Headwaters News -- Letters to the Editor

Readers talk back

Recent letters are posted below, in the order in which they arrived.

An archive of letters, sorted by topic, is here.

Blame politics, greed for housing shortage, instead

Subject: Post-attack economy displaces Denver's working class.
Date: Thursday, Dec. 20, 2001
From: Lance Olsen

The Rocky Mountain News story about un-rich Americans going homeless is
misleading.

While Sept. 11 will go down as one of Americans' most riveting moments, our recession was not only inevitable but already underway by the time Osama's rednecks shook our consciousness.

Why then are so many Americans going homeless and hungry at this time? There are at least two major reasons.

In November 2001, The Economist observed that "America's current recession, however, has been caused largely by an investment boom that has been turned to bust." In a July 2001 editorial, The Economist said that "It is no coincidence that the deepest and most protracted recessions in recent decades have taken hold in countries that experienced booms."

The political community in America is currently divided on whether the booms of Reagan and Clinton were two booms or one, continuous boom. Without need of resolving the political debate, we all know that both presidents and both political parties boasted openly about the booms they delivered to the people of the United States. However, as financial pro James Grant points out succinctly in Money of the Mind, his book of American economic history, booms have consequences.

Grant, a frequent guest on Rukeyser's Wall Street Week, is certainly not alone.

"I have simply tended to be negative about booms," investments guru Marc Faber told Asiaweek magazine in a February 2001 interview, because booms "easily turn into bubbles that become bigger and go bust. " Then, in October, Barron's columnist Gene Epstein said that easy money "helps bring boom and bust in the first place" by making money available to "unsustainable projects."

Our current recession is attributable to Sept. 11 about as much as a chocolate cake is atributable to colorful little candies sprinkled on its frosting. And a lack of affordable homes in America is also only very, very vaguely attributable to the chilling retaliations of Sept. 11.

Instead, it is a direct, inevitable, and utterly predictable product of boom-loving politics.

During the successive administrations of Reagan-Bush, Bush-Quayle, Clinton-Gore and the series of coinciding congresses, there was little sign that politicians had learned to aim construction policy where it was most needed. By 1995, the U.S. Census Bureau's American Housing Survey would report a "43 percent decline over the last two decades in the number of low-rent units in the private housing market." At the same time, in the first term of Clinton-Gore, the House Appropriations Committee, according to Reuters, slashed the budget for low-income housing by $7 billion.

In 1995, Winton Pitcoff wrote a penetrating analysis of the housing crisis for March/April issue of Dollars & Sense magazine. Pitcoff wrote that, "Thirty years ago the nation boasted a surplus of housing affordable to low income people. Today there is a shortage of more than 4 million units." Pitcoff adds that the supply of affordable housing declined by 900,000 units just from 1996-1998 alone, during the second term of Clinton-Gore. Despite the endless and widespread claims that nature was winning and people losing, wild bears and ordinary people alike were going increasingly homeless, or scarcely managing to hang on.

Meanwhile, Congress and successive administrations backed tax breaks that were subsidizing large and expensive homes for buyers in the top fifth of America's income distribution. These tax breaks, according to Dollars & Sense magazine, amounted to $82 billion in 1999 alone. Cushing Dolbeare, founder of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, was cited in a Dollars & Sense interview saying, "If we were willing to spend as much on low and middle income housing as we do on the Mortgage Interest Deduction, we'd have more than enough to solve the housing crisis."

It's not that Congress had not passed law to offer housing for the nation's unrich. Indeed, the Federal Housing Administration was set up for that purpose. FHA even had an insurance fund to cover banks' losses if poorly paid borrowers couldn't meet their loan payments.

However, in June 1990, Associated Press business reporter John Cunniff disclosed that the program had been twisted to reward those who didn't need it and deny loans to those who did. That twist, according to official records examined by Cunniff, was caused "incredible losses" for the program's insurance fund, threatening to break it as effectively as the similar funds for banks and S&Ls were being broken. It turned out that 100 percent of the government-insured loans intended for the needy were going to the well-off, and the bigger the loan, the more likely it was to end up in foreclosure.

