From: EcoNet via Jym Dyer <jym@mica.berkeley.edu>
Newsgroups: alt.activism,talk.environment,ne.politics
Subject: "Wise Use" -- "The Scent of Opportunity" (2 of 3 -- The Report)
Followup-To: alt.activism.d,talk.environment
Date: 23 Jan 1993 04:10:06 GMT
Organization: The Naughty Peahen Party Line
NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu
Keywords: environment

[From EcoNet publiceye Conference]
[Also Posted to ACTIV-L and misc.activism.progressive (by Somebody Else)]

================================================================
=> From: cberlet@igc.apc.org (NLG Civil Liberties Committee)

THE SCENT OF OPPORTUNITY:

A Survey of the 
Wise Use/Property Rights Movement
in New England 

by William Kevin Burke

December 12, 1992

prepared for Political Research Associates 

* Introduction

The national Wise Use movement, a coalition of self-proclaimed
grassroots groups allied to developers and resource extracting
industries, is growing rapidly in New England.  Combining noisy
demonstrations with quiet organizing and coalition building,
Wise Use organizers have rapidly made themselves important
factors in an ongoing struggle to shape the region's economic
and ecological future. But close examination reveals that the
movement's roots are not so deep nor its motives so pure as its
proponents claim.  Across New England the Wise Use movement can
best be characterized as a collection of financial opportunists
and ideological extremists who depend upon misrepresenting -- at
times even appropriating -- environmental messages.

"Property rights" is the slogan the Wise Use movement has
adopted in New England.  The Wise Use/property rights
organizations studied for this report have all used similar
tactics and advocated similar goals.  While these goals,
most importantly the removal of government restrictions on
development, raise legitimate issues for public debate, the
tactics used by the property rights advocates seek to prevent
rational discussion of public issues.

Quite simply, New England's property rights groups rely on
intimidation and misinformation to spread a message that is
almost entirely negative.  Like their national Wise Use advisors
and organizers, the New England Wise Users proclaim either that
there are no environmental problems -- that all environmental
reforms and wilderness protection are part of a socialistic
government plot to steal land -- or that whatever environmental
issues do exist can best be addressed by allowing industries and
landowners a completely free hand in consuming natural
resources.

The logical flaw here is evident.  Free market solutions to
environmental problems can prove quite effective when instituted
through negotiations involving government, industry, and the
community of environmentalists and concerned citizens.  But
cries that government interference will harm economic progress
ring hollow when voiced by a business owner angry over the
failure of efforts to build a regional dumpsite in a relatively
unspoiled rural area.  That sort of self-serving deception is
alarmingly common among the local property rights activist
groups that Alliance for America, a new national group, is
helping build in the hopes of forging a national network.

With only one exception, every property rights group studied
for this report had at its core people with a direct financial
interest in eliminating environmental protection. People from
these groups frequently used techniques which inhibited informed
community discussion over how to protect resources and promote
sustainable economic growth.

It is important to give the New England Wise Use movement credit
for its energy, significant successes, and a few legitimate
complaints.  Development, economic growth, and the truly wise
use of resources are essential to a healthy society. But this
report will show that the Wise Use movement's agenda as applied
to New England is not truly pro-growth or a wise choice for
the region's future.  Rather, the movement is blindly anti-
government.  Some of the more extreme adherents of Wise Use
philosophy oppose spending money on improving schools or suggest
that centralized sewage treatment is a bureaucratic plot to
eliminate local control.  The Wise Use/property rights movement
in its purest conceptual form seeks to overturn modern society's
assumption that there are common public interests, such as
health, education, and planning for the future, that bind
communities together.  Their vision of society seems to be a war
of each against all.  "It's not like they want to set the clock
back fifty years, they want to set the clock back one thousand
years," said an environmentalist who came into contact with the
tactics of New England's Wise Use organizers while preparing a
report on how to preserve Vermont's working landscape.

One of the most striking aspects of the property rights movement
in New England is how links to national movements have produced
organizations that use language and tactics that are virtually
identical.  All the groups take pains to proclaim they are not
lobbying organizations, even when they employ essentially full
time lobbyists or pressure political officials to change
specific laws. All the property rights groups fully embrace Wise
Use founder Ron Arnold's doctrine that "facts don't matter,
in politics perception is reality."  The New England property
rights movement routinely and intentionally spreads information
that is heavily-biased or false to promote an agenda that will
financially benefit the movement's backers.  Unfortunately,
their questionable assertions have rarely been thoughtfully
challenged by the region's press.

