FEATURE
ARTICLE- Dec.
6 , 2004
Where do we go from here? Taking the West Forward
by Staff
In his 1992 book Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the
Future of the West, Charles Wilkinson writes that in the modern era,
Westerners need to "move beyond settlement and to achieve resource
sustainability, economic stability, and social justice in a great
land."
That call for change saw some results in the 1990s,
but during the last four years, the movement to reform the West
has slowed. The Bush administration has opened the region’s
resources to development, massively increasing oil and gas drilling
on both public and private land. At the same time, it has dramatically
reduced public involvement in decision making. The federal government
has repeatedly disregarded or manipulated its own scientists’
work, sometimes to devastating effect, as during the repeated die-offs
of salmon and endangered steelhead in the Klamath Basin. It has
stripped roadless forestlands and citizen-proposed wilderness areas
of federal protection. The list goes on.
For many Westerners, the presidential election offered hope for
a political transformation, and a chance to work toward a more progressive
future for the region. That transformation did not happen.
But regardless of the national political situation during the next
four years, we need to keep moving forward. We have been running
the West at full throttle for a long time, and the dashboard is
aglow with warning lights: water shortages, forests aflame, water
contamination from coalbed methane drilling, and the conversion
of wildlife habitat into housing at breakneck speed. If we refuse
to acknowledge the problems, disaster may not be far off.
The beginning of a presidential term presents Westerners with an
opportunity to identify the problems that most threaten the future
of our region, and to begin talking about how we might take them
on. In this edition of High Country News, we focus on 10 issues
in desperate need of action. These are challenges that we believe
are nonpartisan, and that will remain significant far beyond the
next four years. They can — and should — unite the West.
If there is a common theme, it is that much of the vision and leadership
must come from the ground level. If we can show signs of progress
on the ground, the Bush administration — which touts itself
as a champion of local control — will have no choice but to
acknowledge and encourage these initiatives.
As history has repeatedly shown, reform will come only incrementally.
But the challenges described here give cause for hope: In seeking
solutions, we may yet be able to forge a collective commitment to
finding a way of living in the West that works.
—THE EDITORS OF HIGH COUNTRY NEWS
ENERGY
States lead the charge for renewables
In a speech 25 years ago, President Jimmy Carter
asked, "Why have we not been able to get together as a nation
to resolve our serious energy problem?"
In the mire of the 1979 energy crisis, Carter called on Americans
to conserve energy. He also set a goal that by 2000, 20 percent
of the electricity generated in the United States would be from
the sun.
But in the years that followed, the country made little progress
toward that goal, and when 2000 arrived, the United States was far
from clean and green. Instead, two oil company executives rose to
power: President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
They immediately set out to increase oil and natural gas production.
The Bush administration has called to open Alaska’s Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, to "expedite" energy
projects on the West’s public lands, and to "streamline"
environmental laws across the nation. This November, when Americans
signed up Bush and Cheney for four more years — and boosted
the Republican majority in Congress — they chose production
over conservation.
That leaves the states to explore renewable energy options and
energy efficiency on their own. Colorado just became the nation’s
18th state to set its own renewable energy standards; utilities
must generate 10 percent of the state’s energy from renewable
sources by 2015. And Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, D, has called
for her state to become the "next Persian Gulf of solar energy."
California has an ambitious 20 percent by 2017 goal, and state legislatures
in Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona have all set renewable goals as
well.
The Western Governors’ Association recently rolled out a
program to track the use of renewable energy in the Western states.
The association intends to turn the program into a renewables-credit
system, allowing companies to meet state renewable-energy standards
by purchasing credits from businesses in other states.
Even with these efforts toward regional cooperation, the states
still need help from Congress. When a tax credit for wind energy
projects expired at the end of 2003, it took Congress almost a year
to reauthorize it, halting billions of dollars’ worth of new
projects in 2004. Restoring the 1.8 cent per kilowatt hour credit
is a start — but it will expire again at the end of 2005,
and it’s anybody’s guess what the more conservative
incoming Congress will do next year. Although advocates for clean
energy aren’t as easy to find as those for the fossil fuel
industry, there are three names that stand out among congressional
leaders: Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.
Still, it’s going to take more than a half-hearted commitment
to creating a clean energy economy. "Imagine if some of this
stuff had started in 1979 (with Carter)," says Richard Grossman,
who led the fight against nuclear energy in the 1970s and today
heads the nonprofit Project on Corporations, Law and Democracy.
