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Last week, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt announced yet another formula to reform grazing on public lands.
Each former grazing district will be supervised by a 15-member resource advisory council. Five are ranchers, five are other public-land users, such as outfitters or recreationalists, and the other five must be environmentalists.
Although the first two gangs of five must live nearby, the five environmentalists can come from elsewhere.
Putting environmentalists on grazing councils is a good idea, and if it had been done a long time ago, we might have prevented some of the problems we face now.
But why not use local environmentalists?
Could there be a shortage of environmentalists in rural communities surrounded by public land, and thus there's a need to import green thinkers to provide an informed perspective, lest the unwashed heathen go astray?
If there is such a shortage, I haven't noticed it. In any mountain town, even those amid over-grazed pastures of rapacious Herefords (a landscape so devastated that it remains good only for subdividing into 35-acre ranchettes), it's easier to find a health-food emporium than a feed store, and outdoor shops far outnumber implement dealers. At every public hearing in recent memory, local members of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Audubon Society, etc., have made themselves heard, often to good effect.
That fact means that another possible Babbitt assumption is invalid -- that there might be some environmentalists in rural Western communities, but they're scared to speak up on account of all those violence-prone gun-toting rednecks, so they stay in the closet.
Intimidation certainly occurred in many places 15 or 20 years ago -- but rural Western environmentalists, like rural Westerners in general, continued to say what they had to say. It took fortitude to make an issue of sloppy uranium milling in Moab 20 years ago, or of formaldehyde fumes from the sawmill in Kremmling a decade ago -- but there were people in those towns who had that courage.
Obviously, there's no environmental need to import people from cities to serve on grazing advisory boards.
There is a political need, of course. The Wilderness
Society (290,000 members whom Babbitt is attempting to
placate) says that local control is the problem, not the
solution,
and that any grazing reform should give
all Americans an equal voice in management
decisions.
Indeed. So why aren't they lobbying to give all Americans an equal voice in other significant management decisions -- say, the operation of the federal reserve system, or the New York City transit system, which doubtless collects more federal subsidies than all the ranches in the West?
In a sensible world, if an urban environmentalist felt left out of range policy matters, he could move to the cowtown of his choice and take a seat at the table. Perhaps the move would hurt his career and income, but that's fair; he's dealing with other people's careers and incomes.
But under the latest proposal, all the concerned urban
planet-saver needs to do is pack his carpetbag for an
overnight trip. And still the national environmental groups
whine that the secretary of the interior has somehow sold
out to the lords of yesterday.
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