New England's Wise Users are not violent, though Don Rupp, one
of their most important advisors, once wrote that he is involved
in a guerrilla war with the U.S. government and at a public
hearing told members of the Upper Delaware River Management Plan
Revision Committee that they would "probably get shot."  The
property rights organizers are simply not what they claim to be,
an environmentally aware, grassroots oriented movement devoted
to educating citizens about their property rights.  When their
habit of mouthing falsehoods is exposed, the Wise Use
spokespeople typically turn up the volume of their claims.

Nationally, the Wise Use movement has declared war on
environmentalism.  But it is not inevitable that this conflict
involve the long term hardening of positions into "greens"
versus "browns."  For while the property rights organizers are
certainly entitled to their political opinions and have raised
issues that need to be addressed as society implements
environmental protection and planning laws, their methods,
especially the reliance upon false information to spread fear
among uninformed citizens, make them toxic to society at large.
The author hopes this report will make it easier for other
journalists to ask the hard questions about financial interests
and abuse of the truth that are not being asked when property
rights advocates hang politicians in effigy for advocating land
use planning or claim that waterway protection programs are
government land grabs.

In fact, this report will show it is extremely debatable whether
the policies advocated by the property rights advocates would
actually benefit the bulk of New England's small landowners.
It is certain that the property rights agenda will undermine the
stability of the banking industry and promote rapid changes in
rural landscapes and working forests that would benefit realtors
and developers, precisely the people who most often make up the
core of the region's property rights movements.

Nevertheless, the property rights label seems to carry an
immediate emotional appeal to New England's traditions of Yankee
independence and self-sufficiency.  In New England, property
rights organizing has stretched from Maine's northern forests to
the Connecticut River valley.  The focus of this report will be
a detailed description and analysis of the region's various
local movements.  The main text is divided into sections
focusing on Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and
Massachusetts.  Each of these states has seen significant
organizing activities around property rights issues.  In Vermont
and Maine the property rights movement poses an immediate
political threat to efforts to plan for an environmentally and
economically stable future.  In Massachusetts the property
rights movement won a resounding victory along the Farmington
River, successfully opening the door for future dams or large
scale diversions along the Farmington and preventing efforts to
enact zoning to protect the river's ecologically fragile banks.
In New Hampshire and Connecticut the property rights movement
has tried to enlist widespread public support, but has for the
most part failed.

The property rights movement has attracted active political
allies and has shown signs that its funding exceeds the limits
of its relatively few grassroots members.  In Vermont, the
Secretary of State has helped conceal financial data about
Citizens for Property Rights, the state's Wise Use organization,
from state legislators. In New Hampshire the minuscule local
group -- called the New Hampshire Landowners Alliance -- appears
to be funded largely through Alliance for America.  The Maine
organization claims to fund itself entirely from contributions
from its over four hundred members.  All these groups claim not
to be lobbyists, yet devote the major portion of their energies
to campaigning against specific elected officials and government
policies.

One of the main methods of spreading the property rights word
is through letters to the editor of small community-based
newspapers.  The movement has also benefited from news articles
in major regional papers.  It appears that, as has been seen
nationally, the prepackaged controversy of the property rights
message of "jobs versus spotted owls and wetlands" and
"government land grabs" provides a "sexy" news hook.  However,
it will be demonstrated that news reports that accept the claims
of the Wise Use/property rights movement at face value risk
containing serious errors.

In addition to the state studies, this report includes a short
history of the Wise Use movement and a separate section
describing the Northern Forests issues that loom in the future
for Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.  One of the cruelest
ironies of the property rights movement is that the realtors
and developers who control the agenda will ultimately profit
from displacing the same individual rural landholders and
timber workers that they claim to represent under the banner
of Wise Use.

* Background of the Wise Use Movement

 Though the national Wise Use movement includes groups as
diverse as the Farm Bureau and organizations for off road
motorcycle riders, the movement has a consistent style and
message.  These derive from the movement's founders:  Ron Arnold,
Wise Use's intellectual author, and Alan Gottlieb, a businessman
who has made millions of dollars doing direct mail fundraising
for a variety of right-wing causes.  In blunt terms, Arnold
invented the Wise Use movement and Gottlieb provided the mailing
lists and fundraising capability that let it prosper.