"It could have been done. It’s not a technological problem;
it’s a problem of political will."
GLOBAL WARMING
Westerners can speak truth to power
You didn’t need to see this summer’s
blockbuster, The Day After Tomorrow, to grasp the impacts of global
warming on the West. The region got a live-action sneak preview
back in the summer of 2002, when drought and high temperatures fed
record-setting wildfires.
Was this really global warming at work? Most scientists, with their
customary caution, still aren’t ready to give a definite answer
to that question. But they will say that in the future, the West
is likely to look a lot like the summer of 2002. With continued
global warming, current research suggests, the Interior West can
expect deeper and more widespread drought, hotter temperatures,
less snow — and, of course, more and bigger wildfires (HCN,
9/27/04: In a warming West, expect more fire).
Yet the Bush administration isn’t satisfied with the international
scientific near-consensus that humans are changing the climate.
The president and administration officials emphasize the uncertainties
about the causes and effects of global warming, and oppose mandatory
curbs on greenhouse gas production.
The West, however, isn’t waiting for Washington. Nonprofit
groups such as the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and Cities
for Climate Protection are encouraging local governments and businesses
to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. More than three dozen
Western cities, including "red state" metropolises such
as Salt Lake City and Tucson, have already cut their energy use
— and consequent greenhouse gas production — as part
of the international Cities for Climate Protection program.
On the "blue" Coast, California, Washington and Oregon
have all taken steps to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, and in
late 2003, the three governors pledged to cooperate on new climate-protection
policies. The California Legislature has approved standards expected
to reduce heat-trapping automobile emissions by about 30 percent
by 2016. Earlier this year, Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski, D, created
a task force of academics, environmentalists, businesspeople and
others to identify ways for the state to cut its greenhouse-gas
production; among its draft recommendations is the adoption of the
California tailpipe standards.
But cities and states can’t do it alone. To effectively slow
— and eventually reverse — the impacts of global warming,
federal action is needed. Arizona Sen. John McCain, R, has championed
legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions, and his dogged advocacy
has put a valuable bipartisan face on the issue. But the McCain-Lieberman
bill, which was defeated 43-55 in a Senate vote last year, will
face an even tougher crowd in the new Congress.
What is certain is that in the continuing push for national action
on global warming, Westerners can play an important role. Because
we’ve had a glimpse of the future under global warming, we
now have a dramatic — and instructive — story to tell.
Pressure from state governments and grassroots initiatives, combined
with the ever-louder international call for action on greenhouse
gas emissions, will eventually become impossible for the White House
to ignore. Westerners can help make that happen sooner, not later.
WATER
It’s time to get flexible
It usually takes a crisis to spur change in the world of Western
water. As luck would have it, a major drought in the Colorado River
Basin has arrived at the perfect time.
After a century’s worth of tremendous public investment in
the construction of Western waterworks, we have piled up plenty
of water behind dams. Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which together
hold four years’ worth of the Colorado River’s flow,
have often been depicted as a sort of regional insurance policy.
Now, after five full years of drought, they are half-empty, most
of the water having gone not to cities or to the environment, but
to grow crops such as iceberg lettuce in California’s Imperial
Valley.
It is time to remove the bar from the door so that water can begin
moving to where it’s most needed — to meet the evolving
needs of the West’s urban areas as well as those of the region’s
streams and rivers. It is possible to do so equitably through the
use of water transfers, which allow those in need of water to lease
or otherwise "borrow" it from willing water rights holders,
many of whom claimed their rights over a century ago.
Transfers are not a radical concept. They’ve long been used
in Colorado and, more recently, in California, where they have put
water into the state’s Environmental Water Account. That account
is, in part, a creation of the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which
has moved forward in fits and starts since the 1980s to make water
transfers possible. The Bush administration has vowed to continue
this progress in its Water 2025 initiative, which was unveiled a
year and a half ago. But Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton has
also been painfully insistent on the principle that water is a states’
issue.
States and cities have been sorting things out for themselves:
Most recently, Las Vegas and the Metropolitan Water District of
California inked an agreement to trade Colorado River credits to
meet short-term needs. The federal government gave its blessing
to the deal, but it needs to take a more active role in facilitating
interstate transfers, and in allowing transfers of water from farmers
to urban areas and streams where the need is acute.
