How to cause extinction - Why the mainstream still views typical enviro as very strange bird
Aozotorp
Geov Parrish
workingforchange.com
10.21.02 Printer-friendly version
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How to cause extinction
Why the mainstream still views typical enviro as very strange bird
In August 2001, national media descended for the 15 minutes accorded angry
farmers in Kkanath Basin, Oregon, high desert country in the south-central part
of the state, on the California border. The farmland in the area is completely
dependent on irrigation from the headwaters of the Klamath River watershed --
which later descends to the remote, less dry tribal reservations of the Yurok,
Hoopa, and Klamath, and the verdant redwood country of California's north
coast.
The Yurok were the tribe that lost a landmark 1988 U.S. Supreme Court case, in
which the right of the Forest Service to build logging roads on land considered
sacred to the tribe was held to supercede the Yurok's rights to religious
worship. And now, the Yurok and other area tribes were under heavy pressure to
lose another of their economic and religious foundations -- the Pacific
Northwest's annual salmon runs -- to the economic imperatives of farmers
heavily subsidized by the federal government. Both needed the same water.
The farmers' plight, watching water normally reserved to their parched lands
diverted instead to save fish, was quickly taken up by the Wise Use movement
and conservatives around the country. Conversely, environmentalists in the
region seized the high-profile conflict to demand that Klamath farmlands and
their irrigation schemes be abandoned altogether, for the sake of not just
salmon but a host of dependent species whose steadily declining numbers had
neared the stage of an irreversible decline.
At the time, I stirred up a fair amount of reader venom (and support) by siding
with the farmers and suggesting that the greenies' intractable and unlikely
demands, while they might make ecological sense, were a telling factor in why
the environmental movement had lost support with both mainstream politicians
and much of the American public. As more and more species become endangered,
and sprawl and population growth puts more of us in ecosystems they depend
upon, it just won't do to tell, for example, farmers whose families may have
been invited to a homestead three generations ago by the federal government,
and supported ever since, to pack up and leave because of some fish. Instead of
seeking common ground -- in, for example, the distrust all parties seem to have
for government, and the love all sides claim for the land itself -- such stands
fuel the stereotype that all environmentalists are radical zealots who care
more about animals and plants than people.
Eventually, compromises were reached, cameras left, seasons changed, rains
came. And there things stood until a few weeks ago, when fish began to die in
large numbers in the lower reaches of the Klamath. Lots of fish. Lots and lots
and lots. Perhaps 50,000 or more, Chinook salmon but also Coho and Steelheads,
at least a third of the river's population, with dire implications for the
future not just of salmon, but all sorts of species up and down the region's
food chain.
The salmon were done in by high water temperatures -- over 80 degrees in places
-- with the warm water exacerbated by lack of canopy from logging but due
mostly to shallow depth caused by lack of water. And therein lies the lesson:
never, ever agree with Bush Administration ideologues, even when they're right.
Because what happened is that Secretary of the Interior, former mining industry
lawyer, and harsh Endangered Species Act critic Gail Norton and her chums
(sorry) at the BLM used the previous summer's crisis, and an apparent
miscalculation by the BLM that 2002 was a normal rather than drought year, to
direct that the full complement of Klamath water be released for farm
irrigation this year.
Salmon need water to survive? Gosh! Who’da thunk it?
Beyond the usual conservative and Wise Use distortions, one of the more
politically motivated documents the 2001 crisis produced was a report by the
National Academy of Sciences that the 2001 water diversion had no biological
justification. That's also been used to justify 2002. This is how public policy
is being made these days: conservatives nominate ideologues up and down
publicly invisible posts in the vast tentacles of federal governments: the
courts, the regulatory agencies, the scientific committees. They use big words
and selective interpretations to arrive at the conclusions they began with, and
then they use their job titles and impressive trappings of power to convince
casual observers of their objectiveness. And then their impeccable credentials
lend weight to an otherwise ludicrous-sounding public policy. This is how,
after 20 years of such appointments by Reagan, Bush I, Clinton (yes, Clinton),
and especially Bush II, the federal government can earnestly proclaim that free
markets eradicate poverty, intercontinental missiles protect us from
boxcutters, arsenic in drinking water tastes great, politicians' excreta
doesn't stink, and salmon can live on dry land.
Give 'em an inch, they'll take an ecosystem. Or, as one magazine advertisement
for a mountain-conquering SUV proclaimed earlier this year (I AM NOT MAKING
THIS UP): "One planet down, eight to go."
On the other hand, public support for the alternative requires that the
alternative seem more reasonable, and this brings us back to the demand that
Klamath farmers just go away -- more specifically, that the federal government
buy out their land, as though government at any level can be trusted to give
people fair value for land purchased through eminent domain. (Never mind the
irreplaceable value of having worked a patch of land, perhaps for a lifetime.)
