|
|
|
| Call it collaboration or consensus,
a new book explores ways Westerners can get things done with
less conflict |
By Ed Marston
for Headwaters News |
| The West is famous for feuds
and fights: between cowboys and Indians, sheepmen and cattlemen,
sodbusters and ranchers. For awhile, in the early to middle
1900s,
the region quieted. But ever since people with different values starting moving
here during the 1960s and 1970s, life has gotten nasty.
The newcomers, many from eastern and Midwestern suburbs, were horrified that
Westerners were not only disobeying the "Keep off the lawn" signs,
but were letting livestock eat the grass, were plugging rivers with concrete,
were digging and drilling beneath the ground in search of minerals and BTUs,
and were clear-cutting forests.
It is about a revolution in
the making, one centered on people - not "representatives" but individuals
generally representing themselves - meeting to work out differences.
This clash between the local Western way of making
a living and the values of the newcomers has roiled the Western scene now for
just short of a half a century.
But long before the Greens came on the scene, with their appeals and litigation
and lobbying, Congress realized that it could easily spend full time legislating
contentious Western issues.
So it delegated those powers to what a fine new book,
The Western Confluence, by Matthew McKinney and William Harmon, calls "little
legislatures." These land and wildlife management agencies, such as the
Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service, pass laws, which they call
policies and regulations, to govern use of the land and its resources.
For awhile, starting in the early 1900s, the nation believed it had solved the
problem of natural resource management, at least on the half of the interior
West owned by the federal government.
Thanks to President Teddy Roosevelt and Forest
Service Chief Gifford Pinchot, control was vested in top-down management implementing
policies that provided the greatest good for the greatest number. The keys were
knowledge, expertise and incorruptibility.
To take the Forest Service as an example, for its first 50 years, scientific
management and top-down control led it to protect the land from loggers, ranchers,
miners and others who would ravage it for private profit. What had already been
damaged the agency worked to restore, with district rangers back then bragging
of how many trees they had planted in their careers. One claimed to have planted
a million – a sort of reverse Paul Bunyan.
But in the post-World War II economic boom, the agency turned to logging roughly
five times as much timber per year as it had through the 1940s.
In the early 1990s, in the face of exhausted resources and public distaste for
damaged land, the timber cut collapsed from 10 to 12 billion board-feet back
to a few billion board-feet per year.
Congress, in its enthusiasm for economic progress, had passed laws and made appropriations
that allowed unlimited roading and logging and grazing and mining. But in its
just-as-sincere enthusiasm for vanishing species, intact scenery, freely flowing
rivers and clear air and clean water, Congress had also passed laws that interfered
mightily with cutting, damming, mining and drilling.
As in Alice in Wonderland, the law meant exactly what the interpreter of the
law said it meant, and the courts shut down logging and damming and came close
to crippling grazing. At the bottom of commodity production and environmental
laws, it turned out, lay human values and politics. In our naïve, very American
desire to have all things, we had engineered a major train wreck.
If there was a major problem, then there must be a Fifth Columnist enemy, and
the West's Republicans were quick and clever enough to pin the traitor tail on
environmentalists and Democrats. As a result, the interior West has turned hard
right, politically, since the 1980s. Environmentalists and Democrats have been
marginalized and demonized as the "other." Western representatives
today are from a coastal city or from Boulder or Santa Fe.
If you live in the rural West, you
may be familiar with efforts to settle disputes on the ground. You know the
obstacles:
a lack of skills and resources on the
part of citizens, a "father knows best" attitude on the part of the
agencies, and a fear by large environmental groups of local people and local
power.
But thoughtful Westerners of all political leanings understood
that the problems went deeper than Bill Clinton declaring
yet another national monument. And so,
beneath the sturm und drang of western politics, some Westerners are at work
gradually creating a new system of governance for this contentious region.
The Western Confluence is an excellent guide to this work-in-progress. It is
about a revolution in the making, one centered on people - not "representatives" but
individuals generally representing themselves - meeting to work out differences.
The evolving process goes by consensus, collaboration, natural resource mediation,
watershed management, co-operative management, partnerships. Whatever their names,
at the hearts of these many far-flung efforts lies the idea of citizens shaping
their lives, their communities, and the communally owned federal resources. Negotiations
that had been left to congressional hearing rooms and federal land managers writing
impact statements are now community based.