Encouraging water transfers does not mean that the West’s
urbanites will rise to greatness with their boot on farming’s
throat. In one of the most promising tactics, pioneered in California
in the 1980s, cities invest in making farms more efficient by lining
canals with concrete to prevent seepage, or by helping farmers convert
from flood irrigation to more efficient watering methods. In exchange,
the cities get the conserved water.
Transfers will provide the sort of adaptability that’s needed
to thread the needle of the current drought. They will not, however,
eliminate the need for a crucial debate: Will we simply trade one
kind of water-intensive growth in the desert for another, or will
we use this crisis to begin putting the brakes on development, and
diversify our strategies for living in this dry land?
THE NUCLEAR WEST
States need to take a stand on weapons, workers and waste
The Cold War is over, and aboveground nuclear testing ended in
1992, but a new nuclear age is dawning in the West. As the Bush
administration requests billions of dollars from Congress for nuclear
weapons maintenance, manufacturing and research, Western states
are vying to score the next big contract — either to resume
production of "pits" to replace aging triggers in the
nation’s existing nuclear stockpile, or to develop nuclear
"bunker-buster" weapons (HCN, 9/1/03: Courting the bomb).
But communities should ask themselves if the prospect of new jobs
is worth the fallout of nuclear proliferation. That question is
particularly important as 140,000 American soldiers slog through
a war in Iraq that was marketed by the Bush administration as a
search for "weapons of mass destruction."
We might also look a little closer to home to see how Western weapons
workers and "downwinders" have fared over the last 60
years. Today, four years after Congress passed a bill to compensate
Cold War-era weapons workers who became sick as a result of their
work, 98 percent of those dying workers are still waiting for their
claims to be processed. Meanwhile, citizens who lived downwind from
the last generation of nuclear tests sit through one court case
after another, as the federal government denies responsibility for
the thousands of cancer cases that victims claim have resulted from
fallout. And this fall, Congress has approved a bill allowing the
Energy Department to "reclassify" high-level radioactive
waste at weapons sites as "waste incidental to reprocessing"
— thereby allowing the federal government to simply leave
the waste where it is.
The time has come for states to oppose a reckless federal policy
of proliferation, by refusing to take part in building new weapons
— and refusing to be a dumping ground for a new generation
of nuclear waste. Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, introduced a bill last
year that would require Congress, rather than the president, to
authorize resumption of nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site.
But he supports nuclear weapons production and voted to decrease
the amount of time required for the site to be "test-ready."
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., will soon become the new Senate minority
leader. Reid opposes storage of the nation’s nuclear waste
at Yucca Mountain and supports aid for weapons workers and communities
affected by fallout; now may be the time for him to tackle the problem
at its production-and-testing root.
In the absence of federal leadership, grassroots groups will have
to keep the nonproliferation flame burning. Groups such as the New
Mexico-based Nuclear Watch and the Los Alamos Study Group, the Healthy
Environment Alliance of Utah and the Natural Resources Defense Council
persist in holding the federal government accountable for its actions.
They also have the foresight and compassion to try to prevent new
bombs from being built in the first place.
ENDANGERED SPECIES
Reform the act to save it
The 1973 Endangered Species Act is a crucial tool for protecting
the West’s environment. But the ESA is far from perfect.
For years, Congress has refused to provide the agencies in charge
of endangered species protection with enough money to determine
which species to protect, much less to actually protect them. Those
agencies — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries — spend much
of their inadequate budgets defending themselves from lawsuits by
environmentalists, who charge them with neglecting their ESA responsibilities.
The key to reviving the ESA is money. There needs to be a steady
funding source to provide more incentives for landowners to protect
and create endangered species habitat. Increased, regular funding
would help eliminate the backlog of species still waiting for consideration,
and bolster recovery plans for those already listed. It would also
help support the reintroduction of species into habitat from which
they have disappeared.
But some changes may be merited, including tweaking one aspect
of the law that many see as unfair: It applies not only to federal
land, but also to private landowners. And over the years, protecting
endangered species and habitat has cost landowners many millions
of dollars by limiting development and reducing farm and ranch production.
Some environmentalists acknowledge that if society wants to protect
species and habitat on private land, the taxpayers should do more
to pay for it. There have been some attempts to reform the law.
Changes made during the Clinton administration, for example, allow
landowners some flexibility if they participate in "habitat
conservation plans" and obtain permits for impacts on endangered
species. But so far, Congress has failed to provide significant
cash to landowners.
