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By PAT WILLIAMS
Senior fellow and regional policy associate
O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West
It is difficult to
recognize change while living through it. However, two recent decisions
involving the use of
the public’s lands signal an historic political and policy transition,
particularly here in the Rocky Mountain West.
The first of those two is the almost unanimous rejection by Western governors
of the Bush administration’s five-year long attempt to punch roads
into the last remaining wild lands here in the Rockies. The second is
the public’s outrage at the year end congressional attempt to sell
massive amounts of our commonly held land.
The ham-handed effort to open up the West’s wild places
to road building was a mistake fostered by the Bush administration’s
belief, or hope, that most Westerners want our wild lands developed. That
myth, as with most wWstern fictions, was long ago created and paid for
by those who live outside the Rocky Mountain West and is being exposed
by our Western governors who, challenged by Bush to encourage roading
in our remaining silvers of wild places, are instead reflecting the will
of the significant majority and are informing the Bush administration
that Westerners want these lands left alone.
That second matter, involving Congress’ midnight slam-dunk
attempt to sell the public’s land, was also bucked off well before
the buzzer. The outcry of opposition to that proposal led by Western hunters,
fisherman, and conservationists, forced its congressional riders, all
Republicans, to dismount, turn tail, and head for the fences.
Those two dramatic rejections signal the beginning of the
end for those Western, hard right-wing populists who for two decades have
been demanding the development, privatization, or turnover to them of
the public’s land.
The national media named them Sagebrush Rebels and, although
that implies homegrown, grassroots, local control advocates, this minority
of westerners was created and financed by industries and ideologues determined
to get their hands on the public’s resources. For a time here in
the Rockies, these self-proclaimed super patriots became a genuine political
force. Adopting fashionable signatures such as “multiple use”
and “private property,” they paraded their big buckled hubris
across front pages and lead stories as if they spoke for a majority of
Rocky Mountain Westerners.
I recall the former superintendent of Yellowstone National
Park, Bob Barbee, telling me about his experience with some of these people
back in 1991. He has since written, “I went to a meeting in Bozeman,
Mont.,, and there were 700 people there. You can’t imagine the virulence
of the outcry. I was Saddam Hussein, a communist, everything else you
could think of. One lady got up, jaw quivering, used her time to say the
Pledge of Allegiance, then looked at me and called me a Nazi.”
My career in the U.S. Congress overlapped Barbee’s
years at Yellowstone and I have vivid remembrance of trying to reason
with that same hostility, not only in Bozeman but also in Dillon, Hamilton,
Kalispell and Cooke City, Mont. I understood that most of those people
were well-meaning, but they harbored a misdirected anger aimed at non-existent
enemies. They were victimized by the politics of resentment; a cancer
spread by those who saw advantage in the economic and cultural displacements
here in the West, exploited the discontent, and made their careers by
promoting outrage against all government as well as against virtually
every effort to preserve our valuable wild places.
With the overwhelming public objection to these latest White
House and congressional schemes to road and sell the public’s land,
the West has reached a political watershed. It is ironic that in this
winter season of short days and long solstice nights we would find the
warmth of the West’s renewal: our political spring, belief in ourselves,
trust in our neighbors, the promise of a happy new year and our unfettered
wild lands.
Pat Williams served nine terms as a U.S. Representative
from Montana. After his retirement, he returned to Montana and is teaching
at The University of Montana where he also serves as a Senior Fellow at
the Center for the Rocky Mountain West.
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