Keith Epstein » Environment

Harnessing Purity and Pragmatism

admin — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 02:36:32 +0000

As the wall between the nonprofit and corporate worlds crumbles, many social change organizations are asking themselves: Do we stick to our activist guns, or do we cross the divide and work with business? Both pure and pragmatic strategies exact their costs. But in the end, research suggests that social movements need both kinds of organizations to make the changes they seek.

Fall 2007

By Keith Epstein & Alana Conner

As they do every winter, fleets of Japanese ships sailed into rough Antarctic seas to hunt whales last January. And as they do every winter, Greenpeace activists greeted the hunters with dramatic nonviolent protests, such as positioning their boats in front of the whalers’ harpoons and painting “Whale Meat From Sanctuary!” on one whaler’s hull.

Displays like these never satisfied Paul Watson, a founder of Greenpeace who parted ways with the organization in 1978 to create the more militant Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He has called his onetime colleagues “the Avon ladies of the environmental movement” and “a bunch of wimps.” When confronting Japanese whalers, the bearded captain prefers a more direct approach. He raises a skull and crossbones flag on the mast of his vessel, the Farley Mowat (named after the Canadian wildlife author and activist), and then rams his enemies’ hulls with the 7-foot steel blade on his starboard bow that he calls “the can opener.”

“Nobody would walk by a kitten or a dog being kicked to death,” Watson explained to the Reuters news service last February.

Both the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Greenpeace are provocative environmental organizations with similar goals. Yet Sea Shepherd is more ideologically pure, with its long history of uncompromising stances, radical actions, and contempt for corporations. Greenpeace, in contrast, is becoming more pragmatic, with its recent history of working with Coca-Cola, General Electric, and other corporate giants to create greener products and processes. In turn, both organizations are viewed as purer and less pragmatic than Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council, which are even more focused on working with businesses to cultivate market-friendly solutions to environmental problems.

As environmental organizations, like the nonprofit sector as a whole, increasingly join forces with and emulate businesses, the gulfs between many pragmatic and pure organizations – even those with shared objectives – are widening. Consequently, Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace’s greatest rivals often aren’t Japanese whaling companies. They’re each other.

Bickering between purer and more pragmatic organizations is not confined to the sea. Back on shore, the Native Forest Council roasts the Nature Conservancy for many of its practices, including its decision to sell land in Texas to trustees, who then allowed drilling for oil in the formerly protected areas. After the press exposed these and other actions, the Nature Conservancy established a risk evaluation committee and explored ways to mitigate the damage. Nevertheless, Timothy G. Hermach, founder of the Native Forest Council, still calls the conservancy “the real estate company that cares.”

“Pragmatic, as the term is being used by most of Gang Green, is but a justification for being dishonest,” Hermach says.

In response, Steven J. McCormick, the Nature Conservancy’s chief executive, says: “You have to sort of admire the nobility and passion and purity behind [Hermach’s stance]. But on the other hand, it’s rare you get much out of it.”

Which organizations do the most for their cause: the purer, or the more pragmatic? Sociologists increasingly conclude that “this is the wrong question,” says William P. Barnett, the Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Business Leadership, Strategy, and Organizations at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “What’s most effective is to have both involved.” While purer nonprofits blow whistles on malfeasant companies, mobilize the public with worst-case scenarios, and muscle legislation through sluggish governments, more pragmatic nonprofits enact the small changes and quiet compromises that often make the biggest differences.

Pure and pragmatic nonprofits also make each others’ work easier. Without the threat of pure nonprofits’ radical actions, corporations and governments would often not be willing to work with more pragmatic organizations. And without the subtle legwork of pragmatic organizations, pure nonprofits would enjoy considerably fewer results from their actions.

All social movements need a variety of ideologies, but individual nonprofits must still decide where they will land on the purity-pragmatism spectrum. They must also learn to balance the purist and pragmatic tendencies within themselves. To do so they must first understand the price of being practical, as well as the cost of being pure.

Pragmatism Isn’t Cheap

Although nonprofits’ tilt toward pragmatism has led many major corporations to adopt more socially responsible practices, it sometimes takes a toll on membership and funding, finds Nicholas Switanek, a doctoral student working with Barnett at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In his research, Switanek first classified more than 12,000 U.S. environmental nonprofits as either pragmatic – that is, working with companies on such tactics as carbon offsets, habitat conservation plans, and mitigation banks – or pure – that is, not working with companies. His analyses showed that between 1999 and 2006, more pragmatic organizations failed than did pure organizations.

Switanek thinks that the frailty of pragmatic nonprofits lies not in the organizations, but instead within the psychologies of their would-be members, volunteers, and donors. When people choose to support a nonprofit, they aren’t just deciding where to volunteer their talents or donate their dollars. Instead, they are choosing how to build their identities, which they construct, in part, from the organizations with which they associate themselves.

Many people want to view themselves as unique from – and even in opposition to – the mainstream. In other words, they want to construct what sociologists call oppositional identities. Associating with clearly unique, even antagonistic groups is one way to build such an identity.

Traditionally, environmental organizations were a good source of oppositional identities, says Barnett: “They had to take an oppositional stance to business to be true blue.” Yet as environmental nonprofits adopt tactics from business, they drift closer to the undifferentiated middle of the social world. “There are no identity benefits for pragmatists when polar bears and climate change are on the cover of every magazine on every newsstand,” notes Switanek.

Many committed environmentalists gravitate toward purer organizations to get their identity fix, but some middle-of-theroad environmentalists are actually leaving nonprofits altogether. “People who would have worked for NRDC or Environmental Defense are now going to work for Shell,” says Switanek. “And people who might have written a check to these organizations are now funding alternative energy start-ups.”

As a result, membership and funding for more pragmatic environmental organizations seem to be dropping off over time, while those of purer organizations seem to be holding steady, or in some cases even growing, says Switanek. For example, the more pragmatic Rainforest Alliance has had a rocky time financially, he finds, whereas the purer Defenders of Wildlife, Rainforest Action Network, and Earthjustice have watched their funding steadily grow over the past eight years. And though pragmatic organizations may turn to corporate contributions to make up for their losses, this reliance on corporate dollars sometimes calls into question their independence from the business sector.

Environmental organizations’ departure from their traditional roles of watchdogs and whistle-blowers can hurt them in another way, notes Switanek: “Only those organizations that have the purest, greenest credentials can go into a corporation and maintain their credibility. When they become market pragmatists, however, they cast doubt on their commitment to being creditable monitors, which should make them less likely to attract funding” – as well as public trust.

Other sociologists have reached similar conclusions about the price of pragmatism. In their 1978 classic, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward argue that social movements are most effective when they’re purest, most radical, and most disorganized. “The mob in the street is always more effective than the bureaucratized, institutionalized organization,” summarizes Doug McAdam, a professor of sociology at Stanford. The father of sociology, Max Weber, made a similar argument some 30 years earlier, ¹ observing that as organizations get older, larger, and more bureaucratized, they lose their radical edge – a process he called the “routinization of charisma.”

A Crisis of Legitimacy

The Russian-American nonprofit partnership known as the Wild Salmon Center learned firsthand how difficult it is to walk the line between purity and pragmatism. The center’s original mission focused only on conservation: Protect and learn about one of the world’s last remaining strongholds of wild Pacific salmon and steelhead, located on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East. Better to preserve the breeding grounds of perhaps one-fourth of all Pacific salmon, the organization reasoned, than to focus solely on areas where salmon had already headed into steep decline.

The center created a novel fundraising and education model. It charged anglers some $7,000 for two-week trips into the Kamchatka wilderness, and then spent the proceeds on its own research. Helicopters ferried both fishermen and scientists deep into the wilderness, which lowered the cost of doing research, and the anglers helped the scientists collect data. The best way to enlist guardians of wildlife, the founders figured, was to get them both waist-deep in fly-fishing and elbow-deep in research. How better to save an ecosystem than to build a wealthy constituency that has been there, seen it, and fished it?

