speak a language
that resonates locally.
These struggles may pale in comparison to the brewing battle over
global warming. As more red-state farmers find their crops affected by
rising temperatures, more ice fishermen notice lakes that no longer
freeze in the winter, and more hunters see wetlands where ducks breed
begin to evaporate, concern about climate change is crossing old
political boundaries. Although they may have diverse starting points and
dramatically different reactions to labels like "environmentalist,"
liberal and conservative outdoor activists are discovering that on a
range of issues, their concerns about the earth overlap. In many ways,
this brings them full-circle to the beginning of America's environmental
movement. If today's new alliances become a lasting united front, the
union could not only recast American politics with a progressive tilt
but have vast implications for the health of the planet.
Gentlemen sportsmen
Americans' environmental awareness has grown over the last century
and a half, accelerating in times of ecological crises that drew
citizens from all walks of life into the cause. The first significant
stirrings appeared in the late 19th century, when the seemingly endless
open wilderness of the country was rapidly vanishing, and what remained
showed signs of being ravaged. An eastern timber shortage threatened
development; hydraulic mining pulverized California mountainsides;
buffalo bones littered the Badlands. In 1864, historian George Perkins
Marsh published his seminal book, Man and Nature, which linked
the collapse of ancient civilizations to frittering away their natural
resources. Three decades later, Frederick Jackson Turner articulated his
now-famous theory that Americans' most noble instincts (endurance,
individualism, and egalitarian impulses), were wrought by the experience
of the frontier, already a fading memory.
It was an uncertain moment, when the scales might tip either toward
conservation or catastrophic breakdown. There was little precedent for
federal intervention, and the idea of Washington owning land and
managing resources rubbed against American libertarian impulses. But to
an influential few the notion of saving today to provide for tomorrow
sounded like a damn good idea.
It's no accident that the early conservation icons--including
Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and George Bird Grinnell--were
hunters, steeped in the tradition of the gentleman sportsman. Hunting
manuals of the time were part memoir, part natural history, part
chivalric code, emphasizing the sportsman's responsibility to kill
honorably (shooting birds on the ground was considered gauche) and to
ensure the continuity of game species. This imperative led sportsmen in
the 1870s and 1880s to lobby for the nation's first laws to protect
wildlife: limits on game seasons, an end to commercial slaughter of
wildlife, and protection of watersheds in New York's Adirondacks
forests.
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The once-radical notion of conservation was first introduced to the
general public through a handful of national newspapers devoted to
hunting, fishing, and natural history. When Forest & Stream
editor Grinnell sent a reporter to Yellowstone in 1894 to cover illegal
poaching, the story galvanized popular interest in public lands; weeks
later, Congress passed legislation to protect wildlife on national
parks. Meanwhile, urban reformers with little connection to sportsmen
were opening another front in the nascent environmental movement. In the
1890s, public health advocates from Jane Addams's Hull House linked
sewage outflows with outbreaks of typhoid fever and pushed for sanitary
garbage disposal. In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle,
exposing the dangerous and unsanitary conditions of meatpacking plants.
Later that year, Congress and President Roosevelt created the Food and
Drug Administration.
By the time Roosevelt's cousin occupied the White House, a second
environmental awakening was taking place. Massive erosion, caused by
drought and unsound farming practices, led to the Dust Bowl--when dark
clouds swept across the prairie and drove families off their farmsteads.
In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt called representatives from local
hook-and-bullet clubs to Washington for the first North American
conference on wildlife. A year later, a newly formed national network of
sportsmen's clubs lobbied for the Wildlife Restoration Act, which
imposed a federal tax on sporting equipment to fund state wildlife
agencies. (Two-thirds of the funding for these agencies today still
comes from taxes and license fees on sportsmen.)
Legally green
America's third environmental upsurge began in 1962 with the
publication of wildlife biologist Rachel Carson's Silent Spring,
which traced the destructive path of the pesticide DDT through the food
chain. Chemicals and industrial pollutants were jeopardizing human
health and putting the nation's official symbol--the bald eagle--at risk
of extinction. As that decade proceeded, Americans everywhere saw images
of the burning Cuyahoga River on the evening news. Smog in Los Angeles
became so bad that parents were warned to keep their children inside.
Continuing in the tradition of broad-based environmentalism, these
crises mobilized Americans across the political spectrum.
