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The
way we debate resource issues
may guarantee no middle ground
By
Lorie Higgins
for Headwaters News
"There are few social changes that
can be opposed on the ground that they are contrary to human nature
itself."
--
John Dewey, 1938
As a sociologist who has been studying natural resource conflict
and conflict resolution over the past 10 years, I’ve observed
that most people taking an interest in natural resource debates
seem to want the same thing: healthy landscapes.
From a facilitator’s point of view, this common interest is
a great place to begin a dialogue designed to develop creative solutions.
Yet, as Patricia Limerick said so well, the "legacy of conquest"
continues where social groups -- even those that share common values
and interests -- in the West are constantly engaged in efforts to
displace one another.
Western history has been an ongoing competition for legitimacy —
for the right to claim for oneself and sometimes for one’s
group the status of legitimate beneficiary of Western resources.
A colleague of mine read somewhere that groups who are closest together
in terms of values and interests often wage the biggest battles
against one another (her example was church fissures about baptism
– dunkers vs. sprinklers).
This pattern is apparent in a number of Western environmental issues
and is reason for measured optimism that collaborative strategies
can be helpful in resolving some of them.
Yet, this optimism is restrained because despite a long history
of conflict over natural resources, we continue to make poor strategy
choices for resolving pernicious resource issues.
A mid-1990s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) effort to protect
an aquifer in eastern Washington offers a classic example of what
goes wrong with traditional modes of decision-making and how good
we have become at doing end runs around common interests.
This proposal would designate a large, interconnected
system of aquifers underlying much of eastern Washington and a sliver
of the western Idaho panhandle a "sole source" aquifer.
This means the aquifer is the sole drinking water source for the
communities that depend on it. The designation requires a review
process to ensure that federally funded projects, such as highways
and irrigation systems, will not contaminate the aquifer.
This program is relatively benign as far as regulations
go. It had been successfully implemented in other parts of the country,
and for the most part, had only served to improve project designs.
That is why EPA officials were perplexed by the ensuing controversy.
Public hearings and input periods were extended, scientific panels
(of dueling scientists) were convened, a Wise-Use group formed,
and a little, farmer-friendly environmental group in Idaho was vilified
in the media.
There were death threats, covert maneuverings by industry groups,
plenty of hard feelings, and EPA, in the end, scratching heads,
with glazed eyes, saying "what happened?"
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Bush
plan could become
a vehicle for collaboration
By
Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
Sept. 4, 2002
Collaboration on natural resource issues has moved
along in fits and starts in recent Western headlines, although it
seems to have been mostly fits.
Montana forest officials trying to develop a travel management plan
for sensitive areas along the Rocky Mountain Front are
accused both of allowing too much ORV use and of shutting ORVs
out altogether, depending on who's doing the criticizing. Utah Rep.
Chris Cannon has taken aim at BLM appraisers who dared
to question the value of a land trade Cannon is pushing, and
hearings on a management plan for the Grand Canyon threaten to devolve
into a debate over whether to ban motorized rafts on the Colorado
River.
But perhaps the greatest opportunity for collaboration, or maybe
a chance to validate the most cynical among us, is President Bush's
plan to revitalize forest health by mixing commercial logging with
necessary thinning.
In general, the idea is to remove the smaller-diameter trees that
turn a benign and beneficial natural burn into a raging conflagration.
But those trees have little commercial value, and there's about
195 million acres of national forest land that needs thinning.
Bush proposes to let companies cut
enough mature and valuable trees to entice loggers to take out
the kindling, as well. And, of course, that would require relaxing
some very basic public comment, appeal and litigation avenues that
can slow needed work.
The firm details end there, and the gaping lack of specifics has
fueled the widest possible range of opinions.
Bush's secretaries of Agriculture and Interior quickly added to
the spin, with a joint editorial that said the impediments must
go. They said routine thinning projects take six months to plan,
at a national cost of $250 million a year, and nearly
half are appealed or litigated.
The Spokesman-Review weighed in with a commentary typical of
many Western editorial pages: It's
not reasonable to prevent all logging on national forests and
neither is it prudent to turn them over to timber companies. Good
for Bush, said the Spokesman and others, the situation needs intervention
and it's just as irresponsible to compound the overcutting mistakes
of the past by locking up forests for the future.
The New York Times, in its own editorial and in a fairly scathing
guest column, blasted the administration for what it deemed a blatant
revival of corporate welfare for timber companies.
One column questioned whether
the companies would really be limited in what they take, given
the Forest Service's poor track record for accountability. It said
little of the commercially valuable timber appears to be near residential
areas most at risk from fire, and the Forest Service has consistently
lost so much money on the "good" sales it offered that
the Bush administration last year stopped releasing the figures.
The editorial questioned why
a proposal to thin far less acreage and only around wildland-urban
interfaces -- a plan proposed by the Clinton administration and
expanded upon by Western governors, conservationists and the Bush
administration itself last May -- has evolved into 190 million-plus
acres that need thinned, unless it's intended to give companies
access to backcountry timber.
And the Times said, the fact that the Bush plan is expected to be
introduced into the Senate by Idaho's Larry Craig should give environmentalists
no comfort that new restrictions on appeals won't be wielded with
enthusiasm.
Montana Gov. Judy Martz, a self-avowed lapdog of industry, gave
environmentalists
another chill of premonition when she announced on consecutive
days that if it were up to her, she would ban all appeals of certain
timber sales, and that she would accompany Bush on the Oregon trip.
If the critics are wrong, and the proposal is not just a sop to
timber companies, the plan and its lack of specificity to date may
offer model chances at collaboration. Many Western voices are calling
for moderation. Many are tired of the stalemate that increases fire
danger and provides few local jobs.
Some of the more moderate voices are calling for projects
by local contractors under local supervision. A Christian Science
Monitor column noted some forest workers in California are
finding small-diameter trees profitable. They can mill some
lumber and other products, though they can't afford to ship them.
So they use their raw products to feed new, local value-added industries.
The answer is not in the Bush proposal, the Monitor piece said.
Bush would simply reward timber-industry supporters, who donated
$2 million for Republicans in the 2000 elections, under the guise
of fireproofing the forest.
But if local companies, forest officials and environmentalists could
negotiate projects that thinned fire risk at minimal cost or even
a profit, even the cynics would have to notice.
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