Foundations weren’t so sure. Helicopter-loads of anglers with net worths of $5 million to $30 million apiece did not help perceptions that the Wild Salmon Center needed foundation grants. “They got wary about the idea they were subsidizing rich fishermen,” notes Barnett. “They said, ‘Wait, are you an environmental organization or are you a tourism outfit?’”

The center’s Russian partners also grew suspicious, says Guido Rahr, president and CEO of the Wild Salmon Center: “They asked, ‘Do you want to protect this river because you want to protect a globally important source of biodiversity, or because you want to get angling concessions for foreign tourists?’” At the same time, many ecotourism operators – including the center’s commercial competitors – spun holiday travel as environmentally beneficial, and so the organization was having a hard time maintaining its unique identity.

Ultimately, the fishermen themselves were confused about what, exactly, the Wild Salmon Center did. “When we asked them for 5K to go fishing, and then for another 5K in donations, they thought they were being hit twice,” says Rahr.

For the Wild Salmon Center, the situation became nothing short of what Barnett terms a “legitimacy crisis.” Just how pure could this organization be?

As a solution, the founders created two organizations, one with a purer focus, and one with a more pragmatic approach. TheWild Salmon Center continues to concentrate on conservation and science. Meanwhile, a newly formed nonprofit, Wild Salmon Rivers, continues to offer angling tours. “It has been a bit of a challenge that among some audiences, for example, fishermen who went to Kamchatka in the early years of the program, we are still seen as an organization that runs trips to Russia,” acknowledges Rachel Uris, vice president of resources and communication at the Wild Salmon Center. “But this challenge is fading.”

And both organizations are prospering, says Rahr. Foundations like that each organization sticks to its knitting and develops its core competencies, which makes both the Wild Salmon Center and Wild Salmon Rivers more competitive for grants. The organizations’ Russian partners are also reassured. “To do conservation in Russia,” says Rahr, “everybody needs to be perceived as not making an end run at capturing a resource. It’s important to be seen as providing technical and financial assistance. But ecotourism is a very different model. By creating a firewall between conservation and ecotourism, we assured the Russians that we are supporting their efforts to protect important watersheds.” With its partners’ trust restored, the Wild Salmon Center has been able to implement its projects more easily, and thereby attract even more foundation funding.

Purity Is Also Pricey

Despite the challenges facing pragmatic organizations, both Barnett and Switanek believe that more pragmatic strategies may prove more effective than purer ones when it comes to making change across social issues. “Capitalism is a great engine for innovation,” says Barnett. “If you really want to get something done, you are going to play the pragmatist.”

Barnett cites the alliance between Environmental Defense and Wal-Mart Stores as an effective nonprofit-corporate partnership. (See “Partners for the Planet” in the Summer 2007 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review.) Pushed by Environmental Defense, the world’s largest retailer claims it is well on the way to reducing its energy use by 30 percent, trimming its annual solid waste production by 25 percent, and saving 5,000 trees and 1,300 barrels of oil by reducing its use of cardboard. The corporate giant also intends to launch windmill-powered stores. By partnering with Wal-Mart, “Environmental Defense has done much more to help the planet than many organizations,” says Barnett.

Still, when Barnett recently asked a group of environmental activists, “Who here is too pure to work with Wal-Mart?” about a third of the hands went up. “They regard Wal-Mart as the enemy,” he says. “They’re saying, ‘We’re not going to contaminate our ideological stand and sleep with Wal-Mart just to make some changes at the margins.’ Their identities have become more important than the ultimate objective.”

Granted, cultivating identities is an important psychological need that affiliating with purist organizations can satisfy, says Barnett. Yet purist tactics may leave unchecked not only wayward businesses, but also recalcitrant governments. In the early years of the environmental movement, purist environmental organizations enjoyed powerful legislative successes, including the passage of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. But since the Carter administration, activists have had far fewer legislative victories. As purist organizations continued their fruitless sparring with lawmakers, pragmatic organizations sidestepped government altogether, worked with business, and achieved some of the very same goals for which purist organizations had been fighting in courts and legislatures.

Purity is also hard for organizations to sustain internally. “Very few nonprofits have the luxury of being pure,” observes Elizabeth T. Boris, director of the Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy. That’s because few organizations can operate in a vacuum of like-minded members, founders, and funders. An organization always answers to myriad stakeholders. “If nonprofits are dependent on the public, its members, or foundations, their constituencies are varied and have a claim on them. An agenda that may have been set by a few people in a room may not make it out into the real world in that form.”

Finally, time is not always on the side of purity. “Purity is a higher-risk strategy,” notes Barnett. “If the times are right, it can enhance the organization. A staunchly antinuclear group was the place to go during the Three Mile Island accident. But now, staunchly antinuclear groups are falling out of favor because people are beginning to think that nuclear power is a good idea. If you were really focused on opposing nukes in one era, you were a hero. But now, you would be seen as not progressive or unwilling to deal with the larger issue of climate change” – and membership, funding, and effectiveness would all suffer.

Movements Need Both

The tensions between pure and pragmatic organizations are especially uncomfortable in the nonprofit sector, where scarce resources and high stakes make everyone just want to get along. “There is a feeling in the nonprofit world that, ideally, we would all cooperate,” says Barnett. “And in a lot of cases, cooperation does make sense.”

Yet the clash of approaches feeds innovation, says Barnett: “We need just as much vitality and beautifully uncoordinated innovation in the nonprofit sector as there is in the economy at large.”

Within the ecosystem of a social movement, pure and pragmatic organizations play different yet equally important roles that, when combined, make change happen. Even someone like Captain Watson, the whaler hunter labeled a rogue pirate and ecological terrorist, may accomplish more for the movement than his opponents realize. His model might not be sustainable, since few governments are likely to adopt his method of enforcing international wildlife treaties. But such activists at the fringes of a movement can tug other organizations – and society – in important new directions.

“Pragmatic groups get more done, but part of why that is is the threat of a radical flank,” observes McAdam, using a term – “radical flank effects” – first coined by the sociologist Herbert H. Haines.² In their analyses of the civil rights movement both McAdam³ and Haines argue that purer groups made it easier for more moderate groups to pursue their agendas. In the 1950s, for example, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was illegal in the South. But once the more radical Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference surfaced, mainstream support began pouring into the NAACP, says McAdam. And once the Black Power movement emerged, he notes, white leaders became much more willing to meet with King.

“When you have a really radical wing of the movement, it tends to increase the legitimacy, respectability, and leverage of more moderate groups,” says McAdam.

“The most radical group during the civil rights movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, realized that they weren’t getting the credit they deserved for King’s success,” he continues. “But they were willing to pay that price for the sake of the movement as a whole.”

“All social movements have an extreme faction,” agrees Ingrid Newkirk, founder of People for the Ethical Treatment (PETA), an organization whose tactics include juxtaposing photos of slaughterhouses with concentration camps, promoting nudity over wearing fur, and tossing red paint on fashion show runways that featured animal products. “Such activity seems to move the center forward,” she says, noting that the even more radical Animal Liberation Front, which has raided mink and chinchilla farms and released the animals, makes

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Slipping Towards Oblivion

admin — Sun, 21 Dec 2003 16:19:55 +0000

Tampa Tribune – December 21, 2003

By Keith Epstein

WASHINGTON – They come in all shapes and sizes. A woodpecker that makes its home in century-old pines an hour north of Tampa. A nocturnal mouse that lives in Florida Panhandle dunes favored by condominium builders. The lumbering manatee, beloved by some but gashed by the pleasure boats of others. Hundreds of species are slipping toward oblivion – some slowly, some quickly – under an advancing human tide.

