It's a pleasure to be back in Denver. I am especially pleased by the first day of this conference. You could see the hard work of the Alliance of the West and the Center for the New West.
Coming to Denver, one cannot help but see that there is something of an intellectual gold rush going on in the Rockies. You can see it in the new high-tech start-ups and literary journals. You can see it in the cultural melting pot of Denver and Boise, in Santa Fe and Bozeman.
Phil, you knew this was going to happen. You staked your claim early. You started with a vision of what the West could become. And now the West we know today is, in no small measure, a society shaped by the influence of this Center, one of the premier think tanks of the American West . . .
Phil and his staff did something brilliant at this conference, something almost unprecedented. He has brought people together. Scan this audience and you'll find representatives of every part of this community, including our local environmentalists. To them I say, welcome. We need you here. We want you here.
Let me also say that it would not do any of us good if I refrained from telling it as I see it. To those who will disagree, I say, wait until tomorrow. You will get plenty of time to respond. And I want to hear your response. I want a constructive, open debate.
One thing is for certain: We all love this country.
Many of you, like me, come from old pioneer stock. My great-grandparents arrived in Idaho in a covered wagon. The same is true for many of the Westerners I know.
The first wave of pioneers came here for the freedom of the open land. They came from the warehouses of St. Louis, the stockyards of Chicago, the railyards of Philadelphia. They came from the declining farmlands of Ireland, Northern Germany and Scandinavia. They were not raised as cowboys, or loggers, or miners, but they were willing to become whatever the times needed and the land offered.
Now we are witnessing a second major migration, a new wave of pioneers, as likely to come from the West Coast as the East, from Vietnam and Mexico as from Europe. They come here to do what they can do anywhere, to be computer analysts, to sell financial services, to open restaurants or convenience stores.
But it would be a mistake to think they have come here for the growth. They have not, for they, too, were drawn to the West by the open land. The Center has a fine term for them: "Amenity migrants." Ask these newcomers what they do, and more often than not they won't say I'm a computer analyst, or a stockbroker or a restaurateur.
They will tell you, I am a rock climber.
I am a hunter.
I go fly fishing.
I ski.
I'm a mountain biker.
I hang-glide.
I hike the high country.
Like the pioneers of old, these people are tied to the land in their own way. In the 21st Century, public lands still define the West.
So we still have an old West, a rural society centered on the original commodity-producing industries and agriculture. And then there is a New West, centered on the vigorous enjoyment of the outdoor life.
For those in Washington, D.C., who live for politics and by the polls, it might seem smart to try to drive a wedge between the old, rural West, and the New West of edge cities and high speed Internet access.
There are, after all, plenty of weaknesses to exploit.
The Old West is ailing, small towns suffering from declining access. In the last eight years, for example, this Administration has forced an 80 percent decline in logging. Across the board, access to water, to grazing, to the vast mineral wealth of this region, is being locked up for one pretext or another.
I believe a calculation has been made in Washington: ‘Let's set the cities against the towns. Let's drive a wedge, right in the heart of the other party's strongest region.'
If this is so, it is a cynical ploy. It is a malicious ploy. And it is, above all, a partisan ploy. And I am here tonight to respond, and to say that this ploy won't work, for two reasons.
The first reason is that in time, the people of the cities will discover that their access to the land is as much at stake as the people of the towns. They will recoil from the inflexibility of bureaucracy. The same people who never want to hear a chainsaw in a National Forest also never want to hear a snowmobile. The same people who never want a miner's or oil driller's bit to cut the earth also never want a rock climber to place a bolt in a canyon wall.
As I see it, this is a Great Western Lockup, and it is based on an antiquated idea, an idea that only a select few, mostly from preservationist organizations in the East, can be trusted with environmental responsibility.
Who is an environmentalist? Let me tell you, we are all environmentalists.
This was not true when I first got into politics over twenty years ago. Twenty years ago, the commodity-producing industries—timber, cattle, oil and gas, and mining—were in control of the agenda. They constituted a defensive status quo, many with heels dug in. They hesitated to embrace environmental awareness and to create a sustainable balance. They became the victims of change, instead of the agents of change. As a result, public land policy has been made by the agencies and the courts, not by the Congress or the people.
Since then, times have changed. People have changed. Go to any person you know and show him or her the "Wilderness Letter" of the late, great Western writer, Wallace Stegner, wrote in 1960, from which I quote:
"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clean air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste."
Who is not moved by such words?
When Wallace Stegner wrote this in 1960, there were no designated wilderness acres in America. Since then, the Congress has created 95 million acres of wilderness. We have protected virgin forests, wild species, perhaps the place where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs.
Wallace Stegner expressed this spirit of preservationism, a desire to protect the rare, the wild, the most beautiful. This is one legacy of the West, the legacy of John Muir, Bob Marshall and Ansel Adams.