An expert Cunniff contacted for an explanation told him that, while the public might lose money on these bad loans, the brokers who set up financing made more money on the larger ones than they would on smaller loans needed for the nation's poor. The expert said that this was "outrageous."

Gifford Pinchot, an early head of the U.S. Forest Service, would stand angrily from his grave if he knew of all this. "The rightful use and purpose of our natural resources," Pinchot wrote in 1947, " is to make all the people strong and well, able and wise, well-clothed, well-housed -- with equal opportunity for all and special privilege for none." Back then, if only briefly, America's poltical leadership was listening, and responsive to ordinary needs and dreams.

In 1949, America passed its Housing Act, which stated that it is the policy of the United States to provide "a decent home and suitable environment for every American family." More recently, preaching a public line of family values, politicians of both major parties have instead provided the means by which every wealthy family could afford extravagant housing.

During booms, the Wall Street Journal would report in early 2000, homes get bigger. Like Americans' waistlines, the Journal observed, the new American home was getting much bigger, and more extravagant. While affordable housing was uncomfortably rare for the Americans who most needed it, the fortunate were demanding homes with "more bedrooms, more bathrooms, and more flourishes than ever before."

Architects and even the builders of luxury homes were noticing the trend. An architect told the Journal that the trend was "appalling." He said that the bigger-is-better trend was about showing off to neighbors. In his opinion, people buying luxury homes were saying, "I can be a 1920s tycoon like anybody else."

One builder of American luxury homes interviewed by the Wall Street Journal was quoted saying, "Does anybody need all this? No." Indeed, the Journal observed, "Need is hardly a consideration these days."

That's where our forests have been falling. Now that so much forest fell into unsustainable logging-construction booms, both booms have hit the skids in a predictable recession, and the forests have been so enfeebled by frivolous logging that now they cannot meet the needs their felling could and should have filled circa 1980-2000. The ordinary homeless and the ordinary logging family both got cut off at the knees by home-grown extravagance. Booms have consequences.

It's only free trade when it works in U.S. favor

Subject: Canadian softwood subsidies undercut U.S. wildlife and jobs.
Date: Friday, Dec. 7, 2001
From: Rebecca Prescott
Vancouver, B.C.

I read the article "Softwood Agreement must maintain environmental and economic fairness" written by Steve Thompson and Loren Rose, and was disturbed by what I read. Not only is the article littered with inaccurate facts in regard to British Columbia's environmental policies, these gentlemen are arrogant to think that Canada should change the way we do business to an expensive American alternative.

The article states that "Stumpage princes are fixed at low rates with the goal of maintaining timber jobs in local mills." I am curious why these gentlemen would see this as bad thing. It sounds superior to the policy of having "U.S. mills interested in purchasing logs from state, federal or private land must vie against each other in a competitive bidding process."

If American producers are unable to compete with Canadians, perhaps they should change their system in order to be more competitive, rather then imposing a tariff that is costing British Columbia 30,000 forestry jobs (right before Christmas).

It is also important to keep in mind that American jobs are also at risk because of the imposed tariffs, and the fact that American consumers will now have to pay more for their lumber, something that Mr. Thompson and Mr. Rose failed to mention. The agreement is one that will only benefit a small few U.S. producers, while jobs are lost on both sides of the border because of the tariff; for every job lost in Canada more will be lost in the U.S.

I find it disturbing that this is what Americans call free trade; free trade only when it works in America's favor, right? When it comes to attacking British Columbia's environmental practices, it would have been beneficial for Mr. Thompson and Mr. Rose to have done their research. I suggest that they take a look at these two websites to get their facts straight:

http://www.growingtogether.ca/facts/forest_practices.htm

http://www.growingtogether.ca/facts/QuickFacts.htm
Perhaps the U.S. should use B.C.'s policies as an example worth following.

I hope in the future these gentlemen do their research before attacking a country which provides America with so much, from lumber to energy (which California has yet to pay for), not to mention the thousands of Canadians overseas fighting in an American lead war.

Colorado coaches would benefit from Rotary creed

Subject: Coaches know but won't tell.
Date: Thursday, Nov. 15, 2001
From: LW Greb
Butte, Mont.

What other groups do we know that tend to act this way? Doctors, police and attorneys come to mind first. But this is always a problem when you find a group of people who see the world as "them vs. us."