Public attention is focused more on war and politics than nature. But especially in recent months, federal and state authorities have managed to compound the ill effects of years of government sluggishness and neglect in safeguarding species under siege. Little noticed by many, these actions by President Bush’s administration, Congress, governors, legislatures, bureaucrats, commissions and courts have whittled away at a once-popular mission to preserve and protect threatened species.

Wild things didn’t fare well even before the recent actions. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the chief federal agency charged with restoring plants, animals and insects “to a significant portion of their range,” is limited by lawsuits and court orders. It is also hundreds of millions of dollars in the red. This year it has $12 million to address a backlog of species-saving work that would require $153 million to clear, according to Gary Frazier, assistant director for endangered species.

The agency can’t keep up with reports to Congress, required every two years, on the status of species it is supposed to monitor. The latest report, in 2000, found that only 39 percent of listed species were stable or improving. The rest were in decline or faced uncertain futures. Florida agencies, meanwhile, list 117 animals as endangered, threatened or “of special concern,” and 413 endangered, threatened or commercially exploited plants. Only California and Hawaii have more endangered species.

Of all Florida vertebrates, 44 percent are known or suspected to be declining in numbers or distribution, according to data compiled by the Center for Natural Resources at the University of Florida. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Endangered Species Act, passed by a nearly unanimous Congress and signed into law by President Richard Nixon almost 30 years ago – Dec. 28, 1973 – was designed to do more than list protected plants and animals. It was written to preserve the communities they inhabit, the places they traverse, and the living things they eat and that influence their survival. “Nothing,” the Republican president declared, “is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed.”

Since then, eagles, whales, grizzlies, condors, ferrets, alligators, pelicans, wolves and many other animals and plants have been helped back from the edge of extinction. But nationwide, only seven protected species no longer need protection. And seven on the federal list have been lost forever. Many more imperiled species – some say up to 350 – have not been added to the protected list because of a lack of money to review their status, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

“Piecemeal Attack’

Under Bush, some conservationists predicted wholesale demolition of the Endangered Species Act, worrying about the influence of business and property interests on the Republican president and Republican-led Congress. That hasn’t happened. Destroying the law would be politically untenable.

Public opinion surveys consistently show broad support for protecting species, even when the economy is poor. Americans love wildlife. Some 66 million people fed, photographed or found other ways of watching animals in the wild in 2001, spending $38 billion on trips, equipment and related items. “The Bush administration knows there’s still strong public support [for the law], and they know going to Congress and openly gutting it won’t fly,” says John Kostyack, senior counsel at the National Wildlife Federation. “So they’re doing a piecemeal attack strategy,” he says. “Piece by piece, they’re taking specific species off the list, downgrading them, denying them protection, reinterpreting the law – basically weakening its implementation.”

It’s a pattern of “tinkering with administrative changes, budgetary allocations, and other below-the-radar maneuvers,” says Michael Bean, chairman of the wildlife program Environmental Defense. “A lot can be done that doesn’t trigger the same alarm bells a frontal assault in Congress on all species would trigger.” In the last year, Bush’s administration has: Given the military more leeway to sidestep wildlife protection laws to train personnel within habitats of endangered species and to test sonar systems that may injure marine mammals.

Drafted regulations to make maintaining viable wildlife populations in national forests discretionary rather than mandatory. Wrested decision-making away from Fish and Wildlife Service experts on whether pesticides harm endangered species. Tried to remove Fish and Wildlife Service experts from helping decide whether fire and logging plans on federal land harm endangered species.

Removed from the endangered list species viewed by many as still endangered, such as, in September, a fish called the Sacramento Splittail. Refused to add many species to the list. When Bush’s father was president, his administration added species at a rate of 64 per year; 25 have been listed since 2001. Proposed allowing hunters, circuses and the pet industry to buy endangered animals from other nations.

Conservationists aren’t the only ones protesting. “I think you misled me. I think you misled the plaintiffs. And I think you are in violation of this order,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup wrote in May 2001, admonishing a Bush administration official. The case involved a plan to limit desert grazing in critical tortoise habitat in California deserts.

Last week, a federal judge in Seattle struck down an administration decision against protecting orcas, criticizing it for not considering the “best available science.” Cooperative Conservation The administration counters its critics by saying that in many instances, it takes a more pragmatic and effective approach to conservation. There often are better ways to spare species with less effect on people than traditional policing, officials say.Rather than being ensnared in squabbles, saddled with lawsuits and prodded with court orders, the federal government should focus on recovery programs that work.

Administration officials increasingly call these times “a new era for cooperative conservation.” In October, Interior Secretary Gayle Norton described the resolution of a fierce conflict over an imperiled bird as “a win-win partnership that is essential to successful conservation of our wildlife and its habitat.” The bird is the mountain plover, which nests in ranch and farm fields in the West.

Under the resolution, farmers and ranchers agreed to report voluntarily any plovers found in their fields, thus avoiding the government telling them when and where to plow. “By not listing the bird, we’ve actually saved the bird,” says Alan Foutz, president of the Colorado Farm Bureau, which assembled a coalition that succeeded in keeping the plover off the federal endangered species list. “If it had been listed,” Foutz says, “there probably would have been a rebellion.People wouldn’t have reported its existence on their property. But now we all have an opportunity to take care of this bird and manage it.”

When migrating plovers return to Foutz’ 1,800 acres of wheat, millet and sunflowers in March, he and other landowners will have a toll-free telephone number to report nests, which can be marked with red flags so tractors avoid them. A video tells farmers what to do. “This is an historic case,” Foutz says. “Secretary Norton told me it’s going to be used as a model around the country for endangered species. More people are willing to help if they don’t have a club over their head.”

“Fearing Endangered Species’

At least one study appears to lend credence to that argument. The Preble’s meadow jumping mouse favors areas near streams within sight of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. So do people, who have fueled one of the nation’s biggest real estate booms. In Colorado – as in many states, including Florida – developers complain that concern for small living things has spiraled out of control. The Endangered Species Act is misused to halt development, they say.

In 1998, when the Preble’s mouse was listed as a threatened species, the Mountain States Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit. The government’s stance held, but it didn’t translate into victory for the mouse. A study in the December journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, based in Gainesville, found that once the mouse was listed as threatened, landowners became as likely to destroy as to enhance the creature’s environment. To avoid regulation, people dug up the mouse’s favored waterside habitat. More than half of 397 landowners in the study said they would refuse to allow a biological survey of their property. That survey would collect important information to help scientists determine the extent of protection the mouse needed.

Such reactions suggest the “current regulatory approach to rare species conservation is insufficient to protect the Preble’s mouse,” the study’s authors wrote. “We have learned that command and control approaches have their strengths and their limitations,” Norton said in a speech Dec. 15. The Endangered Species Act’s “punitive aspects intimidate otherwise law-abiding citizens into fearing endangered species.”

A “Move To Placate’

Some conservationists regard such arguments as rhetorical cover for placating commercial interests and campaign contributors who typically say the law threatens development and jobs. “It looks systematic to us, as if there’s a strong anticonservation bent to this administration,” says Jeff Kessler, conservation director of the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, which was stunned at losing its battle to gain species act protection for the mountain plover.

“I think it was a political move to placate the Bush administration’s large corporate clients, like the minerals industry and the agriculture industry,” Kessler says. The plover and the mouse are just two examples of the creatures caught up in tugs of war among humans. Hundreds of conflicts over species fill the dockets of agencies and courthouses from Tallahassee to Anchorage.

The federal government is involved in at least 34 active lawsuits over 42 species, is being directed by court orders involving 73 species, and foresees 33 fresh lawsuits soon over 54 species. As species fade, such contentious litigation fuels a growth industry among lawyers.

Robert Wiygul, an environmental attorney in Biloxi, Miss., is fighting Florida Panhandle business interests with Gulfside land plans threatened by the tiny, dune-loving St. Andrew Beach mouse. Only 500 dwell between Mobile Bay and Apalachicola. “I’m certainly not one of those people who say the Bush administration is putting me out of a job,” Wiygul says. “They’re keeping me in one.”

