Rural Alliances Fighting Restrictions on Land Use

Twelve years after the start of the Sagebrush Rebellion, Westerners unhappy with environmental restrictions are forging defensive coalitions to counter what they see as a threatening string of environmentalist victories.

At least once a month, Cliff Gardner leaves his remote cattle ranch at the base of the snow-capped Ruby Mountains to travel to colleges, high schools and Rotary Clubs with a slide show emphasizing the benefits of ranching to the environment.

Like many other ranchers, the 53-year-old, fourth-generation cattleman worries that environmentalists and government agencies are trying to drive him off the range. “Cattle Free by ‘93” and “No Moo in ‘92,” the latest refrains of some environmental groups, ring ominously in his ears.

“Environmentalism is the biggest lie ever told in the world,” he fumes, as irritated as the cows bawling in the distance for their calves at branding time. “It’s based on disinformation. That is what is destroying us.”

Gardner is part of what is being called the wise-use or multiple-use movement, a rural coalition of ranchers, loggers, miners, off-road motorists and hunters who want to protect their access to public lands and block environmental regulations that might restrict the use of natural resources on private property.

He and others who live off the land, particularly federal land, have long chafed under environmental restrictions, particularly attempts to designate more and more public lands as “wilderness.” The legal designation can restrict use of motorized vehicles, the building of new fences or water developments and the killing of predators that attack herds.

Fed up with President Carter’s efforts to preserve more and more public lands, ranchers in 1979 set off what came to be known as the Sagebrush Rebellion, a campaign to have the federal property in the West transferred to the states and, in some cases, into the hands of the families who had ranched them for generations.

The movement mainly produced legislative resolutions and speech-making, and it languished under Ronald Reagan. By giving ranchers and other public land users substantially freer rein in using natural resources, President Reagan defused the tensions. His first interior secretary, James Watt, was considered a strong ally of the Sagebrush rebels.

But heightened environmental activism in recent years has again frightened many of these rural Westerners. Some Bush appointees and members of Congress are trying to reinstigate more controls, and although their proposals are usually criticized as too weak by environmental groups, many Westerners perceive them as threats to their livelihood.

Logging limitations to protect the northern spotted owl, off-road vehicle restrictions to guard desert tortoise habitat, a federal policy designed to prevent further loss of wetlands and congressional attempts to raise fees for grazing on public lands, restrict mining and reduce use by designating wilderness areas have prompted the disparate rural interests to band together.

Robert Lee, a professor of forest resources at the University of Washington in Seattle, describes the movement as “a very rapid mobilization of the rural sector,” organized in large part only in the last year and a half.

“People get threatened enough, and it’s amazing the way they form alliances with folks they never would have talked to before,” said Lee, a forester and sociologist who studies timber-dependent communities and who previously consulted for the forest-products industry.

Lee noted that a group of Oregon loggers recently came to the defense of hunters by organizing a successful boycott of a T-shirt that bore an anti-hunting slogan. The manufacturer, threatened with a nationwide boycott, eventually withdrew the shirt from the market, he said.

“The interesting thing was that the loggers said, ‘An attack upon one is an attack upon all of us,’ ” recalled the professor, whose research is funded by the federal government.

The wise-use movement represents hundreds of groups nationwide but appears strongest in the West, where activists like Gardner are estimated to number in the tens of thousands.

Not all of them use the wise-use label; some describe themselves as multiple-use or wise-stewardship advocates. Environmental critics brand them as “multiple-abuse” or “overuse” activists.

The movement’s potential clout has yet to be measured, but more often than not it seems to be marked by the introduction of sympathetic legislation more than its passage. Effectiveness varies from organization to organization.

“They are a little better organized than they were three or four years ago in the Mountain West,” said Carl Pope, the Sierra Club’s San Francisco-based conservation director. “They are better able to resist us more effectively, but we are still on the offensive. . . .”

John Gatchell, director of the Montana Wilderness Assn., rates the movement as “far more sophisticated and well-funded than the Sagebrush Rebellion. . . . They are doing very well.”

Wise-use activist Bruce Vincent warns that the groundswell is only now “exploding” as rural America comes “under siege.”

“The people who live in these rural towns are environmentalists,” said Vincent, 35, executive director of the Montana-based Communities for a Great Northwest. “We live here because we love the environment, we want to sustain it. But federal management decisions . . . are evicting rural Americans from rural America.

“It’s happening under a banner that says we are bad people, something just short of baby-killers, because we’re destroying our forests, ruining our landscape.”

Much of the effort is aimed at winning public sympathy by holding rallies or demonstrations and influencing media coverage.