What can be done about high school coaches and illegal recruiting? This problem seems to me to be just another part of the problem of the pressure to win at any cost that is rampant in many parts of our society. And, because it is a part of a much larger problem, it can not be cured unless, and until, we take a really hard look at larger problem is attacking the very core of our society.

Several groups are trying to do their part in changing the attidude of the society in which we live. One of them is Rotary. We use the following 4-Way Test because, we are always concerned with promoting high ethical standards in our professional and personal lives. If the people involved in this scandal down in Colorado held their actions up to the following, much of what is wrong could be corrected:

"Of the things we think, say or do:
Is it the TRUTH?
Is it FAIR to all concerned?
Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?"

Humans should be resourceful enough to leave timber standing

Subject: Global warming prophets of doom risk being dismissed.
Date: Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2001
From: Lance Olsen

It is always a real delight to see that Headwaters News has once again given space for John Baden's interpretations of environmental issues, and especially so when John says something with which I can so enthusiastically agree.

John and Headwaters have just hit the pinnacles of pleasing me with John's observation that "human brains are excellent substitutes" for old growth -- or presumably any other timber. Yeh, verily. That's why I and hundreds of other environmentalists around the nation and the world have insisted that the timber can stay right where it is, and that the skies won't fall because of it.

Humans are, after all, every bit as ingenious as Baden claims, and I just love it when John joins our ranks on topics like this. I just wish more people had John's confidence that the world can do quite nicely, thank you, without cutting down its last wild forests.

In essence, Baden reiterates Julian Simon's longstanding rap that, hey, we don't need to worry about shortages of anything, because a brainy species like ours will always find substitutes. Darn right. Ergo, leave that oil-gas under the Rockies and the Arctic where it is, because as Baden and Simon both gladly say, the human brain will always and everywhere find substitutes.

It's also a delight to see John bashing the world's many doom-'n-gloomers. What a relief it is to have him on one's side in the tedious and endless arguments where so many folks still warn -- stridently in some cases, with hot anger in others -- that the human world will suffer horrible gloom and doom if forests are left standing, and pollutions not set free into the atmosphere.

I just wish more people could be blessed with the confidence in one's fellow human that he so plainly shares with so many of my colleagues in the conservation community.

Consider source of criticism of Wyoming's severance taxes

Subject: Analyst says Wyoming has let severance taxes slide.

Date: Thursday, Sept. 13, 2001
From:John D. Atkins
Litchfield Park, AZ

Tom Throop's Equality State Policy Center is a special interest, lobbying coalition that is the thinly disguised liberal wing of the Democratic party in Wyoming. While keeping its finances a deep and dark secret, the law does require disclosure of this coalition's member organizations. Unionized teachers and the environmentalists provide the muscle and much of the money.

Mr. Throop, in the recent past, carpetbagged his way to Wyoming all the way from Oregon, and has been complaining ever since. I would urge your publication to carefully scrutinize future releases from this anti-business and anti-agriculture front group.

Students saving ranches is too simplistic a view

Subject: Environmental students need a semester on a ranch.
Date: Friday, Aug. 31, 2001
From: Lance Olsen

FEER's Amy Green is correct in saying that environmental studies students would gain real-world experience in working on a farm or ranch. There is, for example, no subsitute for standing on a haystack when it's 40 below, tossing forkfuls of hay to waiting cattle.

Still, one wonders to what end such experience is envisioned. If Ms. Green intends, for example, that real-world experience might help save the family farm and ranch, the evidence is shaky at best. In just one recent year, North Dakota lost 1,000 family farms, including those where the farmers were carrying the benefits of three or more generations of real-world experience in the day-to-day routines of agriculture.

As befits any student, some additional homework will be necessary, and it doesn't have to be all that extensive. Just a look at three articles in the January 2001 issue of Beef (www.beef-mag.org), an online journal about the beef industry, could put students on the track of some important insights.

One author reminds fellow cattle ranchers that U.S. ranchers are the most productive in the world, and that they are also the most unprofitable. Could it be, he asks, that our ranchers are suffering the economic consequences of producing so much beef? In fact, he points out, grazing at today's levels is spurring soil loss, too. In ranching, as in so many other modern industries, it seems that financial and environmental losses are paired rather than opposed.