QUICK FACTS – CHART

First it was ice ages. Then giant asteroids. Entire lines of reptiles and mammals were wiped out. Now there’s a sixth wave of extinction, the first attributed to the spread of people. The Endangered Species Act, passed in 1973, was meant to slow the rate and restore imperiled animals and plants to sustain themselves. On the law’s 30th anniversary, here’s what is really happening: Each year, at least 3,000 species become extinct worldwide. Sixteen animals and plants have made comebacks, including gray whales, bald eagles, grizzly bears, brown pelicans, peregrine falcons, American alligators and Aleutian Canada geese. For every recovery of a species, 126 more qualify for U.S. designation as threatened or endangered. The Endangered Species Act is supposed to protect, at latest count, 1,263 U.S. species and 558 foreign species.

The Other War

admin — Mon, 01 Sep 2003 02:29:03 +0000

August 31, 2003

By KEITH EPSTEIN and JAN HOLLINGSWORTH
The Tampa Tribune/Media General

WASHINGTON – On the third Tuesday in May, the Bush administration scheduled two news events: One became the lead story of the day. The other was buried inside newspapers and newscasts – if it was reported at all.

The first elevated the nation’s terrorism threat index to level orange, or high risk.

The other touted the Bush administration’s Healthy Forests Initiative, a plan that would open some 30 million acres of protected forests to logging.

It was not the first time a critical homeland security development coincided with the unveiling of a controversial environmental policy decision.

Nor will it be the last, predict conservationists who accuse the Bush administration of using the war on terrorism to divert public attention from the systematic dismantling of laws and regulations that have for three decades protected the nation’s air, water and wild spaces.

“People are scared, people are depressed. This crew is taking advantage of that and I think that’s wrong,” said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club.

Pope and others point to a series of national crises they say the administration has parlayed into opportunities to undermine environmental protections.

The California electricity crisis paved the way for a national energy policy that relies heavily on coal, oil and natural gas.

Western wildfires sparked the initiative to expand commercial logging on public lands.

Turmoil in the Middle East served as a rationale for drilling and mining in protected wilderness areas.

But it was the Sept. 11 attacks that provided a distraction for what conservationists call a sweeping and unprecedented assault on many of the nation’s landmark environmental laws.

The past two years have seen a flurry of initiatives that go to the heart of critical regulations meant to protect everything from the majestic sequoias of the Pacific Northwest to the asthmatic lungs of the youngest U.S. citizens.

This war, like the one waged on terrorists and Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq, is not without casualties, said Greg Wetstone of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“This is about your children’s health, lead levels in blood, sewage spills in water where you swim, whether the air will aggravate emphysema and other lung problems, the availability of water,” he said.

“This is about quality of life.”

Homeland Insecurity

The Bush administration argues its actions and motives have been widely misinterpreted.

Top officials say they are merely bringing balance to regulations that have grown too cumbersome, too susceptible to legal challenges and that fail to take into account the need to encourage economic growth, to allow local control over local issues and to meet increasing energy demands.

They say they are, for the first time, imposing discipline on the highly emotional process of weighing competing interests.

“I’m not surprised that what we do isn’t always popular,” said John Graham, a regulatory administrator with the federal Office of Management and Budget. “The role of cost-benefit analysis has always been controversial in the eyes of the greens,” or environmental activists.

And, of course, there is the compelling question of national security, which President Bush has cited as a driving force behind the administration’s quest for oil and gas on federal lands.

“We need an energy policy that helps our national security, an energy policy which makes us less reliant on foreign sources of energy,” Bush said this summer in a speech to employees of a Minnesota electronics company.

Theodore Roosevelt IV, great-grandson of the president who founded the national park system, called the administration’s national security arguments “wholly specious.”

“What is relevant is we haven’t used the opportunity we’ve had in the past to address excessive dependence on oil,” said Roosevelt, a conservationist who sits on the board of The Wilderness Society.

Indeed, the push to remove barriers to drilling, mining and logging in the nation’s parks, forests and wilderness began long before terrorists turned jetliners into guided missiles on U.S. soil.

Seventeen days before his inauguration in January 2001, the president-elect announced plans to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

By late February that year, the administration was working to redraw the boundaries of 22 national monuments designated under the federal Antiquities Act in the last months of the Clinton administration.

The stated purpose was to allow the drilling and mining environmentalists had urged President Clinton to block in granting the monument protections.

At the same time, the White House was pursuing oil and gas exploration in long-protected lands between two national parks in Utah.

On March 14, 2001, Bush announced his administration intended to look at “all public lands” for energy development.

Bush also was retreating from campaign promises to regulate power plant pollution and address global warming.

But by summer, public outcry had forced the administration to reverse some policies, including proposals that would have lowered the standard for arsenic in drinking water and eliminated the testing of school lunch meat for deadly bacteria.

“There was a sufficiently public spotlight on what they were doing that members of Congress were not inclined to go along with them,” Pope said.

Then came Sept. 11 and the prospect of a threat more compelling than tainted food and water.

“While you were weeping, the Justice Department stopped enforcing environmental laws,” Pope said.

Behind Closed Doors

Cloaked by the tears of a mourning nation, federal agencies quietly curtailed enforcement of environmental regulations, rolled back pollution laws, and relinquished public lands and resources to private enterprises.

The focus has been on identifying and expanding regulatory loopholes and forging quiet settlements to industry lawsuits, outside the legislative process and largely unnoticed by the media.

Some of the more controversial policies have been implemented near holidays or weekends.

A plan that significantly weakened provisions of the Clean Air Act was announced last year on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and finalized on New Year’s Eve.

A rule that made national parks and other federal land vulnerable to development was published in the Federal Register on Christmas Day.

A permit to excavate a mine in the Montana wilderness was issued the day after Christmas; a ban on awarding federal contracts to repeat environmental offenders was scrapped the day after that.

Numerous other decisions were rendered just before 5 p.m. on Fridays as reporters and bureaucrats were headed out the door.

“We see a wholesale effort to shut the American public out of the process in many cases,” Wetstone said.

Administration spokesman Taylor Gross dismisses the allegation.

“The White House does not control what the media is reporting on,” Gross said. Nor, he added, does the timing of policy decisions reflect any particular agenda.

“A holiday or whatever other charge critics may put forward doesn’t play into White House policy with regards to protecting our environment.”

Meanwhile, Sylvia Lowrance and Eric Schaeffer – the two top enforcement officials at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – resigned in 2002, with Schaeffer charging that the agency was failing to enforce federal laws.

Other agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior, were engaged in out-of-court settlements, forfeiting federal protections for Utah’s wilderness, Yellowstone National Park’s air quality and the nation’s old-growth forests.

The strategy allowed the government to dramatically weaken environmental programs without undertaking the public comment periods required under traditional rule-making, Wetstone said.

In June, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a settlement in which Alaska’s Tongass National Forest would become exempt from the federal Roadless Rule, the subject of six years of rule-making and public hearings in which an unprecedented 2 million comments supported a ban on the construction of roads in wilderness areas.

The Tongass settlement opened the door to mining, logging and drilling in the largest remaining wilderness in the United States.

Congress had rejected the exemption just weeks before, when Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, tacked it onto the federal spending bill.

Mark Rey, an Agriculture Department undersecretary and former timber industry lobbyist who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, has promised in published reports that critics of some forest policy changes – and there are many – will be heard during a public comment period. He noted, too, that environmentalists can sue.

The same settlement strategy was first employed in Utah, where administration officials agreed in April not to enforce federal laws protecting that state’s wilderness.

“That’s not how the law gets changed in this country,” said Pope, of the Sierra Club. “It gets changed by Congress.”