Now, Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif.,
who chair key congressional committees, are trying to address property-rights
concerns through a large-scale rewriting of the law. Their proposal
would weaken the requirement for protecting "critical habitat"
and require more "peer review" by scientists outside the
agencies, which means scientists funded by industry. As one agency
biologist says, "You can’t beat industry science,"
because industry can afford to hire an overwhelming number of scientists
who know where their money comes from.
Environmentalists have a much better chance of heading off such
attacks if they support the reforms needed to make the law less
of a target for property-rights advocates. Any reform of the Endangered
Species Act will involve trade-offs — but those may be necessary
to keep the law alive.
PRIVATE LANDS
The ‘rest of the West’ is more important than ever
The West is renowned for its public lands, but roughly half the
region is privately owned. The private lands, located primarily
in the valley bottoms, are not only the most biologically rich in
the West; they are also the most endangered. Ranchlands and farmlands
are being converted to housing tracts and strip malls at an astonishing
rate (HCN, 3/29/04: Who will take over the ranch?).
Nonetheless, it is private lands that present some of the greatest
conservation opportunities for the next four years and beyond. Over
the past decade, a land trust movement has sprung to life to keep
the most valuable lands intact. The more than 265 land trusts in
the West have conserved over 2.5 million acres through conservation
easements and outright purchase.
But that is just a drop in the bucket: The West has 100 million
acres of private ranchlands alone. As Alan Front, senior vice president
of the Trust for Public Land, says, "There is an ocean of need
and a trickle of cash."
Still, Westerners continue to show that they are willing to tax
themselves to protect private lands from the bulldozer blade. In
this election, they approved ballot measures amounting to $431.5
million for land and conservation easements, according to the Trust
for Public Land.
These local efforts can be leveraged into even more protection,
with help from the state and federal governments. But Western states
have generally allocated few dollars to private-lands conservation,
and the Bush administration and Congress have been stingy with funding
for the past four years.
The Land and Water Conservation Fund, which is the granddaddy of
funds for conservation purchases, is supposed to be filled each
year with federal royalties from offshore oil and gas development.
But the fund has steadily decreased, from a high of $450 million
in 2001 to just $175 million in 2004.
Still, other sources of money have grown under the Bush administration.
The Forest Legacy Program, the Farm and Ranchland Protection Program,
and funding for Habitat Conservation Plans, which protect endangered
species, now each provide approximately $100 million a year to purchase
private lands or conservation easements.
But the biggest bang for private-land conservation may come through
another Bush administration priority — tax reform. Conservationists,
allied with ranchers, farmers and sportsmen’s groups, will
continue pushing for reforms in the federal tax code that increase
the incentives for landowners to voluntarily conserve wildlife habitat,
says Rand Wentworth, director of the Land Trust Alliance.
The reforms, which Wentworth says could leverage $18 billion worth
of conservation easement donations over the next decade, didn’t
make it into law this year, but will be reintroduced next year.
Standing at the gate is Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, R, chairman of
the Finance Committee. Last year, following a Washington Post exposé,
Grassley held a series of hearings looking into the legality and
propriety of land-acquisition practices at The Nature Conservancy
and other land trusts. The high-profile attention has forced internal
reforms at The Nature Conservancy and set up a quid pro quo for
any future tax-reform legislation: Grassley will not include any
new conservation incentives without other reform measures, including
tighter land-appraisal standards to ensure that conservation easements
won’t be abused for personal profit.
HEALTHY FORESTS
Learn to love the cut
There’s been a lot of ink spilled about the evils of the 2003
Healthy Forests Restoration Act. The act’s backers, including
Western congressmen and President Bush, sold it as a way to protect
communities from wildfire, but critics say it strips the forests
of protection and, in some cases, deprives the public of its right
to comment on and appeal timber sales.
For all its genuine dangers, however, the Healthy Forests Act is
something Westerners need to embrace.
Already, under the act, local advisory groups, fire-safe councils
and watershed alliances are working with the Forest Service and
Bureau of Land Management to protect homes from wildfire and restore
forests. Communities that develop fire-protection plans can receive
funding to thin trees and clear brush on both public and private
lands. Tribal, state and local governments can get funding and technical
assistance for watershed restoration and protection projects. There’s
also money for research on environmentally friendly forest practices,
and for jump-starting small businesses that use small-diameter trees
and other "biomass." There’s even a clause that
allows the government to create temporary "healthy forest reserves"
to protect endangered species on private lands.
