Nevada and Common-sense Environmentalism

I’ve been thinking about since yesterday’s post on Dean Heller’s short-sighted idea of environmental policy. Orcinus has two great posts on “common-sense environmentalism,” or the importance of urban environmentalists and rural residents working together on environmental campaigns. Sarah Robinson writes about Mono Lake and Dave Neiwert writes about protecting old-growth forest in the Northwest.  Here’s Neiwert:

Because environmentalists are usually right about the facts of the issues they attempt to confront: global warming is a reality, the rape of the world’s forests is a disaster in the making, corporate pollution is poisoning us, and the extinction of animal species is both an ecological and a human disaster. On the science and on most policy issues, the environmentalists are right.

But on the human front … they leave a lot to be desired. And this in turn has a lot to do with why their rightness fails to translate into effective action.

Obviously, not all environmentalists are all bad or vice-versa, but often the relationships between environmentalists and the locals they sometimes profess to be saving from themselves, leaves a great deal to be desired.  And political appointments like Gibbons’ appointment of extremist Tony Lesperance to head up the state Department of Agriculture don’t help matters. Neiwert uses battle to halt the destruction of old-growth forests in the Northwest to illustrate:

The classic case, in my mind, is the way environmentalists in the Northwest have worked to bring a halt to the destruction of old-growth forest in the Lower 48 in the 1980s and ’90s, but did so in such a way that they permanently alienated people who should have been allies in that fight: the residents near the forests that were being torn down.

Most of these folks worked in the timber industry, but few of them trusted their corporate bosses much at all. And the reality was that their bosses’ rapine behavior — especially the mass liquidation of forest stocks in the 1980s — may have meant a short-term uptick in the local economies, but they guaranteed a future where scarcely any cutting or milling would even be possible, because the entire stock of cuttable woods would be gone.

But if you talked to urban environmentalists at the time (and even now), their attitudes about working people in those small towns was strikingly uniform: Those people were just anachronisms, and they should just work up fresh resumes (maybe go back to school) and go get jobs elsewhere. Indeed, a surprising number of them believed that the world would be better off if there just were no timber cutting at all.

It was clear that, as well as they might grasp some of the scientific realities of the issues (and not even those all that well, considering how many of them really believed the nonsense about halting all logging) they had little understanding of the human consequences of their argument. Many people who live in rural areas do so because that’s what their ancestors did, and they log because that’s how daddy and granddaddy and great-granddaddy made their livings; their family homes are not just dwellings, and they can’t and won’t just up and move into another one as if it were a condo. People who live in rural areas are often deeply rooted.

Neiwert goes on to suggest a smarter approach for the environmental groups:

A smart approach for the environmentalists would have been to win these people in the true “grassroots” to their side — arguing for maintaining the long-term viability of working forests by not overcutting, keeping jobs permanent, and requiring better working conditions and pay in the mills, as well as retraining for the sake of modernization. Argue for preserving wildlife habitat because, among other things, it helps improve hunting.

The good news is that the divide between rural residents and environmentalists is shrinking measurably. More collaborative environmental campaigns and possibly a new governor and congressional representative will usher a new, more innovative and forward-thinking approach to the preservation of Nevada’s environment and economy.

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