Wise Use In Minnesota
Understanding The Wise Use Movement
With the growth of the Wise Use movement in Minnesota, there is a need for a means of understanding what this movement is about. This page is an effort to provide information and links to stories and sites relating to Wise Use. The information provided by the sites, and the opinions and events related by the authors, are their own, and are provided here solely as information for you to judge.
Groups calling themselves members of the Wise Use movement represent landowners, loggers, off-road vehicle users, miners and other individuals who are often at odds with legislation enacted to protect and preserve public lands. The term "Wise Use" was co-opted from Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the Forest Service, who advocated the wise use of natural resources. Unfortunately, anti-environmental groups are committed to opening up public lands not only to harmful resource extraction, but to outright exploitation. They also seek to frighten people with paranoid stories about government take-overs, and similar delusional tales of United Nations usurpation of U.S. sovereignty.
Though their ideas are often wacky, these groups have become a thorn in the side of progressive conservation efforts. They've gained footholds in the political machine of Minnesota, particularly in the NE, NW, and SE, and they continue to organize. In general, the movement believes that the government should not own land, that private property rights need not recognize responsibilities to the common good or environment, that the authority of counties is equal to that of the state and federal governments, and that environmental laws, and those people that support them (and agencies that implement them), are the cause of all rural job insecurity. To that end, they prey upon the fears of non-unionized rural workers dependent upon natural resources, villainizing those in support of conservation and natural resource agency employees. They oppose all land use restrictions - thus wilderness designation is one of their favorite targets. But they also oppose even lesser levels of resource protection - travel restrictions on ATVs, OHVs, and personal watercraft, etc. Even the existence and creation of state owned and managed wildlife management areas are now under attack by the movement, and they oppose federal acquisition of waterfowl production areas, national wildlife refuges, and parks. Where these places already do exist, the Wise Use movement maintains that they should be open to oil and gas drilling, logging, grazing and other uses contrary to the purpose of the land use designation. Wildlife, fish and plant species that are threatened or endangered are "non-adaptive species" in the language of Wise Use, and are not needed (nor are the laws that protect these species from extinction).
According to award winning environmental writer Ted Williams,
"The principle organizers/promoters of Wise Use are Alan M. Gottlieb and Ron Arnold. Gottlieb, who runs the not-for-profit Center for Defense of Free Enterprise, has done time in the slammer for filing false income tax returns and failing to pay taxes. Arnold has ties to Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church."
"The movement's official platform--known as the 'Wise Use Agenda'--advocates opening all wilderness and national parks to logging, oil drilling and mining, and lifting Endangered Species Act protection from 'non-adaptive species,' i.e., everything that can't stand hack-and-gouge development. The one planetary crisis the agenda doesn't kiss off is global warming, for which it prescribes razing all old growth, this on the timber-industry-generated superstition that planted monocultures suck more carbon from the atmosphere."
"Right now the environmental movement is a perfect bogeyman for us," Gottlieb told Williams. "In order to get people to join and donate money we need opposition."
"Facts don't matter," declared Arnold, "in politics perception is reality."
Arnold, in a 1998 interview that appeared in the Conservative Monitor, had this to say about environmentalism:
"Environmentalism has gone so far around the political spectrum it has become that farthest-to-the-right of all ideologies, fascism. But it's a fascism without Hitler or Mussolini. It's a fascism with equally self-righteous zealots absolutely convinced they are right and willing to disregard you if you disagree. Radical environmentalism is not progressive, it's retrogressive, aiming to blast us not to some utopian future, but back to primeval nature..."
The Wise Use movement, while giving lip-service to the idea that we must be good stewards of the earth and that natural resources are finite, actually supports Arnold's notion that technology will be our savior, and that the whole world can be brought up to Western living standards. When this happens, they predict that the developing nations of the world will stridently reject environmentalism.
"The great marvel of technological civilization is its ability to learn and its power to solve problems imaginatively, said Arnold in the same interview. "I foresee Western standards of living extending worldwide in stages as Third World cultures throw off the yoke of environmentalists who have imposed no-growth policies on them. Watch for some determined struggles of the poor to better their lot and a revolutionary awakening of global populations to the negative influence of environmentalism on human life."
Some of the "negative influences of environmentalism on human life" that are targets of the Wise Use movement are landmark laws such as the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, both of which have had measurable positive impacts on human life (as well as fish, plant and animal life). They also oppose any other restrictions or regulations that might promote human and ecosystem health if they perceive it as restricting "private property rights."
In an interview with Cascadia Planet, Arnold elaborated his views on rights and responsibilities. Summarizing Arnold's view, this article states he belives: In a world of large-scale bureaucracies, governmental and corporate, private property rights constitute a bulwark of individual freedom. Property rights in a privatized world would be tied to "exact responsibilities". Relations would be regulated by courts.
"If you can show that by negligence or nuisance I have harmed you, then you have a civil tort. You may not harm another with your property." But those responsibilities do not extend beyond the human world, Arnold believes. In his view, the owner of a piece of land owns the plants and wildlife on them, and can use them as he or she chooses.