The other legacy of the West is conservation and multiple use, for a century now the dominant policy of our public lands. This is the West of Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, who said, "National Forests are made for and owned by the people. They should also be managed by the people. They are made, not to give the officers in charge of them a chance to work out theories, but to give the people who use them, and those affected by their use, a chance to work out their own best profit."
There is a need to preserve pristine areas. Preservationism has its place.
But radical preservationism--preservationism that embraces extremism--has no place in our public life. It has no place because it is inflexible. It refuses to acknowledge the role of multiple use. It sees every acre of public land, set aside for the people, as a wilderness in the making. It seeks preservation, but sows conflict and unhealthy public lands.
From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton
These are fine distinctions, which some in Washington would like us to overlook. Mr. Clinton has set aside more federal monument land, outside of Alaska, than any other chief executive, an area about twice the size of Delaware. These lock-ups have been stealth decisions, without input from Congress, the states, or the public. Indeed, in may cases, these lock-ups have been in direct opposition to the democratic will of the Congress and the states.
Like the twenty-sixth president, the forty-second has used his most exclusive executive powers, but to different ends, and for different reasons.
[My colleague in the Senate, Strom Thurmond, tells me he knew Teddy Roosevelt, and he assures me that Mr. Clinton is no TR . . .]
Perhaps Mr. Clinton thinks he is also following in Teddy Roosevelt's footsteps when he targeted roadless areas in the National Forests, creating de facto wilderness areas. By executive fiat, the President doubled the size of restricted land, leaving those of us in Congress dumbfounded, the Forest Service paralyzed and citizens without a voice.
Worst of all, the President's policy swept away all the work of local environmentalists and local land users who had begun to work together.
There are important differences between the actions of Teddy Roosevelt and Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton is trying to harness radical preservationism. Teddy Roosevelt founded a conservation club named after Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.
Bill Clinton betrays no interest in the plight of the rural West. Teddy Roosevelt understood the importance of the forest to the rural West more than any Easterner. Teddy Roosevelt once said:
"Eastern people need to keep steadily in mind the fact that the Westerners who live in the neighborhood of the forest preserves are the [ones] who, in the last resort, will determine whether or not these preserves will be permanent. They cannot, in the long run, be kept as forests and game reservations unless the settlers roundabout believe in them and heartily support them."
Just as we have very different presidents with very different philosophies, we also live in starkly different times. In Teddy Roosevelt's day, there was a genuine environmental emergency. Industries poisoned the land without compunction. Today, these same industries routinely incorporate environmental considerations into their process and product designs. They do so not only as a matter of law, but as a matter of conscience. Our public lands are now under the protection of sweeping laws, like the Endangered Species Act, enforced by powerful bureaucracies.
Despite the progress we have made in almost a hundred years, this is not enough for the nation's doorkeepers of the environment.
It is important to remember, that among the original thirteen states, any land the federal government has acquired, it has purchased. To this day, in the majority of these states, the federal government owns less than five percent of the land.
In the West today, almost half of the region of 11 public land states belongs to the federal government. Every minor issue that should be a matter for a local zoning board is truly "a federal issue." This is true here in Colorado, where the federal government owns one-third of the land. It is especially true in my home state of Idaho, two-thirds of which is owned by Washington, D.C.
If the president wishes to seize on a genuine emergency, he might compare the performance of a Forest Service that can run a $42 million deficit selling timber in Montana, during a period in which Montana generated $13.3 million for its schools, from the same type of forest lands.
If the president wishes, he could turn his attention to another emergency, the appallingly poor health of our forests and parks, overcrowded, infested with insects and disease, increasingly at risk to catastrophic wildfire. (He could also note that lands under federal management are twice as likely to have toxic wastes than privately held land.)
What is the cure? The exact opposite of the president's prescription. Healthy forests and watersheds require forest management. And that means road access.
The Rural West
Instead, this administration seems, in my view, intent on punishing the rural West.
The new policy is having a devastating impact on small towns and schools districts, which were set to receive 25 percent of every federal dollar produced from these trees.
Go to Grangeville, Idaho, and you will see an exhausted and tapped out citizenry, where every year parents have to cut firewood, sell bottled water, hold raffles and solicit, in truth beg, for donations to keep their schools open, and their kids educated. I can show you school districts rationed to four days, where the football teams, drama club and debate teams a fading memory.
I can take you to other places in these Western states where thousands of acres of productive state school trust lands are effectively transformed into wilderness areas by the "land-locking" effect of the president's roadless areas policy.
In the Northwest, there is another raging debate over dams and fish. This one is largely about how Washington can lock up the West's water resources.
I care about our steelhead and salmon fisheries. We all do. It just seems clearly premature, until science better understands the Pacific Ocean environment, to resort to "blowing up dams" on the Lower Snake River, and with it much of the region's economy. Yet this is what Secretary Babbitt has said he wants, and where his Administration clearly wants to go.