A columnist in the same issue has written for Beef for 35 years. Reflecting on the economic viability of American ranching, he says he's wondered if the whole enterprise should be regarded more as a hobby than a business, because losses have dominated the industry throughout his career. Just about anyone with a few acres, he says, feels obliged to put some cattle on it, thus upping overall production.

Montana rancher Lynn Cornwall, currently president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, seems to pick up on that same theme. In describing problems facing today's ranching community, Cornwall mentions that maybe our land grant universities need to back off a bit from a long tradition of emphasizing production.

Amidst all their other problems today, problems shared in large part by the whole society in which we all live, ranchers face the odd situation of failing because of their success. Put most simply, ranchers seem endangered by too many cattle headed into the market. The science on soils and species illustrates much the same lesson for ranching's impact on the environment, too.

Some experience down on the farm or ranch could sure be useful but, given the farm-ranch community's great and lengthy difficulty in wrestling with these questions of production and loss, that experience may be too frail a vessel. Environmental studies students can gain as much from a basic grasp of supply, demand, and price.

Mergers give industry control over consumers

Subject: Albertsons to close 165 stores.
Date: Monday, May 23, 2001
From: Lance Olsen

Albertson's' anouncement of store closings is just one more in a string of developments heralding America's entry into a New Age of Cartels. Consumers will pay the price.

Albertson's has in recent years gone on the same binge of merger and acquisition that has by now become familiar across many industries. We've seen the same trend in the forest products industry, for example, and in both cases we see prices on the rise as corporations kill competing stores and mills by buying and then closing them.

In one case, we're seeing the emergence of a Grocery Cartel. In the other, we're seeing the emergence of a Timber/Paper Cartel.

Such cartels are not identical to monopolies, but they have the same power to force price increases on the ordinary American consumer. For example, The Wall Street Journal has reported that the price of milk may be a leading indicator of what's coming in a world with fewer grocery stores competing for the consumer dollar -- the price of milk is going up.

Likewise, I learn from sources in the financial industry that the forest products industry "needs" more merger/acquisition, in order to exert greater "control" over prices. Newspapers, for example, can expect to pay more for newsprint as the number of paper mills is reduced and competition thereby slain.

While consumers get hurt in this process, so do some basic producers. For example, Montana livestock producers now look in vain for meatpackers competing to buy their livestock. One Montana farmer told me, "You could say we have only three buyers for our lambs -- Cargill, Cargill, and Cargill."

Whether we buy groceries or sell cattle and sheep, Montanans and the nation face a dismal situation. When we go shopping around for lower grocery prices or higher livestock prices, we are cut short because our opportunity has been taken. It seems to me that if Fed Chairman keeps a complete log of the factors driving inflationary trends in America, he would be tabulating the growing impact of mergers and acquisitions across the full range of industries that affect our pocketbooks and our economy.

Former House Speaker Jim Wright recently wrote of all this in terms of the deregulation that spawns and spurs it. His remarks are important as we ponder our future as individuals and as a nation. I'd just add what I immodestly call Olsen's First Law of Deregulation: To the extent that Commerce is ungoverned, Commerce governs.

The Supreme Court has seemingly hardened this alarming trend in American society. According to an analysis in Business Week, the court has gutted a longstanding safequard that had helped Americans get some control of the commercial interests who seek to control us. According to Business Week, the court has ruled that damage to consumers from corporate control of pricing is no longer a criterion for American anti-trust law.

Deregulation may, as many sincerely believe, have gotten Big Government off our backs, but a thorough look at this result shows that it's just made room for Big Commerce to climb on.

Bigger highways not the only path to better transportation

Date: Monday, July 23, 2001
From: Tim Davis. executive director
Montana Smart Growth Coalition
Helena, MT 59624
smartgrowth@mcn.net

The Montana Smart Growth Coalition vigorously supports improvement of road safety and economic growth in Montana, but we believe Governor Martz's proposed transportation study is misguided. Highway expansion is not always the right choice for a community or the economy.