Another law passed in 2003 gives agencies authority to use multiyear
"stewardship contracts," which pay contractors based on
the condition of the forest left behind, rather than the logs they
remove. These long-term contracts give small operators some financial
stability, and can guarantee a supply of small trees and biomass
to local manufacturers and power plants. Any money the forests make
from selling the logs can be plowed back into local projects, rather
than sent to the federal treasury.
The alternative to making these tools work — watching the
forests languish and houses burn while the agencies and environmentalists
are stuck in gridlock — is far worse.
"It’s up to the folks who live next to those forests
to keep them on the straight and narrow," says George Sexton,
conservation director of the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center in
Ashland, Ore. If agencies go back to cutting old-growth trees and
logging roadless areas, he says, groups like his will "sue
their pants off." And if the administration guts the laws and
stacks the courts to make those lawsuits futile, activists will
take to the trees, as they have in the last old-growth redwoods
on private timberlands.
"There are few laws protecting (those trees on private lands),
but the timber companies have to fight old-growth tree by old-growth
tree," says Sexton. "If that’s what they want to
do on the national forests, that’s fine by me."
AGENCY OPENNESS
Support your local bureaucrat
In contrast to corporations, public agencies such as the U.S. Forest
Service and Bureau of Land Management are required to open their
doors — and their decisions — to the public. Over the
past several years, however, federal land-management agencies have
become increasingly secretive, to the point that they seem like
branches of the timber and energy industries.
It has become difficult for the press, and the public at large,
to talk with agency personnel. Requests for interviews with agency
employees — even leaders such as Bureau of Land Management
Director Kathleen Clarke and Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth
— are routinely bumped to politically appointed higher-ups
in the Interior and Agriculture departments.
Citizens often have to force agencies to share information by using
the Freedom of Information Act, and even that has its limits: More
than three and a half years after environmental groups filed a FOIA
request, and then a lawsuit, to obtain information about Vice President
Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force, they are still waiting.
National energy policy isn’t the only thing being decided
behind closed doors. Outgoing Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman
rescinded the Roadless Area Conservation Rule despite overwhelming
public comment in support of it. The department has accepted a new
round of comment on a revised rule, but it makes no secret of the
fact that public comments are not votes, and will have less influence
on the new rule (HCN, 4/26/04: Outsourced).
The most alarming phenomenon has been the stifling of scientists’
work. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has repeatedly ignored
its own scientists’ recommendations for recovery of the Rio
Grande silvery minnow in New Mexico. Similar suppression of biologists’
research in NOAA Fisheries helped cause the death of 58,000 salmon
and steelhead in the Klamath Basin in 2002 (HCN, 6/23/03: Are minnow
scientists still under the gun?) (HCN, 6/23/03: Sound science goes
sour).
A few dissenters have spoken out. BLM archaeologist Blaine Miller,
whose concerns about the impacts of oil and gas exploration on archaeological
sites led to his removal from a project in Utah, continues to speak
candidly to the press (HCN, 7/19/04: BLM gags an archaeologist to
get out the gas). NOAA Fisheries biologist Michael Kelly blew the
whistle on his bosses when they doctored river-flow recommendations
on the Klamath; he has since resigned in the face of similar censorship
on another project.
But truly bridging the secrecy divide is a challenge for people
outside the government as well. Local citizens and environmental
groups need to become savvier watchdogs, to learn the issues inside
and out, and to be front and center at every public meeting. They
also need to have the sort of over-the-backyard-fence conversations
with agency staffers that seem to have disappeared with the rise
of the FOIA request. No matter how badly science and public process
have been manipulated, continued and unrelenting public involvement
will create a brand of local solidarity that extends into the agencies,
to the bureaucrats under siege.
MAKING IT LOCAL
Time for a new Sagebrush Rebellion
If there were any doubts that the Bush administration is out of
touch with Westerners on environmental issues, the November elections
should have laid them to rest. In race after race, Westerners stood
up to industry and demanded protection for their crisp, clear air,
gurgling trout streams and wide-open landscapes. Oddly, the administration
insists that the election gave it a mandate to continue to dismantle
environmental protections, clearing the way for its corporate backers
to run roughshod over the region.
To make the administration understand the error of its ways, it
will take a new Sagebrush Rebellion.