No single environmental lobby existed at the time, but hundreds of
local groups played a role. Sportsmen's groups worried about watersheds,
city-based citizen groups worked to control pollution, union chapters
focused on mining safety, and women's organizations highlighted the
connection between pollutants and fetal health. In Washington, leaders
competed to be known as champions of environmental reform. Sen. Ed
Muskie (D-Maine), a man with presidential aspirations and an instinct
for public sentiment, embarked on a national tour in the mid 1960s to
hear about toxins in rivers, air pollution in cities, and garbage
problems everywhere. With the help of a Republican colleague, Sen.
Howard Baker (R-Tenn.)--and support from varied groups including the
League of Women Voters and the sportsmen's Isaak
(sic) Walton League--Muskie's
subcommittee produced a series of major environmental laws in the early
1970s, including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered
Species Act.
Many of the groups we associate with the environmental movement today
were in fact the product, not the cause, of this landmark legislation.
The 1970s laws created a broad new federal regulatory apparatus for
environmental concerns, which in turn required a new breed of
scientific, legal, and technical experts to hold the bureaucracy's feet
to the fire. A few existing conservation groups such as the
Sierra Club
(once a regional wilderness and backpacking organization) fortified
their lobbying and legal resources to adapt to this new role. And a
whole host of new organizations, including the Natural Resources Defense
Council and Environmental Defense, emerged to do the same.
As these new green groups hired professional staff in Washington, the
focus of the movement shifted from grassroots advocacy to policy
implementation. Whereas previous political debates involving the
environment had ebbed and flowed around specific flashpoints, the new
oversight responsibility necessitated an ongoing effort, particularly at
the national level. This permanent role meant that the DC-based groups
became the dominant face of environmentalism, overshadowing the myriad
grassroots organizations that had focused on wilderness and outdoor
issues for decades. These national groups did not prioritize--or perhaps
have the resources for--maintaining extensive ties at the local level.
While their efforts to hold the federal government accountable vastly
improved American's quality of life, environmental groups no longer
represented the leading edge of a popular movement; they had become a
political fixture in Washington.
The breaking of the fellowship
In the late 1970s, a rift opened between environmentalists and
hunters. Sportsmen's groups had supported the Clean Air Act and Clean
Water Act, but they were not equipped, nor particularly inclined, to
oversee implementation. The membership of such groups, drawn largely
from rural areas, continued to focus on local concerns and hands-on
conservation projects.
Different priorities alone didn't cause bad blood. But with the
emergence of the animal-rights movement, a growing number of urban and
suburban Americans, with little experience of farms or slaughterhouses,
came to view hunting as backward or barbaric. Local chapters of some
green groups, including the Sierra Club, campaigned to prevent or
curtail state hunting seasons. This put some greens and hunters directly
at odds. "To hear someone attack your grandfather's tradition--that
stings," says hunting columnist Wray. "And they [hunters] don't forget."
The intensity of these conflicts, and a growing sense of cultural
alienation, led many sportsmen to view environmentalists as antagonists.
After sportsmen left the fold, the environmental movement became more
vulnerable to political attacks. The seeds of the modern
anti-environmental backlash were sown, when conservative leaders in the
late 1970s and 1980s came to see environmentalism, together with Nader's
consumer-safety movement, as threats to commercial enterprise.
Industries that depend upon cheap access to public lands and federal
mineral resources--oil, gas, mining, timber, and grazing interests--used
their checkbooks to fight back. Colorado brewer Joseph Coors funded the
new Heritage Foundation in Washington and the Mountain States Legal
Foundation in Denver to promote free enterprise and weaken regulations.
The billionaire Koch brothers, overseers of numerous oil refineries and
chemical companies, founded the Cato Institute and the Foundation for
Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), which support
privatizing federal lands.
During the Reagan years, these groups saw their interests advanced by
like-minded presidential appointees, such as Interior Secretary James
Watt, an alumnus of the Mountain States Legal Foundation. But after
Reagan left office, they feared that President George H.W. Bush would
take a more conciliatory approach toward green concerns. Former
logging-industry consultant Ron Arnold and his business partner Alan
Gottlieb realized that "industry can't stand alone," as Arnold told
journalist David Helvarg. "It needs a grassroots movement to fight for
its goals." Thus was born the "wise-use" movement, a loose network of
new organizations with names like People for the West! formed to
undercut support for environmental crusades. Vilifying greens proved
easier than vilifying green policies, which the public largely
supported. In lectures, books, and media appearances, wise-use advocates
hammered home the image of environmentalists as out-of-touch,
tree-hugging, people-hating, dope-smoking elitists. In one 1984
presentation to chemical manufacturers, Arnold advised, "I would
strongly suggest that you do everything possible to associate the word
anti-pesticide with the word marijuana."