Some national Wise Use observers feel that Alliance for America,
a coalition of grass roots anti-environmental and property
rights groups formed in the fall of 1991, represents a move by
Wise Use pioneer Grant Gerber away from Gottlieb and Arnold.
This may have to do with press revelations that Gottlieb
served seven months in prison for tax evasion and Arnold
was a registered agent for the American Freedom Coalition,
an organization that receives almost a third of its budget
from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.

Arnold was once an organizer for the Sierra Club.  A profile
in Outside magazine credited him with organizing teaching
expeditions that helped create the Alpine Lakes Wilderness area
in western Washington state in 1976.  Arnold's big career break
coincided with the coming of the Reagan Presidency and Arnold's
own rapid swing to the right.  In 1981 he coauthored At the Eye
of the Storm, a biography of James Watt that the former
Secretary of the Interior not only authorized, but also helped
edit.  As Watt's anti-environmental "Sage Brush Rebellion"
petered out and the public embraced the environmental movement
in the mid to late 1980s, Arnold formed an association with Alan
Gottlieb.  Together they forged dozens of widely scattered
groups -- groups whose main bond was that they felt threatened
by environmental protection and the rise of the environmental
movement -- into the Wise Use anti-environmental movement.

Ron Arnold took the Wise Use movement's name from the works of
Gifford Pinchot, first head of the U.S. Forest Service.  He has
said he chose the phrase because it is catchy and uses only nine
spaces in a newspaper headline.  Arnold was also pleased with
the ambiguity of the phrase.  "Symbols register most powerfully
in the subconscious when they are not perfectly clear," he told
Outside.  Arnold told the same reporter that "facts don't
matter," essentially admitting that he is willing to lie or
manipulate information to achieve his goals, a tactic the Wise
Use movement employs regularly.

Gottlieb's Center for Defense of Free Enterprise reportedly
takes in about $5 million per year through direct mail and
telephone fundraising for a variety of right-wing causes.
Gottlieb seems to possess a genius for dancing along the edge of
legal business practices.  He purchased the building that houses
CDFE's headquarters with money from two of his own non-profit
foundations, then transferred the building's title to his own
name so he could charge his foundations over eight thousand
dollars per month rent. Then there was his conviction for tax
fraud.  But even jail did not hurt his business. In Gottlieb's
own ultraconservative circles, tax evasion seems to be a badge
of honor.

At present the Wise Use movement is a very loose coalition.  It
includes mining companies anxious to preserve a 120-year-old
statute that allows mining companies to purchase federal lands
for $2.50 to $5.00 per acre; manufacturers of Off Road Vehicles
(ORV's) eager to promote the use of their products on public
lands; ranchers fearful of losing their federally subsidized
grazing permits; and developers, small businessmen, and
landowners frightened by John Birch Society claims that the
federal government is out to grab their land.  This last group
dominates the New England property rights movement.

The John Birch Society envisions a world run by secret elites
whom Birchers call the "Insiders."  According to Birch lore,
government regulations are part of a larger Insider scheme
to create a socialist "One World Government" that will deny
individual and property rights and lead to a global
collectivized society.  Many Birch activists are also part of
the right wing of religious fundamentalism, and pursue their
anti-modernist theological and political goals with equal zeal.

In 1988 the first large gathering of Wise Use advocates in Reno,
Nevada, led to the publication, by Alan Gottlieb, of Ron
Arnold's book, The Wise Use Agenda, which outlines their
movement's goals and aims.  Few environmentalists would find
fault with the spirit behind this quote from The Wise Use
Agenda:  "[Wise Uses's founders] felt that industrial development
can be directed in ways that enhance the Earth, not destroy it."
But the agenda itself is basically a wish list for the
extractive industries.  The Wise Use movement seeks the opening
of all federal wilderness lands to logging, mining, and the
driving of ORV's.  Despite much rhetoric about seeking
ecological balance and "environmental solutions," almost the
only environmental problem the Agenda addresses, rather than
dismisses, is the threat of global warming from the buildup of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  The solution proposed is the
immediate clear cutting of the small portion of old growth left
in the United States so those lands may be replanted with young
trees that will absorb more carbon dioxide.

