November 20, 1999

Wise-use activist says his fight is about 'saving civilized society'

By John Myers News-Tribune outdoors writer

Ron Arnold has been labeled by his supporters and detractors alike as the grandfather of the wise-use movement, and it's a title he doesn't mind.

Arnold, executive director of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, embraces his role as arch-enemy of the U.S. environmental movement.

In a lengthy telephone interview with the News-Tribune this week from his home in Bellevue, Wash., Arnold said wise use is defined as people wisely using the earth for their benefit versus preserving the earth for nature's sake.

It's a critical distinction, he claims, because public hysteria over exaggerated or artificial environmental concerns could soon 'destroy industrial civilization.''

Arnold, 62, will be in Duluth Monday as featured speaker in a fund-raising banquet for the local groups FIGHT (Fight Inefficient Government and High Taxes) for Minnesota and the Land Rights Alliance.

His appearance is considered a coup by wise-use advocates across the Northland who regard Arnold a hero in the fight against the environmental and conservation movements and against government ownership and regulation of land.

Arnold's visit has angered environmental and conservation groups who have linked the wise-use activist to radical elements of anti-government groups, including county supremacy and militia groups that condone violence against the federal government in the defense of private property rights. (County supremacy groups generally believe county-level elected officials are the highest law of the land and supersede state and national officials and regulations.)

But to local activists battling to reduce public ownership and government control of lands -- in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Voyageurs National Park, Isle Royale National Park and even state wildlife management areas -- Arnold has become a national source of strategy and support.

"This guy is incredible and he can help us in our effort,'' said Gregg Lillejord, president of Duluth-based FIGHT. "We have a resource-based economy in northern Minnesota and it's about time people heard the wise-use side of the story and not just the eco side of the story. We want to conserve what we have, but we have to use (the resources) we have or we won't survive. We can't live off being a bunch of tourist shops.''

Arnold has been a national player in the anti-environmental movement since writing a 1981 biography of James Watt, the controversial, conservative Secretary of the Interior under President Ronald Reagan.

Arnold said the wise-use movement had its true impetus in a 1988 conference in Reno, Nev., that he promoted. The meeting attracted 250 groups from across the country -- all of which were fighting government land control and environmental regulation. The event included county supremacy groups and large extractive resource corporations such as Boise Cascade and Exxon.

In just over 10 years, Arnold noted, the list of groups involved has grown to nearly 3,000.

Still, outside of activists within the wise-use and environmental camps, few people have likely heard of Arnold. But they probably have heard his issues.

Arnold's goal is simple: Destroy the "moral crusade'' of the environmental movement and pledge total support for the extractive industries -- mining, logging and cattle grazing -- that provide jobs in rural America.

The entire wise-use movement, Arnold says, is about fostering extractive industries and thus "saving civilized society.'' The ultimate goal of what he describes as well-organized and well-funded environmental organizations is to stop consumerism and the industrial revolution, turning back the clock and placing the earth above people.

It's simply utilization versus preservation, Arnold said. And preservation means people will have to do without.

"We call them environmental supremacists. They are putting the earth above people,'' Arnold said. "They understand that the things we all use come from the ground -- food, lumber, minerals. So they know that shutting these industries down means ending our society as we know it.

"We're trying to save the industrial revolution here,'' Arnold said.

Arnold brushes aside assertions that environmentalists may simply be trying to mitigate industrial impact to preserve clean air, water and land for people as well as nature. While some local environmental battles may be legitimate causes to protect people's interests, Arnold conceded, he said most are based in a philosophical effort to place nature over people.

Arnold, who was once a member of the Sierra Club in the 1960s, said the environmental movement has been fostered by an increasingly urbanized society that has lost touch with the fact their homes and newspapers are made from trees, that their cars and computers are packed with minerals and that the steaks they eat were cows that had to eat grass.

Urbanites are "fat, dumb and happy. But if we can't get at the resources they need, the entire system will collapse. Then what will happen?'' Arnold said.

Urban Americans also are ignoring the plight of rural residents -- ranchers, loggers and miners -- who he says have not benefited from the nation's longest period of economic prosperity.

But instead of blaming rapidly changing world economics and trends, undue corporate profit taking or outdated technology as others have, Arnold flatly blames environmental groups for nearly all of the problems.

It is the woeful state of much of rural America that Arnold says fuels his passion to stop big government and environmental efforts. Arnold dismisses as lies and misrepresentations the many economic statistics that show the economies in his home Pacific Northwest as booming despite increasing federal logging regulations.

The boom in large, urban areas is really masking the rural depression, he said. Even booming rural areas, including several in the Northland, likely are based on service industries and not resource extraction, he said, and likely won't hold up.