In its antagonism toward urban liberals, the anti-environmental
movement found a kindred spirit in the gun-rights lobby. In the wake of
the Kennedy assassinations when the Democratic Party embraced
urban-based gun-control advocates, conservatives within and outside the
National Rifle Association transformed that organization from a
nonpartisan hunting-safety group into a gun-rights powerhouse staunchly
aligned with the GOP. The heart of its appeal is in defending hunting as
a way of life against cosmopolitan liberals who would treat hunters as
criminals. Both the gun-rights and anti-environmental movements tap into
similar emotions; they also share some leaders. Wise-use guru Gottlieb,
for example, is the author of Gun Grabbers and founder of
numerous Second Amendment groups.
Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope, whose grandfather belonged
to the 1930s generation of hunter-conservationists (he fought for state
parks in Michigan), remembers when he first recognized these attacks as
part of a coordinated smear campaign against greens. In the mid 1980s,
he noticed articles in Outdoor Life attacking the Sierra Club as
systematically anti-hunting (some state affiliates have taken
anti-hunting positions, but the national leadership has not). "At that
point I realized we were dealing with a conscious political strategy to
separate rural hunters and fishers from urban environmentalists," he
says. "It wasn't about hunting and fishing. It was about politics."
The peacenik-and-hemp-pipe caricature of environmentalists may be
unfair. ("Perhaps all aging hippies are environmentalists, but all
environmentalists are not aging hippies," observes Pope.) But the
archetype of greens as culturally distant touched a nerve, exploiting
and amplifying a real reservoir of social alienation. In recent years,
environmentalists' public image has declined. More important, so has
their clout in Washington. Despite the efforts of green groups, for over
a decade Congress has not reauthorized any of the key 1970s
environmental laws. On their top priority of global warming,
environmental groups have achieved little meaningful progress.
These setbacks have prompted something of a dark night of the soul
among national environmental leaders. In October 2004, two movement
iconoclasts, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger, released an essay,
"The Death of Environmentalism," which argued that the very category
of "the environment" was a political and practical liability, and that
the movement desperately needed to broaden its appeal. "What the
environmental movement needs more than anything else right now is to
take a collective step back to rethink everything," they wrote.
"Environmentalists are in a culture war whether we like it or not."
The next environmental awakening
Some environmental leaders understand the need to build alliances.
Since becoming Sierra Club executive director in 1992, Pope has sought
common ground with groups that haven't always felt comfortable within
the fold of the environmental movement. In the late 1990s, the Sierra
Club initiated outreach efforts to people of faith, labor unions,
Latinos, and hunters--including sending staffers to man a booth at a
Texas rifle fair. Pope has also tried to broaden the views of his own
members, publishing a series of articles on "Why I Hunt" in Sierra
magazine.
At the same time, some within the hunting and fishing community have
realized they have as much reason to be concerned as greens.
Thirty-eight million Americans hunt and fish, but their access to
private hunting land is eroding quickly, thanks to rapid development and
suburbanization. (See
"The End of Hunting?" January/February 2006 issue.) This has made
public lands more valuable at precisely the moment when Republicans in
Washington are pushing measures to sell them off. In addition to last
October's surreptitious budget amendment, the president's 2007 budget
calls for public lands sales from the Forest Service and Bureau of Land
Management.
Alarmed by these trends, some prominent leaders in the
hook-and-bullet community are today urging sportsmen to become advocates
on behalf of the environment. Earlier this year, Tony Dean, a popular
outdoors TV host in South Dakota, embarked on a lecture tour to talk to
sportsmen about the importance of the Endangered Species Act, now under
threat from Republicans in Congress. Outdoors writer Ted Williams has
been challenging hunters to look beyond the assumption that the NRA
represents their best interests. And Jim Posewitz, a former Montana
state wildlife department biologist, has founded a think tank, Orion,
the Hunter's Institute, to promote efforts to remind sportsmen of their
history as advocates for environmental causes--"before anyone was
considered an alien from Planet Green."
Bridging cultures and a quarrelsome recent history is no small
obstacle. But advocates on both sides are finding ways to break the ice.