Vincent, whose group represents about 2,600 dues-paying loggers, miners and cattlemen, recently helped organize a referendum on wilderness designation in his northwest Montana community.

The Lincoln County vote showed a majority favoring designation of no more than 115,000 additional acres of the Kootenai National Forest as wilderness, the amount backed by wise-use activists. Wilderness advocates had opposed the referendum.

A mere 11% favored the much larger addition backed by the environmentalists and proposed in congressional legislation.

Although the vote was not binding, Vincent hopes it will send a message to Washington to accept the smaller wilderness designation.

On another occasion, the Great Northwest group organized a convoy to carry logs to a small Montana town whose mill had been shut down because of logging restrictions.

“The convoy was 26 miles long, and people stood on the side of the road and waved American flags and cried,” said Vincent, who is part-owner of his family’s logging business. “It was awareness, letting people know that we’ve got a problem.”

Multiple-use activists successfully pressed sponsors of an Audubon Society television documentary on forests to pull their advertising from the 1989 program. Those same activists said they pressed Ford Motor Co. to withdraw funding for another Audubon special on ranching scheduled to air this summer.

On Friday, Ford Motor Co. pulled its funding for the documentary. The Audubon Society accused the company of buckling to intimidation, and multiple-use activists claimed victory. A company spokesman said that Ford bowed out only because the program was “too controversial,” not because of threats.

After the Gannett newspaper chain printed a story recently about the conflicts between environmental activists and ranchers, multiple-use advocates organized to influence the outcome of a poll on the subject.

The story noted that cattle denude stream banks and can turn rich range into wastelands. A telephone number was provided for readers to express their views.

By pushing one of three numbers, callers could vote in favor of continued grazing, kicking cattle off the land or reaching a compromise between ranchers and environmentalists.

The result: 65% of callers approved grazing, only 28% wanted to oust cattle from the range and a piddling 7% called for compromise.

Multiple-use activists, including Nevada attorney A. Grant Gerber, credited the results at least in part to the busy fingers of fellow activists who swamped phone lines to defend their ranching friends.

Gerber is chairman of a national group called the Wilderness Impact Research Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization that grew out of a local fight in 1985 against new wilderness areas in Nevada.

The bespectacled, clean-cut attorney practices law in Elko, Nev., a growing town that owes its prosperity largely to miners, cattlemen and casinos. But Gerber grew up in rural Nevada and dreams of one day shorning his tie and sports jacket for the cowboy hat and blue jeans of many of his friends.

To make sure that ranching remains an option, he spends much of his time defending and promoting users of public lands. His foundation has 231 affiliated groups, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, American Forest Council, American Mining Congress, American Motorcyclist Assn. and the American Petroleum Institute.

Contributions to the foundation, which has a $120,000 annual budget, average about $100, according to Gerber. Last year, the largest donation, $10,000, came from the Livestock Marketing Assn., followed by a $5,000 contribution from the Sacramento Safari Club, a hunting group.

Besides holding national conferences, the foundation sponsors television documentaries sympathetic to ranching, hunting, logging, oil-drilling and other multiple-use concerns.

Betsy Marston, editor of the High Country News, an environmental newspaper that covers the West, attended one of the group’s annual conferences a year ago and remembers feeling ostracized by the anti-wilderness activists.

She said they glared at her, their suspicions tempered only by the “Western gentlemanly tradition” that demands politeness to women.

“The main thing that came over from this onslaught of talks, speaker after speaker, was the idea they were the underdogs, that the environmentalists were winning and locking it all up and that there was a conspiracy against them,” Marston recalled.

“Here I am looking at these rather prosperous white males, and they don’t look like America’s losers. They look like the people we have been fighting for decades.”

But to ranchers, miners and other multiple-use activists near here, the signs are troubling.

This state, which was home to the Sagebrush Rebellion, now has a national park and 798,067 acres of national forest wilderness, the vast majority of it designated within the last three years.

Although most of the state is rural--nearly 80% is owned by the federal government--most Nevadans have become urbanites, living in or near Las Vegas and Reno.

The political landscape is reflected in the changing demographics. Nevada’s two U.S. senators, Richard H. Bryan and Harry Reid, both earn high ratings from environmentalists. The League of Conservation Voters last year gave Bryan a 100% rating and Reid a 92% vote of confidence.

Even more worrisome to the anti-wilderness activists is the plight of their out-of-state neighbors to the north.

High unemployment in some logging towns and the prospect of more job losses in the future, whether from environmental restrictions, overcutting in the past or other economic factors, has frightened many public-land dependents. Ranchers fear they will be the loggers of the ‘90s.