"Until you see the damage they (environmentalists) cause in the face of people who have been harmed by environmental regulation, you can't understand,'' Arnold said. "We have a two-class economy now, urban and rural.''

Environmental groups are pushing their ecology as an ideology without first finding suitable and affordable substitutes, Arnold claims. For example, some environmental groups are pushing to end logging on national forests without first finding a suitable alternative source of wood fiber or building materials; and without finding new, good-paying jobs for loggers and mill workers.

"They (environmentalists) have already won that battle. They have shut down, or are in the process of shutting down, logging on federal lands. And what is that doing in your communities in northern Minnesota?'' Arnold said, dismissing the more than 1 billion board feet of lumber still cut on national forests each year as just a "fraction of what it should be.''

That's why Arnold's various organizations (he also owns Northwoods Studio, a for-profit company that does consulting for business and industry groups) strongly push laws and regulations that favor private property ownership and rights. Only on one's own property, he said, can Americans truly enjoy the freedoms intended by the founding fathers.

DULUTH NEWS-TRIBUNE

Saturday, November 27, 1999

Environmentalists' influence cripples rural economies

Ron Arnold

The following is excerpted from a speech given in Duluth this week by Ron Arnold, executive director of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise and a founder of the wise-use movement:

I want to talk to you about the most important book I've ever written.

``Undue Influence'' is the seventh book I've written, and number six, titled ``Ecoterror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature,'' was just voted by a Random House/Modern Library reader survey as one of the hundred most important nonfiction books of the 20th century. I hope that one day people can vote for ``Undue Influence'' as one of the hundred most important nonfiction books of the 21st century.

It's a book of warning. It's a book of hope. It's a book that takes the lid off a hidden world that affects your daily life and that of everyone else in America.

This book grew out of a report to Congress: a report titled ``Battered Communities: How wealthy private foundations, grant-driven environmental groups, and activist federal employees combine to systematically cripple rural economies.''

Although this report covered the entire United States, many of you here in Minnesota helped a great deal in putting it together. Some of your county commissioners, a state senator and a mayor provided statements for this report.

I soon discovered that every environmental group I investigated was connected to some coalition or some alliance or some campaign with a lot of other environmental groups. Now that's not natural. Previous experience had shown me these groups had been cutthroat competitors during the 1970s and 80s, sending out direct mail fund-raising newsletters to the same pool of potential members. They were always fighting each other for money, for turf, for bragging rights and for time in front of the TV cameras.

Why were they suddenly so buddy-buddy? Why were they working so closely together now? I had to solve that mystery.

I got out some old tape recordings made at the annual meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association back in 1992. The Environmental Grantmakers Association, or E.G.A., as they call themselves, is a group of about 200 foundations, including the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the W. Alton Jones foundation, the Bullitt Foundation and many, many others.

Chuck Clusen of a foundation called the American Conservation Association said: ``I think the environmentalist community as a whole is not very strategic. And I think we need to start rebuilding that.''

Then, Anne Fitzgerald of the Switzer Foundation asked him, ``Do you detect, though, a resistance in the larger organizations to becoming grant-driven?''

Here, Donald Ross of the Rockefeller Family Fund broke in and said, ``Yeah. I think a lot of them resist.''

Clusen added, ``There's definitely a feeling on the part of the environmental organizations that they resent funders, not just picking the issues, but also being directive in the sense of the kind of campaign, the strategy, the style, and so on. I look at it as, if they're not going to do it on their own, thank God funders are forcing them to start doing it.''

Donald Ross then said: ``I think funders have a major role to play. And I know there are resentments in the environmental community towards funders doing that. And, too bad. We're players, they're players.''

Now here's the clincher: Donald Ross then said, ``I think the fundamental effort that has to be made is a reorganization of the movement. I don't think it's realistic to think that groups like Sierra Club or NRDC are going to disappear and reform into something new. They'll stay, and they'll still send out those newsletters. I think we have to begin to look much more at a task force approach on major issues that is able to pool resources. And the funders can drive that.''

And they sure have. That's what we've seen more and more in the past seven or eight years.

In legal terms it's not really money laundering, it's more like a rinse job. The public can't see where all this tax exempt, taxpayer subsidized money is coming from or going to in this washing machine. For one thing, environmentalist public relations firms make sure the question gets lost in the spin cycle.

Environmentalist money isn't all that goes around in circles.

Environmental executives go through a revolving door from their organizations into the Clinton/Gore administration. I've tracked more than 50 former environmental group executives in high level federal jobs from Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who came from the League of Conservation Voters, to Jean Nelson, who came from the Natural Resources Defense Council to become the top lawyer of the Environmental Protection Agency. And Al Gore's former Senate staffer Carol Browner now runs the EPA.