For consensus to work, solutions must be worked out on the ground, in their particularity.
If those efforts don't work, then all parties are free to revert to court and
to big ideas such as "first in time, first in right" for water buffalo,
blanket protection of endangered species by a ban on all development for Greens,
and "jobs for our children" for mill workers.
Big Ideas, always the enemy of common sense and community and progress, can be
found in the slogans used to galvanize a political base: "Cattle Free by
'93," "Custom
and Culture," "Save the Old Growth," "Wise Use."
What can a bunch of citizens without portfolios gathered in a pasture, forest
or meeting room achieve in the face of embedded bureaucracies, greedy corporations,
a century of laws and court cases, and the West's tendency to practice sound-bite
politics?
When the stars align, consensus can do a great deal. This book tells how to know
when the stars align or can be forced into alignment, and what tools are needed
to resolve conflicts over natural resources.
In my abbreviated telling, success through collaboration may not sound possible.
And I hope it doesn't sound easy. But it is happening. There is a track record.
And the successes go beyond the circumstantial or anecdotal. This book describes
the creation, here in the least populated and, thank god, least sophisticated
part of the nation, of a new way of governing.
The book's strength is its overview of how we got into our present situation,
and a step-by-step guide to getting out. What it lacks is stories about how consensus
works on the ground. So you may want to read case studies in Across the Great
Divide, edited by Philip Brick, Donald Snow and Sarah Van de Wetering, and also
published by Island Press.
If you live in the rural West, you may be familiar with efforts to settle disputes
on the ground. You know the obstacles: a lack of skills and resources on the
part of citizens, a "father knows best" attitude on the part of the
agencies, and a fear by large environmental groups of local people and local
power.
Is there a secret ingredient that paves the road to collaborative success? I
think the key is that Americans hate paralysis. We hate uncertainty. We like
to get things done, even if the things we want done are very different. We have
a tradition of progress and of trying things. We are not wedded to tradition.
So when gridlock jams us up, we tend to turn on the blockage. If collaboration
is the best way to unplug the toilet that's backing up onto the land, we
collaborate.
So collaboration is driven by a mix of human generosity, impatience, and, most
strongly, self interest.
It doesn't always work, or even often work. But neither do appeals and lawsuits,
which often just set the stage for more appeals and lawsuits. The conflict industry
thrives, but at the expense of communities and nature.
By comparison, the authors of this book believe that land, people and communities
do best where consensus and collaboration succeed.
It might be helpful to read this book in concert with a 37–page paper titled "The
Death of Environmentalism," by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. It
argues that environmentalism, by focusing narrowly on "its" issues,
has alienated potential allies and weakened itself. The paper uses global climate
change as an example of conventional environmentalism's massive failure.
The paper, the buzz of the moment, never mentions consensus or collaboration.
This paper is flawed by its jam-it-down-from-the top approach - something called
the New Apollo Project. But the underlying analysis is sound. Environmental problems
cannot be solved by focus, focus, focus, but only by including an array of problems
and interests.
There is one other thing to be said. Environmentalism, as practiced in the West
by the major environmental groups, is colonialism of the kind England practiced
in India and Egypt and South Africa. Environmentalism as a whole should welcome
consensus and collaboration, for it frees us from the white man's burden we have
arrogantly imposed on ourselves.
Ed Marston has started or re-started three newspapers in Western
Colorado, the
last of which was High Country News, which he and his wife,
Betsy, ran for 19
years. |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Send this page to a
friend or colleague
 |
| There's precedent and hope for local
interests settling their own disputes, according to "The
Western Confluence: A Guide to Governing Natural Resources,"
by Matthew McKinney and William Harmon; Island Press, 2004. |
|
|
Readers
respond
If not groups, then who
It’s not that conservation groups have to win to ensure their funding base
as much as it is they have to win to ensure the larger survival of living creatures
and ecosystems.
If the conservation groups were not there to sue when the agencies
break our environmental laws, who would keep them honest?
You can collaborate
all you want (which is not always an undesirable tactic), but if the old growth
keeps falling and the native trout dying off, you don’t have anything.