John Inman, forest supervisor for the Humboldt National Forest in northeast Nevada, understands the ranchers’ worries. He noted that eco-terrorists have sabotaged some of the ranchers’ water developments and destroyed their fences.

Much of the opposition to the cattlemen stems from damage created by overgrazing, which can prevent the rejuvenation of vegetation, erode the land and destroy fisheries. A 1986 forest plan found two-thirds of the Humboldt to be in satisfactory condition, one-third damaged, Inman said.

“If we can’t show we are able to graze right, there may be reason to fear,” he said. “We all saw what happened in the Pacific Northwest with the spotted owl,” where dwindling mature forests have prompted the federal government to move to restrict logging.

Not surprisingly, the concerns of wise-use activists often mirror those of industry. Many groups are linked with or receive funding from industry associations, although the rank and file tends to be local entrepreneurs and employees of those industries.

“The movement is a little different from most in that it also includes special-interest groups such as the National Forest Products Assn. or the National Ocean Industries Assn . . . anybody that has anything to do with the use of national resources,” said Ron Arnold, spokesman for the Washington state-based Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, which coined the “wise-use” label and publishes books sympathetic to their cause.

Arnold’s use of language has prompted environmentalists to associate the movement with the country’s right wing. The common enemies, he says, are “environmentalists and leftists in general who detest corporate capitalism--the Jane Fondas of the world.”

Clark Collins, 49, executive director of the Idaho-based Blue Ribbon Coalition, which represents motorized recreational interests, counts as its members the Motorcycle Industry Council and the International Snowmobile Industry Assn. Collins said the organization presses its views through letter-writing and telephone campaigns. It worked to defeat a political candidate whose views did not square with the coalition’s and now is helping to shape a wilderness policy for Idaho that will leave plenty of public lands accessible to motorists.

“In the past, wilderness debates or negotiations have ignored the motorized recreational interest groups,” said Collins, who describes recreational motorists as “blue-ribbon citizens.”

Gardner, who ranches with the help of his wife, Bertha, and their four children, seems more concerned about threats to his neighbors than to the industry at large.

A large chunk of the federal lands his 250 Red Angus graze on recently was designated “wilderness” along with many of the grazing pastures of his neighbors.

Making ranchers even more nervous were recent purchases by the Nature Conservancy, an environmental group, of two ranches in the Ruby Valley for wildlife.

Even though the Conservancy insists it does not categorically oppose grazing, Gardner and other wise-use activists tend to distrust all environmental groups and federal land agencies. He said the Forest Service already has stopped him from replacing a pipe that carried water from a spring on federal land to his home, and as a consequence, the water that runs from his modest home’s faucets tends to be brown and gritty in springtime.

His biggest gripe, however, is with environmentalists over wildlife. They contend that grazing has destroyed the native grasses and changed the mix of animals living on the range, creating, for example, unusually large deer herds that thrive on the plant varieties that grow on grazed lands.

But Gardner and other wise-use activists are proud of the big herds and claim that predator-control programs and irrigation by ranchers have produced more abundant wildlife than existed before white man inhabited the range.

He points to a Nature Conservancy reserve just down the dirt road from his place to make his point. On the reserve, which becomes a marsh in years of heavy snowpack, the desert now reigns. White and green grasses mingle with silvery sage.

Adjacent to the dry land is an irrigated cow pasture, where a flock of noisy birds has gathered on its lush green carpet.

“See, the geese are up there where it is green,” Gardner said, triumph in his voice. “They don’t like all this dead stuff.”

Nevada Wilderness Here are some of the national forest lands that were redesignated as wilderness by the Nevada Wilderness Bill signed into law by President Bush in December, 1989. Once land is declared wilderness, restrictions on ranching and other commercial-related activities may be issued. Humboldt National Forest: Wilderness Acreage 1. Santa Rosa-Paradise Peak: 31,000 2. Jarbidge: 48,500 3. East Humboldt: 36,900 4. Ruby Mountain: 90,000 5. Mount Moriah**: 82,000 6. Currant Mountain**: 36,000 7. Grant Range: 50,000 8. Quinn Canyon: 27,000 Toiyabe National Forest: Wilderness Acreage 9. Mount Rose: 28,000 10. Arc Dome**: 115,000 11. Alta Toquima: 38,000 12. Table Mountain: 98,000 13. Mount Charleston: 43,000 Inyo National Forest: Wilderness Acreage 14. Boundary Peak: 10,000 Total Wilderness Acreage: 798,067* Total National Forest in Nevada: 5,690,465 * Includes 64,667 acres previously designated as wilderness ** Total of 6,458 acres under Bureau of Land Management jurisdiction SOURCES: Humboldt National Forest and Bureau of Land Management Compiled by Times researcher Michael Meyers