The Department of the Interior maintains it is trying to apply common sense to managing public lands.

Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, who was instrumental in forging the agreement that opens millions of acres to gas, oil and coal development, was named this month as Bush’s pick to head the EPA. The position was vacated by the moderate and embattled former governor of New Jersey, Christine Todd Whitman, in June.

Bush told reporters that Leavitt, “a trusted friend,” will come to the EPA “with a strong environmental record, a strong desire to improve what has taken place in the last three decades.”

Lauded by business and industry as “a consensus-builder” who has provided leadership on clean air issues in his state, the three-term Republican governor draws less favorable reviews from environmentalists. They point to Leavitt’s resistance to federal regulations on power plant pollution and protections for the wilderness.

Republican Legacy

Nearly a century has passed since President Theodore Roosevelt fixed the nation’s moral compass on conservation as a patriotic duty.

“He realized that protecting our natural resources is not a luxury – it’s essential,” said Jim DiPeso, policy director of Republicans for Environmental Protection, based in Albuquerque, N.M.

The moderate grass-roots organization sprouted in 1995, when its founders decided the party “had gone off the deep end” in its antienvironmental stance.

“Historically, the Republican party has been pro-conservation,” DiPeso said.

It was a Republican president – Richard Nixon – who in 1970 established the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the landmark measures that mandated clean air and clean water would be the law of the land.

Although that environmental commitment faltered during President Reagan’s years, former President Bush, received generally good marks, especially on air quality issues.

During the 2000 campaign, some environmentalists expressed optimism that his son would carry out the ambitious environmental agenda he promoted.

“I think many people were hoping that once in office, he would carry on a tradition first set by his father,” said Frank O’Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust.

Those hopes were bolstered by Whitman, who echoed Bush’s campaign promises when she unveiled the EPA’s agenda in March 2001.

“She had the rug pulled out from her when some of the industries screamed bloody murder and called upon Vice President [Dick] Cheney to call off the cops,” O’Donnell said.

“I think that push became the starting point for a number of things that have become serious rollbacks.”

Two months ago, Whitman stepped down, saying she wanted to spend more time with her family.

In the Name of Science

Meanwhile, many of the environmental rollbacks were originating not in the EPA, but in the Office of Management and Budget, where Bush’s “regulatory czar,” Graham, was crunching cost-benefit numbers.

Graham’s office targeted 13 rules it deemed a “top priority” for change or elimination. The rules it wanted to change prevented mining public lands, building roads through national forests and other measures that stood between corporate America and the untouched wilderness.

Environmentalists have found the administration less than rigorous in its commitment to scientific integrity to achieve its goals.

The Interior Department, for example, set aside environmental studies and public comment to allow snowmobiles into Yellowstone despite EPA warnings air quality and human health could be impaired.

The criticism has come even from within. Former U.S. Forest Service Deputy Administrator Jim Furnish resigned last year as the administration was revising a forest management plan that was years in the making.

Although the original rule to govern logging and wildlife preservation underwent a “very rigorous and science-based process,” Furnish said, the proposed replacement did not.

Furnish, a 34-year veteran of the Forest Service, now works with Defenders of Wildlife.

Members of the scientific community also have complained the administration made appointments to health-related advisory committees based on ideology rather than scientific credentials.

Noting that Enron’s manipulation of the California power market and other controversies over environmental policy have created an image problem, O’Donnell, of the Clean Air Trust, said, “There is a public perception they are too close to polluters.”

A protracted legal battle between Congress and the administration threw a spotlight on the secrecy involved in forging the nation’s energy policy.

The administration refused to turn over pertinent documents requested by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. The GAO last week reported that Vice President Cheney met privately with and relied heavily upon representatives and lobbyists for petroleum, coal, nuclear, natural gas and power industries in shaping the plan.

The Power Of Words

Republican pollster Frank Luntz, architect of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America in the mid-1990s, offered Republican candidates and leaders advice on how to deal with the environmental image “problem” in a confidential memo distributed before November’s midterm elections.

Luntz advised the candidates to refer to themselves as “conservationists.” He urged them to adopt language that would place unpopular policies in a more positive light.

Thus a plan to open public lands to commercial logging as a way to prevent forest fires became the Healthy Forests Initiative. A major rollback of Clean Air Act provisions, which prompted several states to join in a lawsuit against the federal government, carries the name Clear Skies.

While students of Luntz donned the mantle of conservationists, their critics were anointed with another label: environmental extremists.

Leading the charge within the Bush administration was James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. He asserted, “The sharpest criticism comes from those who are entirely uncompromising.”

Connaughton, a former lobbyist for corporations that have created some of the largest Superfund toxic waste sites, said regulations aren’t always the best solution to environmental problems.

“I know that Americans understand the need for balance because that’s how they lead their own lives – not by being extremist but by constantly balancing work and play and taking care of the future for their children,” he said.

DiPeso, of Republicans for Environmental Protection, calls the extremist label “just plain insulting.”

“We don’t think it’s extreme to be concerned about keeping the air and water clean, or protecting heritage lands,” he said. “If anything, policies that would roll back protections we’ve had for the past 30 years are extreme.”

Economic Rationale

The object should be to strike “a good balance between our economic appetites, social aspirations and environmental aspirations,” Connaughton said.

The environmental community agrees.

It could not be more clear that economic and environmental viability are very much in sync, said Wetstone, of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“We’ve seen huge progress on the environmental front as the economy continued to grow.”

Conversely, he said, the economy and the environment have both been on the decline.

“The history of the law has shown we can be aggressive in enforcing the law and still have a healthy economy,” he said. “But few companies are going to volunteer to clean up unless they think the law is going to be applied equitably.”

Undaunted by the rising tide of resistance from the environmentalists, the administration and some in Congress continue to press an agenda that elicited widespread protest less than two years earlier.

For the most part, environmental groups were silenced by the prospect of criticizing the policies of a president whose popularity soared as he waged a global war on terrorism.

“The only reason the environmental assault has been sustained as long as it has is by sustaining a crisis atmosphere around national security,” Wetstone said.

But the environmental community is fighting back in court, in televised advertisements and through petition drives.

Last month, more than 100 former park service officials signed a letter calling on Bush to end what they say are destructive park policies.

Also in July, nearly 200 members of the House, including 20 Republicans, unsuccessfully tried to block the administration’s forest policies, which included a proposal to eliminate public and scientific review.

However, a week later the lawmakers successfully blocked another Bush plan to put the jobs of 100 park service archaeologists up for bid in the private sector.

Recent court decisions also have gone against the administration.

On July 2, a federal district judge ruled the Department of Energy violated the law by granting itself authority to dodge costly cleanups of radioactive waste at U.S. weapons facilities.

Another court ruled earlier that the public has the right to enforce wilderness protections on public lands.

“We find ourselves struggling, using every resource we have, to hold onto the basic programs that have been broadly successful in improving the quality of life we have in this country,” Wetstone said.

“The good news is, there’s still time to turn the tide,” Pope said.

“But the longer we wait to pay attention to these things, the harder it will be to reverse the damage.”

(CHART) (C) WHO GUARDS THE ENVIRONMENT

Key posts in forging and enforcing the Bush administration’s environmental and public health policies are held by former lobbyists and lawyers with strong ties to industries that have long sought to weaken regulations.

Mike Leavitt, Nominated by President Bush to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Task: Directs implementation and enforcement of laws that protect human health and the natural environment.

The three-term governor of Utah was instrumental in forging an agreement last year with the Interior Department which lifted federal protections from millions of acres of that state’s wilderness.

John Ashcroft, Attorney General

Task: Enforces all federal laws, including those for environment and public health.

As a U.S. senator, Ashcroft’s opposition to environmental legislation earned him an overall score of 3.7 out of a possible 100 from the League of Conservation Voters.

Resources Division

Task: Enforces environmental law, defends against challenges.