The combination of deception, hysteria, and demagoguery that has
brought wealth and fame to Arnold and Gottlieb has found fertile
soil in New England.  Backed by groups ranging from the John
Birch Society to the Farm Bureau, the Wise Use movement has won
a few significant political victories.  Sadly, these victories
have often resulted not from open honest discussion of
controversial issues but from misinformation and scare tactics.
Wherever it appears, the Wise Use movement depends on promoting
people's fears for their land and future.  It exploits the fact
that most people just do not know much about the complex
intricacies of federal and local environmental programs,
government regulations, and land use planning in general.
            
* The Big North 

 Regionally, the New England Wise Use/property rights movement
has been most active and vocal on issues surrounding the
forested lands known as the Big North.  And the fate of the
Big North, 30 million acres of woods that stretch across four
states, will determine the economic future of northern New
England.  Covering most of Maine, the Northern portions of
Vermont and New Hampshire, and the top third of New York, the
mixed woodlands of the Big North have been managed according to
a tradition of cooperation between industrial and public uses.
Large acreages of Maine woods have been clearcut, but the
willingness of forest products companies, which own one-third of
the Big North outright, to leave their lands open for public use
has helped sustain the state's tourist industries.  This balance
between public and private land use has been maintained despite
the relative paucity of governmental land purchases.  A few
national and state parks dot the region, but Yankee independence
(Governor Percival Baxter had to purchase the land for Maine's
first state park with his own funds, then donate the land to the
state) and forest industry noblesse oblige created a compromise
system that met the region's economic needs and left the Big
North relatively intact.

Until recently, that is.  In 1982 Sir James Goldsmith, a British
corporate raider, bought Diamond International, makers of safety
matches and owners of over one million acres of Big North forest
land. Goldsmith made over 200 percent profit on his investment
by breaking up Diamond and selling off the company's assets.
Federal and state money obtained by Senator Rudman of New
Hampshire allowed that state to purchase about forty-five
thousand acres of former Diamond lands, but only after Goldsmith
had first sold the land to a developer, who made a large profit
by outbidding the state initially, then raising the price and
reselling part of his acquisition to the state.

Most of the Diamond lands were purchased by other forest
products companies.  But this experience showed the governments
of the four Big North states that unless they organized to
plan for future changes in land ownership, the Big North,
which lies within a day's drive of 40 million Canadians and
Americans, would gradually be subdivided into resort communities.
this would mean more no trespassing signs and septic tanks
surrounding woodland lakes, fewer forest products jobs, and more
low-wage jobs for chambermaids and gas station attendants.

The governors of the Big North states appointed a study group
to investigate the possibilities for planning the future
development and management of the Big North.  This led to the
formation of the Northern Forest Lands Council, a National
Forest Service advisory body composed of environmentalists,
forest industry representatives, and state and federal
representatives, to continue this planning process.  In the
summer of 1991, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine held hearings
on proposals to make the Council an independent body.  It still
would not have power to condemn or purchase private lands, but
the new status would have meant the Council would no longer be
dependent on the Forest Service for its existence.

Those hearings marked the emergence of the Wise Use/property
rights movement in upper New England.  Activists from the
Adirondacks and other areas arrived to speak against the
Council in New England.  The John Birch Society distributed
flyers warning, "Land Takeover Threatens NY, VT, NH and ME."
Environmentalists were surprised and somewhat overwhelmed by
this opposition to a council painstakingly assembled so as
to contain representatives of all points of view.

In Maine, the Bangor City Hall, site of what had been expected
to be a relatively non-controversial hearing, was cleared by
authorities when about two hundred Wise Use activists disrupted
the proceedings with chants.  New hearings were scheduled a few
months later for a larger hall.  "Northern Forest Council Puke!"
was the property rights activists' signature slogan displayed on
signs at those hearings.  Maine Governor Jack McKernan and later
Senators Mitchell and Cohen, withdrew their support for
upgrading the status of the Northern Forest Lands Council.

Wise Use activists had employed misinformation, talking of
land grabs and government plans to muzzle activist ministers,
to orchestrate public fear and anger.  Their antics damaged a
program meant in no small part to allow dialogue between the
forest products industry and the environmental community.  Such
dialogue is considered especially important by those concerned
for the future of the region's forests as economic pressures
cause an increase in clearcutting in the region.