Governor Martz is quoted in the Billings Gazette as saying "the safe and efficient movement of goods and services will bring more economic opportunities to communities throughout Montana, which is why I have directed the department [of transportation] to study the exciting possibilities for highway expansion around the state."

Why not spend tax dollars where each community needs them the most? Federal transportation dollars can be spent on a wide variety of transportation options. However, Montana spent none of these flexible dollars on alternative modes of transportation, between 1992 and 1999, according to the Surface Transportation Policy Project. And this lack of choice has left an estimated one-third of Montanans, who cannot drive, without the transportation options they deserve.

How can transportation help our economy develop while protecting that, which makes Montana special? This is the question that we believe MDT needs to be asking. We urge MDT to study how to use our tax dollars to support businesses where infrastructure already exists. How can we use railroads more effectively as a means of getting produce and products to market? This is a perennial problem for Montana's farmers, ranchers, and industries.

While some communities might need new or expanded roads, most of the economic benefit from larger roads is fleeting and can actually damage local businesses. For the most part, highway expansion leads to a redistribution of wealth from local businesses to international companies by promoting strip developments. These pull dollars away from our downtown areas and from local businesses.

Miles City is just one example, of many, where stores that were once downtown moved to newly expanded roads on the outskirts of town and have marginalized the downtown business area. Twenty years ago, a Miles City resident was able to walk around downtown to shop for food, clothes, farm equipment, and go to the bakery and the bank. Since then chain stores have popped up or plopped down on a strip mall east of downtown and have stripped local, downtown businesses of customers. Today, it is nearly impossible to buy groceries without a car in Miles City, as it is in so many other towns around Montana.

Larger highways not only erode our downtowns, but also accelerate sprawling development that paves over precious farmland and fragments wildlife habitat. For example, citizens in Paradise Valley fought MDT's plans to widen and straighten the East River highway because of concerns that such "improvements" would make the road less safe as traffic speeds increased. It would also convert farm and ranchland to rural sprawl. They were right.

We need to look toward transportation choices that use Montana's tax dollars and land most efficiently. Transportation decisions clearly impact land use. After all, transportation design and construction is the largest single government decision that affects how our communities grow.

The proposed steering committee to oversee the study seems to only be made up of members of chambers of commerce, in addition to corporate officers and financial investors. This committee needs to have representation from the rest of Montana including downtown business districts, farming and ranching groups, conservationists, tribes, smart growth advocates, and others.

The Montana Smart Growth Coalition could support an objective, well-designed and scientific transportation study that:
--addressed the transportation needs of the 30 to 37 percent of the Montana population that does not drive;
--addressed more efficient use of trucks and railroad links;
--examined and made recommendations about efficient, effective use of passenger rail and bus systems;
--examined how to efficiently move agricultural products within the state to local markets;
--made transportation to downtown business areas more efficient and convenient while preserving the historic character of our downtowns;
--met the spirit of the current federal TEA-21 legislation, which is to build truly multi-modal transportation systems (e.g., not only cars and trucks, but also rail, bikes, buses, walking, etc.);
--took a visionary look at how Montana will develop a forward-thinking and innovative approach to planning for its future transportation needs when faced with energy shortages.

If you want a choice about future transportation in your community and the state, then please contact Governor Martz (444-3111) and Director Galt at the Department of Transportation (444-6201). Montana citizens need transportation choices. They also need clear and objective transportation information if this state is to preserve its wonderful quality of life while building a sound economic future.

The Montana Smart Growth Coalition's mission is to support safe and healthy communities, sustainable economies, conservation of farm, forest and ranch lands, and protection of natural resources and wildlife habitat. Our member organizations represent over 27,000 individuals and families, who are farmers, small-business owners, low-income families, ranchers, conservationists, hunters, urban and rural residents, and many other Montanans.

It's not consumers who will pay most

Subject: California industries face brunt of rate hikes.
Date: Friday, May 18, 2001
From: Tom Robischon,
Los Angeles

Contrary to the headline that appeared Tuesday, "California industries face brunt of rate hikes," if anyone in California is facing a brunt it is the residential consumer. California industries face 50 percent increases (commercial and agricultural ratepayers face less significant increases). But residential customers of Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison face 4 percent to 80 percent increases, depending on how much power they use. And the likelihood is that there will be more increases.