A member of the Federalist Society, which opposes many environmental laws, Sansonetti served as chief legal adviser to the Department of the Interior during the first Bush administration. He went on to lobby for mining interests, including two major coal companies.

Dick Cheney, Vice President

Task: Constructs U.S. energy policy.

Cheney is former chief executive officer of Halliburton Co., an oil services company. It was awarded exclusive rights to about $7 billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq, which were rescinded when criticism mounted, forcing the company to bid. The Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root helped construct Enron Field in Houston, and contributions linked to Enron helped pay for the Bush/Cheney 2000 presidential campaign and the fight against the Florida recount.

Task: Advises on environmental matters.

Connaughton represented General Electric and ASARCO, a minerals conglomerate, in past Superfund struggles with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He lobbied on environmental issues for Alcoa and the Chemical Manufacturers Association.

Gale Norton, Secretary, Department of the Interior

Task: Administers policies and regulations for conservation of wildlife, natural resources and the management of public lands.

Norton was the lead attorney for the Mountain States Legal Foundation, founded by her mentor, ousted Interior Secretary James Watt, who aggressively sought to privatize public lands during the Reagan administration. She also is a founder of the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, a group funded by the National Mining Association, the Chemical Manufacturers Association and other major corporate interests.

Task: Second in command to Norton.

Griles is a James Watt protege who lobbied for the coal and oil industry. He voiced support for oil drilling off the coasts of California and Florida.

Donald Schregardus, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment, U.S. Navy, Environment and Installations Division.

Task: Oversees cleanups at contaminated Navy sites.

While Schregardus was director of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, enforcement of cleanup at contaminated sites fell by more than 50 percent. Failures of the Ohio EPA under Schregardus were noted in a U.S. environmental report.

John Graham, Administrator, Office of Management and Budget, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

Task: Advises on regulatory actions, does cost/benefit analysis of environmental regulations.

Graham was founding director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, which obtains much of its funding from Monsanto, Dow Chemical and other producers of dioxin. He devised a cost-benefit calculation related to air pollution which rates the life of each person 71 and older as having 38 percent less value than younger Americans.

Mark Rey, Undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment, Department of Agriculture

Task: Oversees the management of 200 million acres of national forests and grasslands.

Rey worked for timber industry trade associations such as the National Forest Products Association and the American Paper Institute. He supported the “salvage rider” which suspended environmental laws to allow clear-cutting of old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest.

Source: Tribune researcher Buddy Jaudon

(CHART) CHANGING COURSE

Conservationists say since coming to office in January 2001, the Bush administration has engaged in an unprecedented retreat from environmental laws intended to protect public health, natural resources and heritage lands.

Public Lands

Nearly a third of the land in the United States is owned by the federal government, maintained by taxpayers and held in trust for all citizens. A number of Bush administration initiatives pave the way for roads, development, mining, logging, gas and oil exploration, and other commercial enterprises in the nation’s parks, forests and wilderness.

Air

The Clean Air Act, a critical public health statute, is under fire from industries faced with paying the costs of curbing pollution. Critics fault administration officials for announcing rollbacks last year on the days before Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, when they were less likely to receive public attention and media scrutiny.

Water

Pollutants flowing into oceans, rivers, streams and underground aquifers contaminate drinking water and aquatic food supplies. Among actions that would weaken the Clean Water Act were a decision not to set standards for new pollutants and a retreat from federal protections for wetlands, which filter drinking water and serve as breeding and feeding grounds for migratory birds.

Energy

Vice President Dick Cheney’s national energy policy calls for extracting coal, oil and gas from public lands and relaxing environmental safeguards. Conservation is not a significant component of the plan. Federal agencies have balked at recommending or imposing rules opposed by industry, such as higher efficiency standards for vehicles and air conditioners.

Security

The Department of Defense is seeking exemptions from environmental laws in the name of national security. Congress is contemplating exemptions for the government from the Endangered Species Act. Not yet addressed are proposals that would suspend protections for air quality, cleanups at military Superfund sites and water contamination from nuclear weapons.

HOW IT’S CHANGED

Altered policies, subtle changes in enforcement, suspension of rules and private settlements are among tools chipping at earlier environmental safeguards. There are few frontal assaults that make headlines.

The Bush administration’s competitive sourcing plan would put control of national parks, forests, monuments, wilderness and other open spaces in the hands of private companies and individuals not bound by federal ethics rules. The House has rejected the plan and the White House has threatened to veto the Department of the Interior’s budget without it. The Senate has not taken it up.

People 71 and older are 38 percent less valuable under an emerging approach to the cost-benefit analysis of environmental actions. Critics say policy-makers could allow more deaths by pollution because those older than 71 aren’t worth as much and thus keep down industry costs.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s two top enforcement officers resigned last year, one citing the administration’s failure to support regulatory action against polluters. The most recent federal budget proposal significantly cuts into enforcement positions at the agency.

In private settlements with states, administration officials are bypassing the legislative and regulatory rule-making process. In one, federal officials agreed not to enforce wilderness regulations in Utah. Another exempts Alaska’s Tongass National Forest from the federal roadless rule, action originally voted down by Congress and opposed by 2 million Americans who offered public comment.

When the Department of Energy granted itself authority to reclassify high-level radioactive waste to avoid costly cleanup at U.S. weapons facilities, a federal district judge ruled the agency violated the law. The agency has asked Congress for a new law that would allow it to abandon nuclear waste stored in tanks that are leaking into groundwater. The legislation has not been introduced.

Fortune Under the Desert

admin — Sun, 22 May 1994 19:24:23 +0000

THE PLAIN DEALER
Sunday, May 22, 1994

By KEITH EPSTEIN
PLAIN DEALER BUREAU

WASHINGTON
In the harsh desert of western Utah south of the Great Salt Lake, a desolate plateau of scrub and sagebrush stretches to the horizon. It is home to gophers, jackrabbits, rattlesnakes and the occasional coyote. Groundwater is too brackish for crops. The nearest house is 40 miles away.

“Nobody’s ever wanted to homestead out there, and nobody ever goes to a place like that to live or have fun,” observes industrial geologist Lee Davis. “To the ordinary fella, it would seem worthless.”

But this desert, owned by America’s taxpayers, conceals a vast fortune. Beneath 2,548 acres alone is a rare bertrandite ore, which, when processed, could be worth up to $15 billion.

Brush Wellman Inc., a Cleveland-based mining company, wants to buy those acres from the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management for a mere $26,487 – around $10.40 an acre.

That would be one of the richest lodes ever purchased from the government – worth potentially almost as much as last week’s highly publicised sale of land with perhaps $18 billion in gold to a Canadian mining company.

Mine in utah

“The biggest gold heist since the days of Butch Cassidy,” Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt complained on Monday as he transferred 1950 acres in Nevada to Toronto-based American Barrick Resources Corp. for a mere $9,765. “It is a ripoff.”

Babbitt is powerless to stop the sale because, for many years, Congress has declined to curb sales of precious public property. Dirt-cheap prices meant for grizzled miners of 122 years ago are still on the books.

Babbitt vows to insist upon replacing such sales with royalties that produce a “reasonable return” to taxpayers. But theHouse and Senate are far from agreeing on how to do so.

While Brush Wellman disputes some figures in this article, arguing that its high cost of exploration and development should be considered, the company agrees with the bottom line: By paying the government just thousands, it can obtain land worth millions.

“Nobody’s disputing that,” said Hugh D. Hanes, vice-president of environmental and government affairs. “It’s a relatively small amount (returned to the Treasury) in comparison to what’s in the ground.”

Similar stories are unfolding elsewhere. In Oregon, for one, Denver-based Newmont Mining Corp. hopes to spend $1,560 for 60 acres containing most of an estimated $373 million in gold – and tens of millions more in silver.
For five months Western senators have been stalling final action to replace the 1872 mining law. While they dawdle, companies continue to wrest from public lands some $1.7 billion in gold and other minerals each year – with little or no direct compensation to the federal treasury.