Conservation
groups also play a valuable role in ensuring caution rather than blind approval
of any action that appears harmless.
Take for example, the thinning
of largely small-diameter trees in ponderosa pine forests, most people would
say: Great what’s wrong with that? Well, for starters we really have no
idea yet what the negative effects of this regionwide, landscape-scale effort
to alter forest structure will have on watersheds and wildlife.
There are species,
such as the Abert’s squirrel, which require stands of trees 10-13 inches
in
diameter
with interlocking crowns. If the Abert’s goes, so may the goshawk.
What
about the impacts of road construction and driving heavy equipment across watersheds,
especially municipal watersheds?
Conservation groups are often the only ones
willing to ask the hard questions and weigh the benefits and costs carefully.
The realities of biodiversity loss at a continental scale may not allow us the
comfort of collaboration as Ed Marston may dream of; Mr. Marston is a romantic,
those scrambling to halt the crisis don’t always have the luxury.
Bryan Bird
Forest Program Coordinator
Forest Guardians
Public
lands are everybody's
Some folks just don't get it. It has been said a thousand, thousand times that
the national forests and other public lands are not exclusively the local backyards
of the nearby communities or states.
These lands are national treasures that
contain both long-range and near-term values and benefits; in my 40 years of
experience dealing with (and watching) public land issues and disputes, the locals
who most want to mange these lands by consensus are almost unanimously interested
in short term economic issues – more logs, more roads to reach these logs, more
cows on the range, more access for motorized vehicles.
I fully understand why
a logger or timber industry person from Whitefish leans towards resource extraction
as a primary value of the national forests. His livelihood is involved. He is
looking out for himself, his family and his employer.
The only voices in forums, meetings and "public involvement" sessions
that express concerns for ecological values, water quality and long, long-term
land management are the environmental groups-whether local or the Big Guys.
So
if you are going to organize a "local, community" consensus group to
help manage a national forest, who else but the "greenies" can honestly
represent non-economic interests. Certainly not the county commissioners or most
ultra-conservative Western legislators, or the retailer on Main Street who depends
on the mill worker and rancher for his livelihood.
I am not so naïve that I believe that environmental groups with multi-million
dollar budgets and dozens of staff are so squeaky clean that their motives never
are influenced by organizing or fund-raising goals.
But why aren't these economic
concerns just as valid as the economic concerns of the local folks who seem to
only see the surrounding forests as cash cows?
Ed Marston listed several examples of successful consensus efforts that I applaud.
However, I could not help but notice these success stories all involved grazing
ecosystems, noncommercial forestland or other areas where big timber values aren't
involved.
Efforts at local community consensus forest management in the Sierras
and southern Oregon may have made some progress, but I know of no areas where
total resolution has been reached and implemented by local group consensus sessions.
Ed Javorka
Hayden, Idaho
More
productive in court
Re: the comment "The current paradigm is for foundations and big environmental
groups to take on causes and slug it out with industry and government
agencies. They want to win, not compromise."
It is not whether they want to win, they HAVE to win. Ultimately this is about
dollars to the big business of environmentalism.
An aggressive winning record generates
more contributions to buy more lawyers to win more lawsuits to
generate more funds, etc.
Very few are on-the-ground. In-the-courts is
far more productive. For them.
C. W. Gray
Jerome, Idaho
Working public
gets left out
Ed Marston's latest blog underscores the main weakness with the
consensus process and why it will remain weak barring comprehensive
Congressional reforms of land policy and environmental laws.
As long as environmental groups can sue, or as Ed says, make sure efforts
are "sabotaged when possible by the major environmental groups" and
the minor ones (backed by the majors), consensus is a waste of time, especially
to
those wanting a positive result.
One other distinction not being made here is critical. The fact is, "the
public" is not usually an active participant in the environmental debate.
Sure, the enviros claim to represent "the public," but "the public" is
usually elsewhere -- like at work at jobs. So it is left to the paid guns on
both sides, with a smattering of retirees, enlightened small-business owners,
and
the
very rare working stiff with sympathetic employers.
Never mind that the real sympathies of "the public" -- at least the
people
close to the situation on the ground -- are more often than not with " industry."