Mining was the West's first industry, and it remains one of our most important contributors to our tax base, our jobs and economy. It has made great strides in environmentally responsible mineral production. Yet the elimination of mining is clearly where the nation's doorkeepers of the environment want to go.
Ranchers are the small farmers of the West, the keepers of traditions we cherish. They are governed by a one-size-fits-all bureaucracy, in which grazing policies are made in places where 40 cows graze an acre, while our ranchers need 40 acres for just one cow. As grazing fees and restrictions are raised, ranch families of the West are hurting. Yet the is clearly where the doorkeepers want to go.
In short, I do not think I exaggerate when I say that the Eastern preservationists are waging a war on the rural West, a quiet, brutal war of attrition.
Recreation: Closing Access
Why are they doing this? Perhaps the Administration policy is counting on that other West, the urban West, to cheer them on.
They have some reason to believe it will. When the president declared new monument lands, a poll by the Arizona Republic showed that 80 percent of Arizonans supported the measure.
On the surface, it would seem a winning issue . . . not that I'm cynical enough to think that anyone would be looking for one in an election year . . .
Fortunately, the Center for the New West performed a poll of its own, one that scratched below the surface. I am sure you saw it in your information packets. While 55 percent of Coloradans are generally supportive of expanding wilderness, 74 percent are "less supportive" when they understand a wilderness designation would give the government more control over the land and Colorado water. When given a choice, 68 percent say they prefer parks and open space.
A little education is a wonderful thing. The federal bureaucracies, in executing the Administration's draconian policies, are educating more and more people.
The U.S. Forest Service, basing its decisions on vague standards of solitude, cut back the number of hikers on the Mt. Hood National Forest in its Draft plan by as much as 90 percent. This will rebuff more than 20,000 hikers a year.
Radical preservationists are lobbying for two new federal wilderness areas in Nevada County, California, and a third near the biking center of Downieville, though this will economically vandalize small bike shops and outfitters up and down the main streets of those towns.
The doorkeepers have targeted skiing. If they have their way, lift tickets will go from expensive to exorbitant, and lift lines will look like Times Square in summer. We should denounce this "surrender by the Forest Service to the vocal minority of environmental groups who simply want our sport to go away," writes Andy Bigford, editor of Ski Magazine. "If this proposal becomes national policy, we may end up forfeiting all kinds of recreational opportunities from coast to coast."
Snowmobilers are finding their access areas being curtailed by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of acres.
And it's not just the hikers, bikers and "snow jocks" who are getting hit. Every conceivable form of recreation, from rock climbers to trekkers are slapped with new restrictions every day. Any reason will do. We are told, with a straight face, that snowmobile tracts could lead coyotes to predate on Canadian lynx hiding in the snow.
What we are rarely given is the science to back up such claims.
And when local groups push too hard, instead of hard science, they get bare-knuckle threats.
Consider this remark from Michael Dombeck, chief of the U.S. Forest Service. "I would tell the recreation industry to look what happened to timber."
I think the meaning of Mr. Dombeck's statement ought to be clear.
Threats come from Washington. They also come from San Francisco, from self-styled environmental attorneys from San Francisco. Their suits and briefs can give this Administration cover to stretch its interpretation of the Endangered Species Act to enforce any more recreational abatement.
The Doorkeepers of the West
In Roosevelt's time, the West was ruled by the railroad, timber and mining establishment. The West today is ruled by environmental doorkeepers dedicated to an inflexible standard interpreted and enforced by large advocacy groups adept in adversarial proceedings.
The result is a system clouded with enough conflict and confusion to intimidate Smokey Bear. This is just fine by the doorkeepers of the West. It prevents change, except the kind of change they like, the kind that comes from the whip of an injunction or the lash of a judicial ruling.
The first casualty of this official dysfunction is the democratic process. Comment periods are announced abruptly, and then only for a short time. Web sites announce bold new initiatives, that at the next click turn out to be "under construction."
You have to wonder, when the Idaho Attorney General filed an FOIA request for Forest Service documents on its roadless proposal, why did a "who's who" of the environmental establishment file a counter motion to keep these documents hidden? It is staggering to think that public policy groups with proud names and reputations for unassailable integrity would join San Francisco's Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund to try to hide government decisions from the people.
Just what is it, exactly, are they afraid for us to see?
These are the same groups that were included in meetings in June and August with the top White House environmental aide on the coming lockups. No public hearing. No opportunity for you, or your neighbor, to comment. No idea what was said or bartered in that meeting on our behalf.
And it was this same White House aide who had to respond to Congressional inquiries by affirming that, yes, he did review polling data on roadless issues with the president's chief of staff before the decision was made.
I have to sympathize with Tom Stone, commissioner of Colorado's Eagle County, who was quoted in High Country News as saying, "The decisions are being made back in Washington . . . and they don't care because there's just eight electoral votes from Colorado."