That amount is only the General Accounting Office’s guess. Government officials don’t know how many millions of tons of precious minerals there are on federal lands, or what it’s all worth – complicating any attempts to set a fair asking price.

“We don’t have good facts,” Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt acknowledges. Babbitt told a congressional committee he was “really astonished” when trying to learn from his own employees the volume and value of mineral production on public lands, data that companies consider confidential.

“The answer I got was, `we don’t have any’,’ Babbitt said.

The tale of Brush Wellman’s beryllium bonanza illustrates how government and corporations often cooperate to advance corporate interests, sometimes without fairly compensating taxpayers.

At stake is the future of 432 million acres of publicly owned lands – and the untallied treasures they contain. These lands are managed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

This article was assembled using corporate documents, government records, interviews with company insiders, and a computer-assisted analysis of $131,336 in campaign contributions to members of Congress by Brush Wellman executives, lobbyists and committees.

Checks are not illegal

The checks that flow each year to politicians from Brush Wellman and its employees are neither illegal nor random.
As Hanes acknowledged: “The company tends to support those people that are supportive of the company.”
Two company supporters, Republican Reps. James Hansen of Utah and Paul Gillmor of Port Clinton, have received $41,400 from Brush since 1988.

An example of that support occurred last November, when the duo came within 45 votes of getting the company exempted from House mining rules requiring higher fees and royalties.

The congressmen argued that, without a financial break, the company might be forced to shut down the mines. America’s only domestic source of beryllium would thus be jeopardized – and that, they said, elevated the exemption to a matter of national security.

But Pentagon documents show that the military is “over goal” in its stockpile of beryllium metal. Nor does it need beryl ore or a beryllium-copper alloy.

Far from being concerned about secure supplies of Brush Wellman’s products, the Pentagon now wants to sell 24,221 tons of beryllium materials worth $122.9 million.

Explains Beth Offenbacker, spokeswoman for the National Defense Stockpile Center: “We feel we don’t need it.”

Brush Wellman, Gillmor and Hansen all say they intended only to fight for workers’ jobs and the local economy.

They say they’ve done nothing that violates official rules or laws. By all accounts, they are correct – and for that they can thank not only campaign finance laws, but the General Mining Law of 1872, a statute dating to the administration of Ulysses S. Grant.

Brush coverts bertrandite

Brush Wellman’s sophisticated methods of extracting a fortune from the rocks by refining minerals into products with far-reaching technological applications would have dazzled even the hardiest, most crusty “Forty-niner.”

Like other modern mining companies, Brush uses a chemical process to leach ore. Like other modern companies, it literally can move mountains and create cratered moonscapes.

Brush converts the bertrandite ore, found in Utah, Brazil, Africa, India and China, into light-weight, harder-than-steel beryllium. Its uses include satellites, nuclear reactors, airplanes, computers and cars.

Brush Wellman’s products are in nuclear warheads. Every strategic missile in the U.S. arsenal contains beryllium, as did the “smart bombs” dropped on Iraq during the Gulf War.

What President Grant had in mind – around the time of Custer’s last stand – was to encourage exploration and development of the western wilderness.

He wanted it used, opened up and settled. Thus, he offered to “patent” cheap land titles – for miners, not multinational conglomerates that sometimes scar the landscape and foul waters. But Utah and federal mining officials say that Brush Wellman’s environmental record is impeccable – better than law currently requires.

For years, aggressive lobbying by mining corporations and railing by western politicians has thwarted attempts to revise the anachronistic law. Politicians such as Sen. Pete V. Domenici, R-N.M., often complain of a “war on the West.”
But the Clinton administration’s vow to seek market-based fees for use of federal lands for mining, grazing and timber-harvesting has created new pressure for reform.

“Just the first step in an assault on the west,” Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., complained during last year’s debate on ranchers’ fees.

Clinton, who made electoral gains in the usually Republican west, isn’t likely to go too far in alienating his newfound western friends. Nor is the public lands brawl strictly east versus west.

Today’s mines are more likely to be run from corporate boardrooms in Toronto or Cleveland. In fact, 33 companies now mining on public lands purchase $901 million in equipment and supplies that translates into jobs in the east, a fact not lost on eastern congressmen.

In Ohio, four companies besides Brush – Oglebay-Norton, Cleveland Cliffs, Dresser Industries and AEP – have mined on public lands. A fifth, Timken, is a major supplier of heavy mining equipment.

House votes for royalty

In November, the House voted overwhelmingly to end the practice of selling cheap land to mining companies.

Instead, companies would pay the government 8% of the processed minerals’ value.

Amounting to some $100 million a year, such a royalty – significantly lower than the 12.5% coal, natural gas and oil companies have been paying for years – would hardly make a dent in the national debt.

And it would only begin to help pay for cleanups of thousands of old abandoned mines, many of which are fouling land and waters in locations throughout the Western United States.

Over time, such a royalty would have cost companies such as Brush Wellman hundreds of millions.

Thus, the industry supported a Senate-backed end to the land sales that imposes what environmentalists regard as a “sham” royalty – 2% of the value of minerals before they are processed.

Companies also could deduct major business expenses.

Since then, key members of the House and Senate who are supposed to reach a compromise have only dawdled, and now lobbying has intensified. Last month, for instance, Hanes made his pitch to key members as part of an industry-sponsored “Hardrock Minerals Day.”

Meanwhile, mining companies are wisely hedging their bets by seeking to “patent” their claims more quickly than ever.

These are legal and administrative steps they must take before the government grants them title to the land.

As Congress began seriously debating an end to cheap land sales, mining companies scrambled to start applying for purchases. There’s a “patent rush” out there – a frenzy to buy before it’s too late.

In California and Nevada, for instance, more than 100 applications are pending; a few years ago, there were never more than 40 at any time.

“Companies know that something will eventually happen (in Congress), and with a foot in the door they may be able to keep that door open,” observes Walter Phelps, who heads the Bureau of Land Management’s office in Utah.

Interior Secretary Babbitt has tried to stall some sales – including the gold mine now lost to the Canadian company – until Congress passes a new mining law. A federal magistrate criticized Babbitt, saying this amouted to little more than a “shameful de-facto moratorium” on issuing mining patents.

Brush Wellman officers, meanwhile, hope that the company is far enough in the process that the eventual reform of mining laws will not apply; the company will be “grandfathered” in. If not, the company threatens a lawsuit.

“Our concern,” says Hanes, “is protecting the investment we’ve made in the patenting process.”

By that, he means the money spent on lawyers – about $1 million – to prepare eight different applications. Moreover,Hanes says the company has spent more than $8 million on exploration, and that investing in Utah was a “bet-your-company” move in the first place.

“Hardly a giveaway,” he said. “We’re not getting a free ride. The ore we mine on public lands requires a major up-front investment.”

Regula seeks reform

“A specious argument,” responds Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Navarre. “First of all, they don’t have to buy the land to mine it. And their investment is part of doing business whether they own the land or lease it. The fact is, nothing goes to the government.”

For several years now, Regula has persuaded his House colleagues to ban the cheap land sales – only to be stymied in the Senate where, he complains, “westerners always kill any mining reform. It’s outrageous.”

To date, some 3.2 million acres of federal land – an area the size of Connecticut – have been sold, some for as little as a few dollars an acre.

And, Regula says, some land has even been sold back to the government after companies have squeezed what they could from the land – at a profit.

Davis, who was there on the plateau of sagebrush at the beginning of the beryllium mine, in 1968, complains that environmentalists and eastern politicians have distorted the issue.

“The idea that mining companies are getting ground cheap and not paying the government much is completely wrong,” says Davis, who was Brush Wellman’s chief geologist until retiring three years ago. “We pay an awful lot of state taxes and we help a lot of economies locally.