Environmentalists in both Maine and Vermont commented that since
those hearings, their traditionally cooperative relationships
with forest products companies have grown more distant.  There
is a perception that the forest industry, which could profit
greatly by selling off select portions of the Big North for
development and relying more on their southern and western lands
for raw materials, has adopted a wait and see attitude, sending
representatives to Wise Use gatherings but not publicly allying
themselves to the more extreme ideologues who warn of creeping
socialism and tyranny through land use planning.

* Situation by State

** Vermont


 On June 7, 1992, at the Killington Ski Area, the Vermont
property rights movement hosted what was intended to be their
largest and most impressive rally to date.  The group that held
the rally is called "Citizens for Property Rights."  The Spring
1992 issue of their newsletter, Vermont Property Rights News,
was full of pleas for the membership to turn out in full force
for the "election year kick off rally."

"Our enemies are waiting for us to stumble.  Or just quit.
The press is watching.  If this rally fizzles property rights
will suffer.  Your rights.  We need you."  Killington Ski Area
provided the space for the rally along with a special room rate
for attendees.  The lobby was decorated for the occasion with
twenty paper effigies dangling from the ceiling by ropes around
their necks.  Each effigy bore the name of a political figure
that CPR wants ousted in the coming elections, including
Democratic Gov. Howard Dean.

"There is the scent of a lion in the political arena," said
David Edson, CPR's full time lobbyist at Vermont's State House.
"And that lion is John McClaughery."  The 150 rally attendees
cheered Edson, Republican gubernatorial candidate McClaughery
and Nadine Bailey -- who flew in from California to tell how
efforts to preserve the northern spotted owl destroyed her
family's livelihood.  But after the cheering had subsided
and the nooses had been cut down, it was debatable whether
CPR had really advanced its cause.

"Tactics like those unveiled at last Sunday's property rights
bash at the Killington Ski Area can only undermine [the property
right's movement's] credibility and make every CPR argument
sound like a self-serving, hot-headed one," said an editorial
in the Rutland Sunday Herald.

James Douglas, Secretary of State and one of three Republican
candidates for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Patrick J.
Leahy, attended the Killington rally and said he was "surprised"
by the "unnecessary" tactics CPR employed.  Douglas has so
far shielded CPR from scrutiny under Vermont's laws governing
lobbying activities.  The group claims to be exempt from
reporting lobbying activities because it spends less than five
hundred dollars on lobbying per year.  Yet environmentalists
who monitor the State House report that Edson is virtually a
full time lobbyist.

In fact, claiming not to be "slick, high paid lobbyists,"
unlike the employees of non-profit environmental organizations
that faithfully follow reporting guidelines, is a regional
property rights tactic, part of the "just plain folks"
strategy originally advocated by Ron Arnold and his backers
in the oil and mining industries.

Douglas declined to demand more information on CPR's lobbying
activities and funding when requested to do so by a group of
State legislators who had been targeted by CPR for removal from
office.  Douglas's protection has been the key to CPR's strategy
of insisting they are not lobbyists, although their organization
devotes practically all its energy to overturning environmental
protection and planning laws, especially Vermont's Act 200,
which encourages comprehensive town planning and links it to a
regional planning process.

CPR claims to be the vanguard of a grassroots rebellion to
restore Vermont to traditions of frugality, freedom from
government interference, and respect for constitutional rights.
But it is equally accurate to characterize it as a group of
disgruntled would-be developers anxious to cover their home
state with condos, vacation homes, and strip malls.

CPR activist Dennis Carver of East Montpelier has said that
property rights are so absolute that he should be allowed to
build a nuclear power plant on his land, regardless of what his
neighbors think. The Carver family reportedly would like to
subdivide their family's farm. David Edson is a carpenter and
home builder. Douglas Nelson of Landowners United, an outgrowth
of CPR, hopes to build a mall near Newport, Vermont, to lure
shoppers from Canada.

Landowners United was formed to convince landowners to post
their land with no trespassing signs as a protest against
Act 200.  This was a highly successful tactic. The Vermont
Association of Snow Travelers (VAST), a snowmobilers'
organization that depends on the permission of private
landholders to keep open a wide network of trails in northern
Vermont, caved in to the pressure and elected Ed Eilertson, a
staunch CPR ally, as president.  Environmentalists had formerly
considered VAST an organization that shared some common goals,
especially open space preservation.  Now Eilertson, who has
passed out bumper stickers reading, "Plant a Tree Hugger,"
uses VAST to lobby for CPR's agenda.