Arnold agreed that this position signifies the essential divide between the "Wise Use" and ecological movements. Most people in the latter believe that "trees have standing" - that human beings do not have a right to eliminate other species, and that people are obliged to respect the integrity of the ecosystems in which their land is located.
It also flies in the face of the law. One of the great differ differences between the United States and the European homelands of so many of its founders is that the new settlers of this land believed that wildlife should belong to the people, not the landowner. Tired of being harrassed by wealthy landowners in their native countries, America's founders sought a more democratic and equitable distribution of the land's wealth. In other words, in America, wildlife belongs to the people, not the landowner, and while landowners certainly have some inviolate rights, they also have responsibilities to the common good, a fact little recognized by the Wise Use movement. Any effort by any level of government to get property owners to respect their responsibilities is rebuffed as a "takings" of private property.
According to "The Legal Basis for Fish and Wildlife Management in the U.S." by Erik Fritzell of the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Oregon State University,
"Martin vs. Waddell (1842) established public trust authority. The important legal relationship between private and public interests in wildlife was formally established in 1842. Martin was seeking to claim exclusive ownership of oysters from beds adjacent to his land along Raritan River in New Jersey. He traced his title to a land grant from King Charles II to the Duke of York during the 17th century. In those documents, the granted property included land, water, and the fish and wildlife residing there. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, however, declared that 'dominion and property' in the lands and waters were not the Kings to give away in the first place. Taney declared that the Magna Charta had settled the ownership question, and that since the American Revolution, the people of New Jersey held the public trust responsibilities for fish and wildlife -- except for those rights specified in the U.S. Constitution."
The 10th Amendment to the Constitution also appears to grant authority and ownership of fish and wildlife to the states, a position upheld by the Supreme Court in Geer vs. Connecticut (1896). The Supreme Court ruled against Geer (who wanted to sell wildlife that was illegal in his home state, but legal in another) and declared that the states property right in game was to be exercised as a trust for the benefit of the people of the state. Geer vs. Connecticut is considered the bulwark of states authority over wildlife.
Because of public ownership of wildlife and fish, and of large public holdings of land, the average American can afford to hunt, fish, or view wildlife. This would not be the case if the Wise Use movement had its way.
The Wise Use philosophy, though it often purports to represent the interests of the common person -- including hunters and anglers -- actually would drive us toward a feudal system where only the wealthy or those who own land would be able to enjoy America's fish and wildlife resources at the level now available to average citizens.
Thus, public lands are a favorite target of Arnold and his colleagues, and in their "perfect world" they would privatize everything. Knowing that Americans would not stand idly by while this happens, they instead have mounted case by case assaults on destabilizing management of these lands, or have attempted to twist the land's use to something other than their designated purpose -- such as drilling for oil in ANWR.
Here in Minnesota, the Wise Use movement mounted the recent attacks on both Voyageurs National Park and the BWCAW that resulted in over a year of tedious "mediation." In both cases the Wise Use factions sought to force uses in these federal lands that would not normally be considered -- i.e., jet-skis in VNP, trucks and snowmobiles in the BWCAW.
And although they reach out to sportsmen and women, hunters and anglers are used by the movement, rather than respected. Examples are numerous, but here in Minnesota, the Wise Use movement has even sought to stop the acquisition of Wildlife Management Areas -- areas that are highly valued and heavily used by hunters unable to own land. These are not huge national parks being established, but parcels of just one or two hundred acres. The wise-use laden St. Louis County Board supports prohibiting the acquisition of land for parks and wildlife areas, a position already adopted in resolution form by six other northern counties. This same board forced taxpayers to foot the bill for frivolous lawsuits against both the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service by passing resolutions contributing county money.
In our region they have derailed sensible restrictions on off road vehicle use on public lands, despite the fact that the activities of this small, well organized, and very noisy group, adversely impact the rest of Minnesotans. The Wummies' nonsensical attacks on ecosystem management, laced with bizarre inferences of New World Orders and United Nation take-overs, has slowed the implementation of this needed approach to resource management. These beliefs even led to a strange lawsuit by the Associated Contract Loggers against the U.S. Forest Service and two environmental groups. This suit claimed that ecosystem management is based on "deep ecology", and that this is a pagan religion, and thus the Forest Service is guilty of violating the separation of church and state. A judge later ruled that this claim was not only worthless, but bordered on being frivolous.
Some of this is so strange, it seems laughable. It isn't, not when mainstream groups like the Associated Contract Loggers are duped, county boards buy in, or legislators fall into their camp.
You need to inform yourself. The information here is provided for that purpose. It will be updated as often as issues require, or information becomes available. Please check back.
http://webpages.charter.net/duluthikes/wise_use/wiseuse.htm
http://files.dnr.state.mn.us/waters/watermgmt_section/shoreland/SL_Rules_Advisory_Committee_11-14-05_Summary.pdf
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