“And,” he adds, “we’d be happy to give the land back to the government. After we’ve mined it.”

Climb a Mountain – and Find a Crowd

admin — Sun, 20 Jun 1993 20:07:51 +0000

THE PLAIN DEALER
Sunday June 20, 1993

By KEITH C. EPSTEIN

WASHINGTON

When Robert Gries, a 64-year-old venture capitalist from Cleveland, ascended 14,411-foot Mount Rainier last August, for a bit of crevasse training and ice-wall climbing, he wasn’t alone. Nor even the oldest person. An 81-year-old great grandfather made it to the top that day. So had more than 100 other climbers.

On an average summer weekend, so many mountaineers trudge across the glistening glaciers on the dormant volcano they look like ants crawling over a giant vanilla ice cream cone. During last year’s four-month climbing season, 9,422 people tried to make the summit – 39 times the number in 1950.

“It boggles the mind, it really does,” said Glenn Baker, a spokesman for Rainier National Park, two hours’ drive from Seattle. “In a few weeks, this park is one big traffic jam. Even in the back country where isolation is supposed to be the experience, you just don’t find it.”

For years, the National Park Service and environmental groups have complained about crowds. The Friday before Memorial Day, the superintendent of Yosemite National Park, which is often congested and smoggy from all the cars, took the controversial step of closing the gates. That had never happened.

Now, adding to the griping over too many tourists, governments and environmental groups around the world are worrying about the impact of too many hikers and climbers. Once-pristine wilderness areas themselves are getting crowded, not just near national parks, and not just in the United States.

Even Mount Everest, elusive until Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay scaled it in 1953, has been climbed 450 times since. “Ecotourism” companies offer a shot at the top to any adventurer willing to pay. Price tag: $35,000.

The result is so much litter – 60 tons by some estimates – that the Nepalese government for the first time is limiting the number of climbers on what amounts to the world’s highest dump.

“Give the mountain a rest,” Hillary himself had pleaded.

The larger question environmental officials are confronting from Washington to Paris and Brasilia is how to cope with well-to-do mankind – increasingly hungry for status vacations, places rarely explored and natural experiences.

While travel dollars usually are more than welcome, unprecedented numbers of Americans are trekking to – and trashing parts of – Antarctica, the Galapagos Islands and Brazil’s rain forests.

“Thoughtless trekkers from well-heeled countries,” the Sierra Club recently noted, “too often generate not only currency but crises.” At the back of the magazine were ads by some of the more than 300 tour operators in the U.S. now offering nature-related trips.

This summer, an estimated 4 million Americans will take trips to natural destinations, though perhaps not such exotic ones. The reason is clear: 76% of all Americans consider themselves environmentalists.

“You know all that stuff you’ve been hearing for the last three years about America loving nature to death?” said Ranier’s Baker. “It’s getting to be a trite expression.”

One of the more obvious places to witness how love of nature can spoil is on the nation’s highest, most celebrated peaks and passes – and not just the ones you drive through scents of carbon monoxide to reach, like Colorado’s Pikes Peak.

In Alaska, more than 100 people climb 20,320-foot Mount Denali some days. In Colorado last year, some 29,000 hikers reached the top of 14,255-foot Longs Peak. To scale California’s Mount Whitney, at 14,491 feet the highest in the lower 48 states, mountaineers now need a permit – limited to 50 a day.

Places like Cascade Pass, long popular with hikers in Washington’s North Cascades National Park, now are out-of-bounds for even a tent or two. Meanwhile, park rangers with sandbags and sod try to help trampled subalpine grasses and wildflowers get started again.

Not that solitude and true wilderness are impossible to find, at least away from big-name peaks and national parks. For his part, Gries, who has climbed some of the world’s tallest and best-known mountains, avoids popular places. Rainier he considers more of a “training” exercise. During crowded climbs, he mentally blocks out all the people.

“If you climb Kilimanjaro,” he noted, “you’ll see lots of people. With thousands climbing, there’s no way you’re going to have that mountain to yourself. I try to push that out. I’m very singularly focused when I climb.”

But some remote corners of the harshest, craggiest or heavily forested wild areas, once believed impervious to the assault of people, are now the subject of pitched battles waged by environmental groups.

Some of these brewing back-country battles even involve some of the environmentalists’ favorite places for their own vacations.

At Montana’s Glacier National Park, at least six miles from the crowds and cars on the “Going to the Sun Road,” hikers seeking a natural experience for years have roughed it to two chalets, built on rocky ledges eight decades ago by the Great Northern railroad.

That is, until the Wilderness Society forced the National Park Service to shut them down; human waste had turned up near grizzly habitats, attracting bears and fouling streams.

Unknown to many nature-lovers who stayed at the chalets, at the end of each season their own raw sewage was being dumped by operators of the chalets. In a subalpine ravine, biologists had even found tampons and plastic wrappers.

After environmentalists filed a lawsuit, the park service closed the chalets, at least temporarily. They won’t reopen until after the park service does a full-scale environmental assessment – the type of study ordinarily associated with a highway, shopping center project or factory.

Members of the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society have complained about the organizations’ stance. Michael Scott, the Wilderness Society’s lawyer in Bozeman, Mont., said he has “written back saying it’s not our intent to close these chalets permanently, but that this is a very serious issue.”

“Our position is that we don’t know what harm is being done and we should find out,” he said.

A similar assessment is being done at the Chelan National Recreation Area in the northern Cascades of Washington state. Residents of a remote town suspect a park service conspiracy, driven by pressure from environmentalists, to buy their land and eventually close the town.

At Rainier, too, park service officials are considering such a study to assess how many people and activities the environment can withstand. Already, the park service recognizes the biggest problem: human waste. At high altitudes, it doesn’t decompose; it just freezes.

“Frankly, it’s dramatic and kind of disgusting,” Baker said. “Multiply 9,000 people by necessary biological functions and you can understand the problem.”

As an experiment, the park service now is asking mountaineers to pack it out.

For environmental organizations and federal officials alike, such issues present a dilemma. At the Sierra Club, which organized trips for 4,400 people last year, the motto is “explore, enjoy and protect.” The park service in particular is supposed to make wilderness accessible to people – and also preserve and protect it.

“There’s some real soul-searching going on,” observes Baker.

The increasing popularity of taking risks, especially among urban professionals and college students seeking more excitement and meaning in their lives, also adds costs to society. Park service rescues in Yosemite alone last year cost taxpayers $1.1 million. In the Rockies since 1990, there were 14 deaths and 103 rescues.

Even expert rock-jocks like Derek Hersey, almost a folk hero among climbers for scaling granite walls by himself and without ropes, sometimes meet tragic ends. Last month, he was found at the bottom of Yosemite’s Sentinel Peak.

A special park service task force has proposed new climbing regulations. Among the possibilities: forcing climbers to be bonded. Another option: The park service could offer insurance to hikers and climbers. They’d pay at the park gate, along with entry fees.

Gries, a minority owner of the Cleveland Browns, didn’t start climbing mountains until his 50s. He ran marathons, but wanted a bigger challenge. He scaled 14,000-foot peaks, but then he wanted to do 20,000-foot peaks.

“When your life is in your future and you’re thinking about your future, that’s the way you stay vital, young and exciting,” he said. “When you keep thinking about your life in the past, that’s when you’re ready for the rocking chair.”

Next January, Gries plans to head for the top of Aconcagua, a 23,034-foot Andean peak in Argentina. But he’ll be going up a difficult “Polish Route” rather than an easier, more traveled path to the top.

“The ‘Route Normal’ is so junky, a lot of people won’t go near it any more. I’m told you see toilet paper, candy wrappers, cans, all sorts of stuff.”

Muses Gries: “The mountains are there for everyone, and the next generation is entitled to have them in just as good a condition as we do – so they can climb them, too.”