Biologically, it would be far better that farming, especially modern farming
with its pesticides and monocultures, not exist in the Klamath Basin. Or
anywhere, for that matter. But then, it'd also be preferable if 400 million
people didn't live in North America, and if we didn't all need to eat, and if
the tribes had free rein to all the land that once was theirs. It ain't gonna
happen, and so the question becomes how to balance the inevitable conflicts in
a way that save salmon and other, less glamorous species.
So far, salmon et al aren't faring well. In the decade since Pacific coastal
salmon species began to be listed, one after another, as threatened and
endangered, the political will and money needed for any meaningful attempt at
recovery has been notably absent -- in a part of the country dominated by
Democrats. Local groups have done some amazing work to restore habitats in
various streams and creeks, but the sprawl, development and logging practices,
and all the other human activities killing fish, have continued virtually
unabated. Politicians haven't wanted to cost influential business groups any
money, and courts (stacked with those same ideologues) have at times ruled that
hatchery and wild salmon are indistinguishable -- the way, perhaps, that wolves
and dogs once were indistinguishable.
It's the same argument that the Bush Administration uses, even more
disingenuously, to argue that fighting global warming isn't worth the cost to
the economy (!). And it's only possible because Big Green groups, for the past
30 years, have concentrated on the Beltway -- where they will always be
outspent and outchummed -- and because the public's involvement in
environmentalism has been limited to receiving fund appeals with return address
stickers and glossy photos of wilderness and animals with round eyes or big
wings.
The wilderness fetish of mainstream enviros has meant a number of things, few
of them good. The good part has been the more-or-less setting aside of a number
of wilderness areas that otherwise almost certainly would not have been kept
intact as our population grew and spread out. The cost for that has been the
widespread perception of environmentalism as a luxury for young, fit,
upper-middle-class urbanites who like to go hike two weeks a year. The idea
that we all live in an environment, and that its toxicity can, for example,
have (and is having) dire impacts on our health, is never mentioned in those
four-color mailers. Neither is the notion that American consumerism, and the
resource consumption it demands, is the biggest threat to the environment
almost everywhere in the world -- nor is it recognized that economic policy
cannot be separated from ecology, that things like trade policy and collective
bargaining rights and flows of international capital can have an awful lot to
do with whether that panda or condor survives.
Which brings us back to the salmon. As anyone living downwind from the Klamath
this month can testify, the Bush Administration's environmental policies stink.
But polling numbers showing large majorities of the American public favoring
environmental protection are misleading, because such questions are almost
always asked in the abstract. When asked whether trees should be saved or
salmon saved, if it means logging towns decimated or whole farming communities
shut down, the numbers drop. A lot. And without strong public support for
environmental protection even when it's costed out, no politician is going to
be easily convinced to take his hand out of the cookie jar of campaign money
from logging and farming and mining companies and their chums.
The wilderness emphasis of American environmentalism needs careful rethinking
-- not to sell out ala Big Green, or to abandon species already on the verge of
extinction, but to convince humans that the environment is next door, not just
in the next time zone or continent; that the most important part of the
resources needed to save plants and animals involves spending money on the
displaced humans. Get those humans out of the way, and nature has a remarkable
capacity to recover; the only trick is untangling the staggering number of ways
in which we've compounded our damage.
But farmers and loggers and their families, and the townfolk and businesspeople
that rely on them, are animals, too, and so long as they're convinced that
environmentalists are a different species -- so long as people who care about
our surroundings, natural or otherwise, are regarded as "they" rather than "we"
-- the steady decline in legal, political, and public support for
environmentalism will continue. And so will the extinctions.
=== A footnote, on the topic of obscure nominations of ideologues: Yet another
arcane Bush Administration appointment is threatening to mess up the lives of a
lot of people -- in this case, women. It's the nomination -- which must still
be approved by the Senate -- of Dr. W. David Hager as Chairman of the FDA
Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. The committee is the one that,
for example, approved RU-486 (the "morning after" pill) for use in the U.S.,
and Hager is an unqualified quack who has authored books like "As Jesus Cared
for Women: Restoring Women Then and Now" and, with his wife, "Stress and the
Woman's Body," which, according to Time magazine, "puts 'an emphasis on the
restoratative power of Jesus Christ in one's life' and recommends specific
Scripture readings and prayers for such ailments as headaches and premenstrual
syndrome."
Hager was, again according to Time, "chosen for the post by FDA senior
associate commissioner Linda Arey Skladany, a former drug-industry lobbyist
with longstanding ties to the Bush family." Skladany rejected two far more
qualified names put forward by staff in order to get this nut into power. All
that stands between him and reproductive rights is the Senate. Drop a note,
e-mail, or phone call to your senators today.