Then there are the billions of dollars the state of California has already shelled out to line the pockets of energy producers such as Reliant Power, a close buddy of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Where is that going to come from? Well, that's been fixed all along. As Peter King writes in the L.A. Times today, "Call it a bailout. Call it a pricing signal or pass-through costs. Call it a concession to reality. In the end, consumers will pay for the failure of energy deregulation."

In the meantime, industries and businesses pass their increases on to consumers, while residents can only eat them.

Too much is at stake to trust centralized land management

Subject: New administration treats West much like the previous one.
Date: Wednesday, May 16, 2001
From: Daniel Kemmis, director
Center for the Rocky Mountain West,
Missoula, Mont.

Since Headwaters News is devoted to regional dialogue, I was glad to see that my recent Writers on the Range editorial ("New Administration Treats West Much Like the Previous One") drew a few letters to the Headwaters Editor. I'll respond to each of them.

First, thanks for the kind words from John Thorson, who has contributed in so many ways for so many years to good public policy and good public dialogue in the West.

Tom Robischon quoted his "favorite Montana conservative" as having attacked me along with other "liberal enviros" for having acquired decentralist religion only after "losing entrée to the central control" we enjoyed under Clinton and Babbitt. But in fact, as all my "liberal enviro" friends are all too well aware, I have been making decentralist arguments pretty doggedly for 20 years now.

Which brings me to John Adams' very thoughtful and cogent response to my most recent offering. If you haven't seen John's May 8 letter, scroll down and read it. If I have come across as attacking every national public land policy or initiative simply because it is national, then I should learn from John's criticism how to be less indiscriminate. I think I probably have, over the years, developed a tendency to state the case against centralized control in overly sweeping terms. If so, it is a fault that should be corrected because, as John says, it does not contribute to "constructive dialogue on the future of the West."

But if I have tended to go overboard in those terms, it is in part because so many of my "liberal enviro" friends have for so many years gone overboard in the other direction. The idea that the only reliable safeguard for Western landscapes is centralized decision-making is utterly bankrupt, and it's time to abandon it. The main point of my last editorial is that those who live by the sword of centralized public land management under Clinton, Gore and Babbitt may expect to suffer by the sword of centralized public land management under Bush, Cheney and Norton. If centralized control is not necessarily bad, it is certainly not necessarily good.

John Adams is right to point to the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument as a good example of an enlightened national process. But he is wrong to make a blanket statement about the value of leaving a vast range of public policies in the national government's hands rather than "in the hands of more easily manipulated local governments." John, what could possibly be more easily manipulated than this national government? And just how dangerous is it to put all our eggs in that national basket when it is so subject to capture by special interests?

I accept and applaud John's invitation to keep nudging this dialogue in a more constructive direction. What I most strongly encourage now is some real ecosystem-like diversity in our public land governance. Let's give the national government every possible chance to do more good work of the kind John Adams argues it has done on the Upper Missouri. But let's also create some time-limited, carefully monitored experiments in genuinely decentralized public land governance. No sweeping decentralization is in order (yet) nor would it be sound public policy. But unquestioning support of national approaches is no better. There is simply too much at stake to put all our eggs in any one basket any more. We need to be giving both centralist and decentralist (and mixed) regimes a chance to display their pitfalls and their promise.

Undermining the federal government

Subject: New administration treats West much like the previous one.
Date: Tuesday, May 8, 2001
From: John Adams,
Missoula, Mont.

Your recent column is valuable in that it points out that manipulation of federal lands from Washington is a sport long practiced by those who advocate industrial development of public lands. As you predict the Bush administration will do, previous pro-industry decision-makers in D.C. frequently made decisions for public lands in Montana by fiat, with little regard for local citizens, the national interest, or the health of the land. As you note, many of these same decision-makers complain loudly that any federal decision they disagree with is illegitimate and an imposition on the West.

The easiest way to attack any decision is to attack the process by which it was arrived. This appeals to Americans' ingrained sense of fair play, as well as relieving the attacker of the burden of stating and defending an opposing position. Thus, we see that the Bush administration rarely states that it opposes national monuments or roadless area protection, it simply complains about the process by which such designations and protections were produced. The West's right wing describes any federal decision it disagrees with as the product of a flawed process.

