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The chimera of collaboration
JON MARVEL, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, WESTERN WATERSHEDS PROJECT
The key American environmental laws were passed 30 or more years ago. They include the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Federal Land Policy Management Act, the National Forest Management Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Wilderness Act, and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.
Unfortunately, in many cases the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Forest Service do not comply with these laws.
When that happens conservation groups appeal and litigate the agencies' decisions with varying results. When the courts overturn the agencies' decisions, much turmoil results in the extractive groups as their uses are curtailed or prevented by court order.
Collaborative efforts are often the direct result of this turmoil and are typically used as a way to co-opt opponents of historic land uses while sustaining logging, mining and ranching without regard to cost or environmental impacts.
Without the threat of federal court intervention to protect the public interest, the sorry history of American public lands will simply be repeated. That history includes routine political interference to ensure continued logging, mining and livestock grazing with acquiescence by the BLM and the Forest Service regardless of the environmental impacts.
Those who suggest that collaborative or consensus group efforts can successfully address this reality are living in a world as vaporous as the cowboy myth itself.
A recent experience of Western Watersheds Project (WWP) is instructive: In early August 2005, WWP won a federal court case against the Jarbidge Field Office of the BLM in southern Idaho for violations of FLPMA and NEPA. The court also issued an injunction ordering cattle removed from over 800,000 public land acres to protect sage grouse habitat. This unprecedented ruling spread fear across the public lands ranching community even though the primary cattle rancher on these lands is Simplot Livestock, the largest corporate rancher on public lands in the United States.
Immediately after the court's ruling, affected ranchers and groups like the National Cattlemen's Beef Association made entreaties to U.S. Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) to overturn the court's ruling by adding a rider to one of the pending 2006 Congressional Appropriations Bills. Senator Craig has been in the habit of passing similar riders in recent years to protect ranchers from adverse court decisions won by WWP.
In this case WWP was able to circumvent Congressional interference by negotiating a settlement directly with Simplot Livestock to which all but one of the other ranchers caught up in the court ruling later agreed. All the ranchers signing the settlement agreement with WWP agreed to support the settlement even if Congress passed a rider overturning the court's decision!
This unprecedented end-run of Senator Craig's usual political interference to protect public land ranchers will enable the BLM to enforce the stringent terms and conditions of the settlement without the usual level of political interference during the four years the BLM has under the settlement to complete a new Resource Management Plan to address sage grouse habitat needs and related conservation needs for the entire1.4 million acre Jarbidge Field Office.
The point I wish to make most strongly is that without some kind of strong legal threat to ongoing public land abuses there really will be no resolution to the environmentally destructive impacts we observe on our public lands across the west.
Collaborative groups are often formed to seek a way to avoid the outcomes of litigation and the uncertainty that it brings; however, speaking from personal experience, I have found that collaborative groups always include individuals representing groups with vested financial interests in the outcome of the group's work. The groups often consume huge amounts of time, and individuals who participate without any vested economic interest are usually co-opted by users who have an economic agenda with clear limits on what they will concede.
These consensus groups are in many ways simply an abdication of the BLM's or the Forest Service's responsibilities under the pretense of public consensus decision-making. A good example would be the many "sage grouse working groups" that now exist in several western states. These are touted as "collaborative" efforts but always fail to address obvious negative impacts on sage grouse habitat by ranching interests because ranchers involved in these groups deny any such impact and fight any requirements that might reduce their current grazing use.
Collaborative groups are a way to pretend that the public interest is being addressed when, in all cases, the public is being euchred financially and by the continued destruction of their public lands.
Until the BLM and Forest Service manage the public lands of the west in compliance with the law and with a true land ethic, those of us who do not have a vested economic interest in how these lands are used will continue to rely on the courts to achieve at least some measure of environmental protection.
There is no alternative.
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