Environmentalists are everywhere in the Clinton/Gore White House. They're like a termite infestation. You can't see them all, but they're in there eating out your substance. The Clinton-Gore administration is as full of leaks as a sieve. And those leaks can spell real danger for rural communities.

Let me close with the story of one such leak. It happened in Oregon, on the Willamette National Forest, near Eugene. A salvage logging sale was offered in a place called Warner Creek.

Environmental groups were intent upon stopping any salvage logging because they wanted to shut down all logging on federal lands, period.

As soon as the Warner Creek logging contract was signed in September 1995, a group of EarthFirst! protesters and others blocked the only road into the work site. They built an illegal encampment and did $20,000 damage to the road with 6-foot-deep trenches and sharpened metal spikes. At least two of the protesters were from groups that received foundation funding.

Forest Service law enforcement officials quickly prepared an action plan to remove the protesters and allow logging to begin. They were very concerned, because they knew that at least one of the 30 or more protesters had a gun, said to be a machine pistol. Law enforcement was even more worried because protesters equipped with cell phones looked like they knew in advance of their removal plan. The lead officer concluded that some insider had leaked law enforcement information to the protesters.

What the public saw was that the protesters remained for 11 months in that illegal encampment, destroying a Forest Service road and blocking all traffic while Clinton-Gore law enforcement officers did nothing. Not until August 1996 did officers clean out the site, finding only five protesters at the encampment -- the others had run away.

When the House oversight committee in charge of Forest Service activities investigated, they found a Forest Service e-mail that said Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta had given the stand-down order to law enforcement. They also found e-mails that indicated a high ranking officer of the President's Council on Environmental Quality was suspected of leaking law enforcement information to the protesters and had also been receiving telephone calls from protesters.

I hope I have given you a brief insight into what undue influence can mean.

I'm sure you can visualize a Warner Creek Situation here in Minnesota. I'm sure you have grave concerns about the massive fire hazard of downed trees in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area that threatens to depopulate a whole region of your state. If the towns that were built many years ago burn, will current environmental laws allow them to be rebuilt?

This book makes it clear that there is an iron triangle of wealthy foundations, grant-driven environmental groups and zealous bureaucrats controlling your future without your knowledge or consent.

Learn what they are doing. Become knowledgable about who they are. Get the message to every lawmaker, every regulator, every leader. You can stop undue influence from being used against you. Congress needs to investigate. But you must know what you are up against first.

Read this book. Always remember, knowledge is power.

Arnold resides in Bellevue, Wash.

DULUTH NEWS-TRIBUNE

Editorial from the November 24, 1999

Northeastern Minnesotans should make it known they aren't buying Wise Use founders' anti-environment line

Columnist George Will wrote a column that included Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb of the Wise Use Movement among "quasi-political entrepreneurs who have discovered commercial opportunities in merchandising discontent... "

Arnold, described as the "Founding Father of the Wise Use Movement," spoke in Duluth this week promoting his latest book.

Northeastern Minnesotans should make it known they aren't buying his line that environmentalists "combine to systematically cripple rural economies by eliminating resource industries."

It's easy to foment discontent in a climate of rapid change. It's easy to exploit people's feelings of economic insecurity at a time when our natural resource-based industries respond to international market forces and technological advances continue to reduce the number of jobs.

Arnold would have us believe that our economic uncertainties are due to current laws protecting the environment or environmentalists who really aim at authoritarian power -- a bunch of hooey. As Retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf once said at a Nature Conservancy press conference, "These `Wise Use' extremists claim that economically you're going to take their jobs away from them; they're all going to become poor; their children are going to starve; and it's all because you're a bunch of fuzzy-headed tree-huggers... It's blatant lying in many cases is how they present things."

Ironically, Arnold has taken the name for his movement from Gifford Pinchot, named by President Teddy Roosevelt as the first head of the U. S. Forest Service. Roosevelt created the nation's system of public parks and national forests as a protection against what he called "land grabbers and special interests." Pinchot led the way, saying in 1907 that "Conservation is the wise use of resources." Both men would roll over in their graves to learn the current use of their "wise use" message.

Arnold admits, however, "The modern wise use movement does not hold Pinchot in reverence: he was just another bureaucrat who believed `conservation' had to come by `government control of resources.'"

Arnold is very effective and should not be underestimated. Author David Helvarg describes him in this way: "He has taken a personal bitterness against the environmental movement, the organizing theories of Lenin, the collective-behavior analysis of a couple of professors in the social movements field, and a broad reading of Abraham Maslow and other social psychologists, and synthesized them into a new force on the political Right that sees environmental change as an imminent threat to free enterprise, private property and industrial civilization.''