But the Right is seeking not just to discredit decisions it disagrees with, but to delegitimize the federal government. Normally, attacks on process are mitigated by participants' agreement that a particular process is basically fair, and their commitment to making that decision-making process continues to work in the future. For example, if I disagree with a particular decision arrived at through, say, a NEPA process, I will hesitate to attack the process rather than the conclusion, if I want federal agencies to continue making decisions through NEPA.

But the Right is unencumbered by any desire to support any process of federal decision-making. Sure, while the right wing controls the White House and Congress it will use its power to reach out from Washington and impose its will. But the long-term project of the Western Right is to weaken the federal government, leaving environmental regulations, consumer protections and tax policy in the hands of more easily manipulated local governments. So the right wing has no interest in acknowledging the cases where federal decision-making does work, and advances both specific causes and its larger project by criticizing process rather than product.

Dan, your desire to shift decision-making for federal lands has apparently led you to the same indiscriminate attacks. For example, in your column you implicitly tar all conservation decisions to have emerged in the last eight years with the same brush, arguing that "last-minute monuments" and other decisions were fiats imposed on Westerners by powerful environmentalists in Washington, while Westerners were given "short shrift."

To consider just one example of the decision-making you're talking about, let's look at the recent designation of the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument in central Montana. The new monument was designated after two years of local citizen involvement, beginning with consideration by the BLM Resource Advisory Committee, dominated by local ranching and business interests. It was designated with editorial support from the local daily, the Great Falls Tribune, with the endorsement of Great Falls' Republican mayor, with the support of the chair of the Resource Advisory Committee, and after a public hearing evenly split between proponents and opponents of designation. The decision to designate the monument was inclusive, driven by both locals and the national interest, and sound. The decision is the end legacy of an initiative begun 30 years ago by Lee Metcalf to protect the Wild and Scenic Missouri. Nevertheless, you lump this and every other conservation decision to emerge from the federal government in the past eight years together, describing them all as the result of dictatorial environmentalists in Washington.

In your zeal to move the location of decisions, it appears that you have given up the messy and difficult questions of when and where and why different decision-making processes are appropriate, fair, inclusive, and effective. Instead, like the right wing, your agenda is to delegitimize the federal government and you assume that any federal decision is a bad decision. I don't think that kind of top-down, one-size-fits-all, prescription based on ideology rather than on-the-ground reality promotes constructive dialogue on the future of the West. Simply bashing every federal decision because it is federal doesn't help us grapple with the very real problem of how to make good decisions in public land management.

It appears that you now embrace not just the Right's prescription for management of our public lands, but their dishonest rhetorical strategies designed to achieve that management. If you think you know the way to a new golden era of honest, inclusive and engaging decision-making processes, I urge you to try to get there through honest discussion. Otherwise, I'm not certain there's any reason to distinguish you from the (other) right wing ideologues.

A conservative's take on Kemmis

Subject: New administration treats West much like the previous one.
Date: Wednesday, May 2, 2001
From: Tom Robischon

My favorite Montana conservative took aim at Kemmi's proposal for a bilateral decentralized policy for the West as "sophistry (crap)!" He says the "liberal/enviros" are "changing color" now that they "no longer have an entree to the central control" that they enjoyed in the Babbit-Clinton years. I wonder what Dan Kemmis would say.

Kemmis lends clear vision

Subject: New administration treats West much like the previous one.
Date: Wednesday, May 2, 2001
From: John E. Thorson,
Oakland, Calif.

To Dan Kemmis:
Once again, you have the wisdom to see the entire landscape of these issues, not just the upcoming gully or the rise on the other side. Some days, I feel like I'm reliving the 1980s in a much older body.

Politics is personal, or certainly should be

Subject: It's politicians who meddle in forest management.
Date: Wednesday, March 7, 2001
From: Dave Skinner,
Whitefish, Mont.

Former Congressman Williams is absolutely correct in defining my previous missive as a "blunt personal attack." See, in politics, we citizens aren't able to micromanage every decision or vote or negotiation or compromise. Instead, we have to try to take a personal measure of those who wish to represent us (like we were actually ready to vote for a woman for Governor) vote for with the best "person" for the job, and hope to hell we guessed right.