After
all, industry provides two things that "the public" likes: employment,
with pensions, benefits and all sorts of other cool things.
More important in an environmental context, industry provides the ability to
manage land for an array of benefits -- not just environmental, but social
and economic, the latter two which environmental groups ignore at their risk.
As
for the environmental benefit, at least in the case of agriculture and forestry,
not being able to manipulate habitat through logging or grazing or crop selection
is going to have some consequences
that the real public is not going to like.
Dave Skinner
Whitefish, MT
Author's blog:
Stay outside the mainstream
Is consensus the next big thing in environmental problem solving?
I hope not, because that would be the end of it. Consensus works today because
it's an outsider movement, getting little funding from foundations and
being shunned by land management agencies, major environmental groups and business.
Even foundations that fund locally avoid consensus. Their idea of "strengthening
the grassroots" is to fund constituencies to fight for a cause: endangered
species, old-growth forests, land use planning.
Most foundations see consensus
as unfocused because consensus is about solving an array of problems, and not
just that of a creature in decline or a forest about to be roaded or a mine a
company wants to open.
Luckily, then, consensus is a pariah, lacking funding, ignored or patronized
by land management agencies, and sabotaged when possible by the major environmental
groups.
The result is that it often succeeds: in the Trout Creek Mountains of Oregon,
where it improved grazing and recovered the Lahontan cutthroat trout; in Oregon's
Steens Mountain, where it created wilderness and a more secure ranching economy;
in southern Arizona and New Mexico in the Malpai Borderlands Groups' territory;
in Nevada, where it created wilderness; in the West Elk Wilderness of Colorado,
where it improved grazing and recreation.
Looking ahead, it is on the brink of
success in the Owyhee country of Idaho, where wilderness negotiations are going
on, and in central Idaho, where the Idaho Conservation League and its ally, a
conservative Republican Congressman, are negotiating with usually hostile parties
to create capital-w wilderness, as well as places for off-road vehicles to roam.
Are these solutions of the type excoriated by the late David Brower? Is consensus
a way of cutting the baby in half, and then later cutting it in half again?
That's
not how I see it. I think consensus is about helping environmentalists get off
the high horse Brower and others have put it on. Consensus is a way to take into
account the needs and wants of others in the affected community.
Consensus is a series of rough, adaptable techniques available to any collection
of Westerners who want to solve a problem. The alternative to consensus is to
define an issue as environmental, and then hook up with the group that claims
the issue as its turf. The inevitable result is that the white knight – whether
it's the Sierra Club or Wilderness Society or Center for Biodiversity – always
comes with many implacable enemies.
If you instead broaden an environmental problem into one involving education
and economy and a community's self respect, then you have simplified things.
Once you and the diverse collection of people you are cooperating with come up
with a solution, you will usually find broad-based political support.
– Ed
Marston
Author's blog:
Thanks for the discomfort
Rancher Doc Hatfield is undoubtedly a good person; nevertheless, he has made
my life hell.
Until I met him in 1990, I was a good environmentalist: I believed
all ranchers got up thinking about how to make the most money while doing maximum
damage to the land. Given a choice between money and damage, they opted for damage.
I was happy. I understood how the world worked and through the newspaper I published
and talks I gave, I told others how it worked.
Then, one day, while explaining how the world worked to a group of sullen Forest
Service range cons (the guys in charge of managing grazing), my life got changed.
My stump speech consisted of using post World War II Berlin as a metaphor for
the interior West. I had visited Berlin in the 1960s, when entire neighborhoods
were still devastated.
I walked through the memories and remnants of a city rather
than a city itself. But the Berliners had one advantage over Westerners: They
knew what their city had been like before it was bombed. They could rebuild.
But the bombing the interior West has endured from cows and mines and chainsaws
obliterated not the just original West, but the memory of what the West once
was.
After my talk, which, I was pleased to see, had not been well received, an iconic
rancher came up to me: big hat, big belt, boots, snap-button shirt. Doc Hatfield
was also a speaker. We were what the Forest Service called "change agents," brought
in to give staff different perspectives on their work.
Hatfield said: "That was a good talk. I agree with it. What are you going
to do about it?"