Perhaps the worst aspect of all of this is that the lockup is bad environmental policy. It is, after all, the environmental movement that made us aware of the global impacts of local decisions. Americans are not going to stop opening new stores, buying new houses or building wooden decks. If we deny access to the well managed forests of our public lands, where will our timber come from?
It will come from the ravaged forests of the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil, Central America. Where will our minerals come from? Elsewhere, often in countries with little or no concern for the environment. Where will our open spaces be? You have to go on safari, in East Africa. All in the name of environmental responsibility.
A New Vision: Collaborative Conservation
The long struggle over public access to our lands has left many with battle fatigue, people weary of the fight. I am here to say to you tonight that if we come together, if we cast aside petty differences and focus on what's most important, we can all be reinvigorated by new possibilities.
First, clearly, we need a new approach. Perhaps we should begin with a new lexicon, for lands that are off limits to people are not "public" lands at all. They are federal lands.
To restore federal lands to the public, we are all going to have to sit down with our neighbors and talk. We will need to keep the corrosive national debate out of our communities. We must not demonize one another.
I know that many of you will have a very different perspective than mine. Again, I want to hear your disagreements. And I promise you, I will listen with an open mind.
The continuing conflict on the national stage has turned off a lot of local activists, committed environmentalists who feel they can better spend their time working to bridge differences, to find a common solution that reflects the national environmental ethic. In a phrase, to join us in collaborative conservation.
This is what happened at the Quincy Library in California. Senator Fienstein and I introduced legislation to make it possible to free more citizens to explore a Quincy Library solution of their own.
Senator Wyden and I recently introduced a bill to help timber towns find new recreational opportunities, produce new forest products, and come to a local consensus on use.
Collaborative conservation is also the guiding spirit of the Vail Compromise, where today I heard the snowmobilers and the backcountry skiers tell how they worked out a compromise on their own. [And believe me, if they can get along, there is hope for the Middle East peace process.] We are all learning that the West is a big place, with plenty of room for all kinds of activities.
Let me offer a few guiding principles to help us all get along.
One: Let's stipulate that for all the progress made by the commodity-producing industries, by loggers and ranchers, and by recreation, we can always do better. We need a process of continuous improvement in reducing our impacts on the land . . .
Two: The federal government desperately needs reform . . . It needs to manage better, and reverse the shameful condition of our national parks . . . It must not allow the Administration's restrictive approach of preservation management to trump what would otherwise be environmentally sound activities and be used to shut out local people who have to live with the consequences of federal decisions. It must not allow the Administration's restrictive definition of ecosystem management to trump what would otherwise be environmentally sound activities and be used to shut out local people who have to live with the consequences of federal decisions.
It must also end another federal doctrine, dominant use, which is in danger of igniting another Sagebrush Rebellion, something none of us want or need. The ironic truth is, dominant use doesn't even serve the goal of improving habitat. We need to get back to the philosophy of Teddy Roosevelt We need to get back to multiple use . . .
Three: We must discard the doctrine of national communities of interest, where decisionmakers are selected from national organizations, and return to a doctrine of local community interest. We should not allow federal bureaucracies and national organizations to upset the fragile process of local consensus-making.
Of all the things we need to preserve, let us not forget to preserve democracy, and the spirit of tolerance and trust that guides it. We should, for there is, after all, no shortage of local environmentalists to serve as strong representatives of this powerful movement, people second to none in knowledge of, and commitment to, the local land.
Instead of igniting a nationwide battle, as the president's initiative does, I believe we should let the extremes of the issue fight their battles in court, while we, the reasonable 90 percent solve our differences at the round table of consensus and compromise. It will take work, but hard-won accommodations can be reached.
Of course, this proposal does not sit well with some. The national power structure today is as defensive as the structure that existed twenty years ago. Only now, it's the national environmental organizations that have replaced land user groups as the reining establishment in Washington, D.C.
Over the next year, I want to work with you to nurture the spirit of collaborative conservation, to break the logjam, to dispel the rancor. And next year, I want to meet with you again at this Center, to mark our progress, and keep it going.
After all, there's one West, a West that cherishes the land, honors its traditions, and believes in its future.
This is a West of young men and women seeking glory. People who won't be shut up in enclaves of glass and steel. People who want to be free to wander the meadows, climb the rock cliffs, and snowboard in the glory of the Rockies.
In the West, humans are not apart from nature. We are both its children and its stewards.
This is a truth every cowboy knows.
Every logger knows.
Every backpacker knows.
Every hunter knows.
Every fly fisherman knows.
Every skier knows.
Every rancher knows.
Every miner knows.
And yes, every , every true environmentalist knows.
They all know that humanity and nature were not meant to be opposed to one another.
We were made to roam. Thank you.