As Williams suggested, I revisited his Rehberg column. No matter how carefully, diplomatically, politically dialecticized the sentence structure, Williams characterized Rehberg -- former Senate chief of staff, Montana lieutenant governor, etc. -- as a close-minded political naif. That it was said nicely makes no difference ... It was still a bombshell tossed from afar, just like most of the political bombs dropped on Montanans and other Western citizens from out-of-state courtrooms, faraway federal bureaucrats, rich social engineers and their foundations, big-city newspaper editorial boards, urban-based Green organizations, and mercenary corporate tycoons.

I just want to bring up a quick personal example related to the "Shovels to Nevada Brigade" -- actually the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade -- organized by Eureka lumberman Jim Hurst. One of our local enviros approached the Montana Wilderness Association about having Hurst meet with the MWA board. Jim told me that MWA turned the proposal down because actually having face time with Jim would make him harder to "demonize."

Oh man, that's just sick -- but it explains why Greens are so touchy about "personalizing" these issues.

Mr. Williams, any time you are ready for coffee. ... I promise to leave all my handguns at home..

Warnings weren't heard

Subject: It's politicians who meddle in forest management.
Date: Wednesday, March 7, 2001
From: Lance Olsen

My criticism of Pat Williams may have indeed been off the mark. I was disappointed in him for not making a warning that he says he made. Well, in that case, he's right that I don't remember it. Somehow, in the midst of the logging boom that took the state and region, with the many headlines that followed, I missed his warning. And, for that, I owe him an apology.

I also owe him a phone call, to ask about getting hold of the warning(s) he issued, because I'm still very curious about how it came about that his and similar warnings were ignored in the passions of a logging boom that wrought multiple abuse for Montana all the way from its workers to its wildlife.

Selective facts, misinterpretation no basis for attack

Subject: It's politicians who meddle in forest management.
Date: Tuesday, March 6, 2001
From: Pat Williams

I suppose it is incumbent upon me to defend myself against the blunt personal attack in the recent letter from Dave Skinner of Whitefish and a much lesser charge by Lance Olsen.

Mr. Skinner, I assume, is on the right, politically. At least one can infer from his angry rhetoric about "leftist Greens" that he isn't part of any political liberal wing. It is standard stuff for the Right to personify their troubles and relieve their anger with personal attacks on those with whom they disagree. The most obvious example is their drumbeat of eight years of sharp personal invective toward former President Clinton, but some of us lesser lights have also grown used to their angry rhetoric and mean personal attacts.

My column contained a simple suggestion made to incoming Congressman, my friend, Dennis Rehberg of Montana and was emphatically not an "evisceration" of him., as Mr. Skinner claimed it to be. I suggest that readers get the column and read it again; Skinner's charges are ludicrous on their face.

Mr. Skinner, three times, refers to me as "elder statesman" and then makes light of the phrase. I'm not, nor do I try to be, an elder statesman. I like Harry Truman's definition of that phrase: "Elder statesmen are nothing more than dead politicians." I didn't leave my position as Montana's congressman to return to this state and hide out in the hopes of being remembered for my polite silence. It may take some time for the Right to get used to it but I'm a very live politician who is running neither for nor from anything.

Mr. Skinner, in his petulance, couldn't resist mentioning that indeed I had left Congress and that he is "one of many Montanans glad for it." I have no trouble with that so long as he remembers one other thing: Montanans always knew where I stood on the issues , particularly the critical issue of public land management . They elected and re-elected this conservationist, this environmentalist, if Skinner prefers, to the U.S. House of Representatives more consecutive times then any other Montanan in our state's history , often by handsome margins.

Compared to Mr. Skinner, Lance Olsen's criticism of my congressional policy is very mild, complaining only that I did not "step forward" to warn about the glut of tree harvesting ongoing in the 1980s and its long term ramifications to our timber workers . I did indeed make those warnings. I'm sure Mr. Olsen doesn't remember my warnings but they were there nonetheless. Some people apparently live in a forest in which trees don't fall unless they personally hear them topple.

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