In fact, a new rebellion has been brewing for some time, and it
has a distinctly different flavor than the original, which was championed
by President Ronald Reagan and Interior Secretary James Watt, who
set out to plunder the public lands. The new rebels recognize that
the days of strip-mining and clear-cutting and overgrazing are past,
and that the future rests, first, on repairing damaged landscapes,
and second, on building an economy that doesn’t clean out
the West’s larder in one massive gulp.
New Mexico rancher Tweeti Blancett is one of the rebellion’s
many local leaders. A staunch Republican, she turned against George
W. Bush when his energy policies opened her family’s ranch
to natural gas drilling, destroying the grass and the groundwater.
She’s locked drillers off her ranch, gone to Washington, D.C.,
to lobby her congressmen, and pushed for change in the Republican
Party. Most recently, she’s taken to the courts as a plaintiff
in two lawsuits, one from the Sierra Club, and another from Karen
Budd-Falen, a darling of the original Sagebrush Rebellion.
This kind of work, says Blancett, is "bringing people together
from all across the West that have different views." The rebellion
is also raging in rural Montana, where rancher-conservationists,
organized as the Rosebud Conservation Alliance, recently put tight
restrictions on coalbed methane drilling (HCN, 11/22/04: Election
Day surprises in the schizophrenic West). In New Mexico, environmentalists
are working to get a reformer elected to the board of the state
Farm Bureau. In Washington, some loggers are saying, "Thanks,
but no," to the Bush administration’s offer of old-growth
timber sales, and instead putting their energy into restoring cut-over
forests (HCN, 9/27/04: Life After Old Growth).
The new Sagebrush Rebels may be able to turn the far right’s
agenda to their own purposes. Bush administration appointees and
congressional Republicans claim they want to put the public lands
in the hands of the locals. If locals understand that finding a
lasting place in the region requires standing together against industry
efforts to plunder it, they may finally create a Sagebrush Rebellion
worthy of the West.
SOLIDARITY
Take it to the streets
The environmental movement campaigned against George W. Bush for
three years and had no noticeable influence on his re-election.
That’s the clearest evidence yet that the movement has stalled.
There is widespread public support for protecting environmental
quality, but the national groups have trouble tapping into it. For
decades, they’ve built their staffs and budgets, but as they’ve
grown large, they’ve become a bureaucracy — a movement
of clerks filing the paperwork of appeals and lawsuits and official
comments, insisting on procedure and technicalities.
The movement needs to reinvigorate itself, to get more creative,
and to reach out to people who don’t necessarily consider
themselves environmentalists.
Some groups already help provide farmers with windmills that generate
clean energy as well as profit. Some seek tax credits for automakers
that make cleaner-running vehicles, thereby also preserving union
jobs. Recently, hunters and anglers have been enlisted in the campaign
to save roadless forest habitat.
Environmental issues need be framed around people, and the movement
could do that in a big way by marching on Washington, D.C. In 1963,
Martin Luther King Jr. drew 250,000 people to the Washington Mall
to rally for civil rights. Today — when the Sierra Club alone
has 700,000 members — the environmental movement should be
able to rally a million people to demonstrate the extent of public
opposition to anti-environmental policies.
A Green March would be proof of the great variety of people who
believe that environmental protection is important. It could include
the mothers of children who suffer from asthma, which scientific
studies link to air pollution. It could include the residents of
Libby, Mont., the mining town where people are dying from the asbestos
fibers in their lungs. It could include government scientists whose
research is being squelched; American Indians and commercial fishermen
who want more done to save salmon runs; and anglers who can no longer
eat the fish they catch because of mercury contamination from power
plants. It could include caravans of ranchers who don’t want
their land ruined by coalbed methane wells, and outfitters and even
real estate agents who rely on healthy rivers and scenic country
to lure their customers.
Westerners could link up with people from West Virginia who want
no more of their mountaintops lopped off for coal mining, and people
from Florida who want more done to save the Everglades — and
who want the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to be saved from oil
drilling.
A Green March would strengthen the identity of the movement and
widen its outreach. Most importantly, it would flesh out the movement
with a million faces, and reveal the depth of popular concern about
the environment in a far more tangible way than a million e-mailed
public comment letters — or an exit poll — ever could.
To participate in an online forum about the future of the West,
and to meet other Westerners who are working locally to make positive
change, visit www.hcn.org/takeitforward.jsp
.
Contributors to this project were High Country News executive director
Paul Larmer, editor Greg Hanscom, editor in the field Ray Ring,
associate editor Matt Jenkins, assistant editor Laura Paskus and
contributing editor Michelle Nijhuis.