A vegetarian, who is now a spokesman for a national hunting
organization, was deeply dubious of hunting until he found himself in a
discussion with a sportsman about the modern meat-packing industry. The
hunter said he had an elk in his freezer and that he wouldn't think of
stopping at McDonald's until he had consumed what he had taken. "He
thinks about where his food comes from," the now pro-hunting vegetarian
said. "After that I respected him." A Maryland state senator, John Astle,
who grew up hunting in West Virginia and is now president of the
National Assembly of Sportsmen's Caucuses, knows he is an anomaly. Last
fall, in accepting the "Sportsmen's Legislator of the Year" award from
the conservative Safari Club, he stood before an audience in a crowded
Texas ballroom. "Before I say anything, in the name of full disclosure,
I need to confess... I'm a Democrat." After a round of nervous twitters,
he added, "But I love guns, big dogs, and pick-ups," to real applause.
It's not just the hook-and-bullet crowd that's challenging the status
quo. Among ranchers, too, there is the first evidence of a similar thaw.
Though the National Cattlemen's Beef Association remain staunchly
conservative, some individual ranchers have recently become more willing
to work with greens, largely because of shared opposition to policies
that favor extractive-industry interests over citizens. Tweeti Blancett,
a rancher in New Mexico, was a regional organizer for Bush's 2000
presidential campaign. That was before her ranch, a mixture of private
and public grazing land used by her family for six generations, was
overrun with 500 gas wells without her consent--thanks to a Bush
administration position allowing the sale of sub-surface mineral rights
to extraction companies without involving the "surface" landowner. She's
now working with the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society to advocate for
the property rights of other ranchers.
But it's global warming that will almost certainly "be the glue that
brings everyone together," as National Wildlife Federation president and
CEO Larry Schweiger puts it. Last year, Lake Erie did not freeze,
leaving ice fishermen scratching their heads.
The
Waterfowlers' Guide to Global Warming (PDF), published last
summer by NWF, explains how climate change could produce droughts across
the Midwest and evaporate the region's "prairie pothole" wetlands--vital
duck habitat. Global warming recently made the cover of Trout,
the magazine of Trout Unlimited; the article cited a Pew Center study
that found that a 4.8 degree temperature increase could halve trout
habitat in the Rocky Mountain Region (trout thrive in cold water).
Because the potential effects of the problem are so sweeping, the
threat--and lately, the reality--of climate change has become a top
concern across a broad spectrum of organizations. Evangelical Christians
are calling for carbon dioxide emissions' reductions. An agricultural
coalition, 25 by '25, is pushing for renewable energy development.
Insurance companies are calculating potentially catastrophic losses.
Sportsmen are gathering data on shifting habitat and changing stream
flows. "I think we've reached a tipping point in public awareness," says
Steven Williams, president of the Wildlife Management Institute, adding,
"Sportsmen want a seat at the table." In a poll of hunters and anglers
commissioned last year by the National Wildlife Federation, 75 percent
agreed with the statement "the U.S. should reduce its emissions of
greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide that contribute to global warming
and threaten fish and wildlife habitat."
These multiple uprisings in response to global warming echo each of
the nation's previous environmental awakenings. (When Sen. Muskie
embarked on his national tour in the mid 1960s, his chief of staff Leon
Billings remembers, "People just came out of the woodwork.") Each time
environmental concerns have risen to the top of the national agenda,
uniting a broad array of the public behind the need for government
action, it has forged new alliances and remade American politics with a
progressive tilt. Already, there's evidence of such a shift affecting
elections. In 2004, pro-gun western Democrats like Brian Schweitzer in
Montana and Ken Salazar in Colorado won their statewide races in part by
tapping into public discontent with the on-the-ground effects of the
Bush administration's anti-environmental policies. In the last election,
in every region except the South, Bush lost ground among gun-owners
since 2000; he lost ground everywhere among rural voters.
Conservatives may try to counter the emergence of this new
environmental majority with greener rhetoric or by scaling back on
favors to extractive industries. But it is hard to fathom how today's
conservative elected officials could bring themselves to champion
aggressive regulations on carbon emissions and other ambitious measures
to control global warming, which would require a direct hit on the very
industries that hold up the roof of the current Republican Party. The
job of taking on those industries will have to fall to progressive
leaders of either political party. And with the support of
environmentalists, sportsmen, and others, they may finally have the
political clout to pull it off.