I'm pretty sure I got the smarmy, Chevy Chase look I get when I'm
about to say something I think is clever. "Nothing," I said. "I'm
a journalist. If I write about a car crash, I don't have to tell how to
prevent them."
Hatfield was a step ahead of me: "Would you like to come to eastern Oregon
and see people who are doing something?"
So I went – to Brothers, as I remember – and sat for a day in a circle
with a mixed group of people, of the kind we take for granted today: environmentalists,
ranchers, citizens, agency officials, all seeking a solution to the land's
problem in a way I had never imagined.
I'd spent years writing about appeals,
litigation, and demonstrations without ever thinking that people could solve
problems by listening to each other and making suggestions.
But that's an oversimplification. It wasn't the listening or the
suggestions. Before those could take place, the people in that circle had had
to see each other as individuals, rather than as stereotypes dressed in funny,
off-putting costumes. Once that happened – once the bigotry disappeared – the
rest was, relatively, a piece of cake.
As a result of coming to understand and embrace that, my life has become hell.
Thank you Doc Hatfield.
– Ed Marston
No room left to compromise
If this method of locals and agencies and pressure groups meeting and gaining "consensus" is
so good, why does Ed Marston say that it doesn't always or often work?
Very often, no change or no solution is better that a bad solution or a half-way
solution that attempts to give everyone some part of the pie.
Some pies are not
meant to be cut, or shared. Water quality, for example. How do you compromise
on a water quality issue when you are already dealing with a stream or lake where
the water quality is degraded 90 percent below what it was, or needs to be to
protect the dependent organisms.
That is the one, major flaw in this type of process. The forests and waters
are not starting at the 50 yard line in this "game". The forests
and watersheds and biota already have their respective backs against the goalpost
line, after
having been beat backwards by decades of degrading and irresponsible actions.
If the "greens" are on the 10-yard line, we don't think it is fair
to expect us to compromise back to the 5-yard line.
The concept is a good concept, but very, very often, more compromise on environmental
issues is just an easy way out.
Congress passed some very protective, specific
environmental protection measures since 1960, and none of these have been repealed.
It is not unfair for the environmental community to expect these laws to be enforced
by the agencies and the courts.
If NFMA is too tough and impossible to implement,
then the right-wingers should get it amended by Congress. That is what a true
national consensus should be.
Ed Javorka
Hayden, Idaho
retired USFS professional
Checks
and balances
Marston's commentary also fails
to give due credence to all of the owners of the public land. While
local
communities
clearly have a
strong self-interest in the management of federal lands, so do citizens
who live thousands of miles away. And allowing these distant owners the
opportunity to be involved and express their values is something that
national environmental groups try to bring to the table.
While many conservationists would agree some issues can be solved with
collaboration and consensus-building at the local level, a number of
critical issues surrounding forest management on public lands, such as
the protection
of old growth forests and roadless areas, have defied this notion.
And
while it may be nice to pretend these conflicts have subsided, with ancient
trees still being logged and roadless areas still being developed, and
the Bush administration planning to do even more of the same, that notion
fails the reality test.
There is also a long and unfortunate history of local communities not
looking out for the long-term, and supporting the unsustainable extraction
of resources from public lands to meet their economic needs.
Rather than
going back to a system where local economic interests trump the common
good of all Americans, we need to maintain a system of checks and balances
to ensure that resource management is truly sustainable.
Adding to this challenge is an administration that has thrown the notions
of sound science and professional management out the window. Instead of
good stewardship and fair process, we are seeing more power being put
in the hands of federal agencies with a clear mandate to increase extraction,
regardless of the economic or ecological costs. Citizens are being left
at the margins and the works of many collaborative groups left on the
cutting room floor when it comes to how federal dollars for programs like
community protection from wildfire are concerned.
Finding effective solutions to community protection and restoration is
an excellent area for local collaboration efforts and is something that
many conservation organizations are embracing.
As we move forward into
the future, our hope is to see these effective solutions get the support
they deserve, rather than seeing federal dollars continue to be wasted
on vast logging projects, such the Biscuit Logging Project in Oregon,
that harm forests, fail to protect communities from fire and fan the flames
of continued conflict.
Steve Holmer
Communications Coordinator
Unified Forest Defense Campaign |
|