His program includes unrestricted timber cutting on public lands; mining and drilling in national parks and wilderness areas; rollback of clean air, water quality and other landmark environmental legislation.

For those of us who live in communities where economic vitality still depends on natural resources, we need to have discussions about future development and growth. But our discussions ought not be of the politically polarizing, conspiratorial sort that the "Wise Use Movement'' promotes.

"Wise Users'' are as out of touch with the American mainstream as those at the other extreme who advocate tree spiking.

DULUTH NEWS-TRIBUNE

December 28, 1999

Wise-use movement exists to benefit land into the future

Ron Arnold

Your Nov. 24 editorial criticizing the wise-use movement, ``Northeastern Minnesotans should make it known they aren't buying wise-use founders' anti-environment line,'' and recent letters to the editor call for a vigorous reply.

In the first place, the 2,000 or more groups that make up the wise-use movement are the true stewards of our land. They are the farmers and ranchers and miners and loggers who depend for their livelihood on the land and have lived on it for generations.

Wise-users are good people. They certainly do not wish to do the terrible things detractors accuse them of.

As for accusations by News-Tribune readers that my researches are "paranoid conspiracy theories,'' decide for yourself.

My message to the people of Minnesota is common-sense advice: Be as skeptical of organized environmentalism as you are of the wise-use movement. That's only fair.

Environmentalists have a lot to be skeptical of.

Particularly the powerful combination of wealthy charitable foundations, grant-driven green groups and zealous bureaucrats that obstruct resource workers all over rural America.

Joshua Reichert, head of Pew Charitable Trusts' environment program, once wrote, "For considerable sums of money, public opinion can be molded, constituents mobilized, issues researched, and public officials button-holed, all in a symphonic arrangement.'' See Mark Dowie's misattribution.

Pew has those "considerable sums of money'': 1998 assets of $4.7 billion. Reichert wrote that message to recruit millions more from colleagues in the 200-member Environmental Grantmakers Association.

Most Americans resent people rearranging their minds, but they don't know environmentalists are doing it to them.

Take the recent Clinton administration designation of 40 million acres of federal land as permanent "roadless area'' that bans logging, mining, ranching and farming there. It didn't just happen.

That declaration was the result of millions of foundation dollars funneled through environmental groups to pressure top-level bureaucrats into writing the order.

But the public didn't know.

Here's what really happened: The Pew Charitable Trusts created a "Heritage Forests Campaign'' to stop all resource extraction on 60 million acres of federal land.

To put the program in action, Pew gave over $3 million to the National Audubon Society, which, by agreement with Pew, spread the money to a dozen other environmental groups under their supervision.

Pew selected Audubon as their money funnel because of the forceful reputation of Dan Beard, former Clinton administration commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and now Audubon's Washington, D.C., policy director.

Audubon and their dozen money spigots used Pew dollars to mold public opinion, mobilize constituents, research issues and button-hole public officials in symphonic arrangement.

Audubon got a letter of support for the roadless area campaign signed by 170 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and gained support from some 40 Senators. How did they do that without using Pew donations for lobbying?

With Clinton-insider Dan Beard on their staff, Audubon got a promise of action from the White House.

But that wasn't enough. Audubon hired the president's pollster to show that urban dwellers care more about wilderness than about rural jobs. The pollster gave the results to the White House chief of staff.

The president subsequently issued the directive giving Pew, Audubon and their allies 40 of the 60 million acres they wanted.

How did I arrive at this "conspiracy theory?''

I read it in the minutes of Audubon's board meeting, Sept. 17-18, 1999, on Audubon's own Web site! Go to http://www.audubon.org/chapter/ca/santamonicabay/brew.htm#Heritage Forest Campaign.

The Clinton administration and the Pew gang say the roadless designation won't hurt logging much.

Retired Forest Service employees in northern Minnesota, now immune to retribution, told me that is a flat lie. It will hurt many people a lot.

The Clinton Forest Service has already tried dirty tricks to prevent logging on state and private lands in Minnesota: they vowed to keep loggers from crossing federal land to reach their own logging sites.

That's illegal. Attorney General Mike Hatch had to threaten a lawsuit against the Forest Service to make them back down and let loggers on their own property.

Am I unreasonable to ask that such environmentalist abuses be investigated? Certainly Congress needs to do some vigilant oversight.

Even though the Duluth News-Tribune accepted a ``partnership'' with the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, I am sure that will not be used to shield Pew and its allies from probing and objective inquiry.

Your readers deserve a look into that hidden world.

They also deserve better than empty insults hurled at wise-users, who supply you with ink, newsprint and all your other material needs.