At present, CPR is focused on repealing ACT 200.  But their
literature suggests that ACT 250, a system of development
regulation that has been operating for over a decade, is next
on their list.  Laws protecting wetlands and promoting strict
air and water pollution standards are also CPR targets.

The most prominent leader of Vermont's property rights movement
is gubernatorial candidate John McClaughery, a Republican State
Senator from the "Northeast Kingdom," three counties in northern
Vermont noted for their traditional Yankee independence.
McClaughery can claim some credit for aiding the rise of the
New Right.  McClaughery worked on Ronald Reagan's political
campaigns, including Reagan's 1980 presidential race, and was
rewarded with a job in the White House when Reagan was elected
President.  He left that job though, reportedly in disgust at
what he perceived as the overly conciliatory policies of the
early Reagan administration.

State Senator McClaughery hopes his gubernatorial candidacy
will push Vermont's Republican Party, which has a long moderate
conservationist tradition, to the right.  Last year McClaughery
introduced a law that would have designated many government
actions to protect the environment (such as denying a permit
for an unsound development project) a "taking," thus requiring
monetary compensation under the U.S. Constitution.  Dubbed the
"pout and pay bill" because it would have allowed developers to
bill the state government if any agency blocked an unrealistic
or illegal project, it failed to pass by only one vote in the
Vermont House.

McClaughery is on the editorial board of the Washington Times.
This indicates at the very least that he has made a personal
peace with the anti-democratic extremism of the Reverend Sun
Myung Moon's Unification Church, which owns the paper and
largely dictates its editorial policies.  McClaughery enjoys
his reputation as an intellectual maverick and has authored
a book calling for a return to something called "shire
democracy," a kind of libertarian utopia of small hamlets
and honest, independent property owners.

"[Property rights advocates] have a great rapport with the
rural town meetings," said one environmentalist.  Other
activists suggest that at least some of this rapport is based
on intimidation.  Paul Daniels is a wealthy farmer and one of
the original CPR organizers in the Northeast Kingdom.  Daniels
made a great deal of money by attaining a semi-monopoly on
pulpwood sales in his area.  Woodlot owners and independent
loggers were forced to work through Daniels, who held contracts
for delivering wood to pulp mills in the region.  Daniels has
also served as an advisor to a local bank and was in a position
to exert influence over loan decisions.

Daniels threw his considerable local influence behind successful
efforts to force the town of Albany to withdraw from the Act 200
planning process.  He has also opposed efforts to improve local
schools.  Daniels has told rural town meetings that unless they
vote to block efforts to promote regional planning and property
tax reform, "you won't be able to paint your chicken coop."  Two
other of the Northeast Kingdom's other original CPR activists
(the group was born there) are Roger and Jo Sweatt, a husband
and wife team of realtors.

It is perhaps worth noting that the public policy gap that
allows Daniels and his fellow property rights advocates to gain
a following is real.  Wise Users often accuse environmentalists
of elitism.  While this claim most likely originated in the
psychological insecurities of college drop-out Ron Arnold (who
often rails against "environmentalists with Ph.D.'s"), it
contains a grain of truth.  Environmentalists are used to
fighting their battles through environmental impact statements
and lawsuits.  The homespun counterattack of the Wise Use
advocates has in many instances left environmentalists
unprepared.  Environmental organizers in Vermont and elsewhere
have devoted little energy to convincing rural residents that
sustainable development and rational democratic planning
processes are possible and preferable to the boom and bust
cycles of an economy entirely dependent on unregulated resort
development.  Essentially, the choice facing many people in the
Big North is whether their children will be able to work in a
sustainable forest economy or clean condominiums at minimum
wage.

Unfortunately the Wise Use and property rights advocates seem to
have, for the moment, distorted the debate on these issues with
their threats that all reform will lead to "government land
grabs.  It is doubtful that most Vermont residents, or even
most Vermont small property owners, want to see their entire
state developed without any government planning or regulation
whatsoever.  Nationally, lobbying for limiting government's
ability to protect land under the guise of "property rights" is
conducted by national organizations of realtors and contractors.
In Vermont this lobbying is conducted by realtors, developers,
and others with a fiscal interest in limiting and preventing
environmental protection and land use planning.

** Maine

 Just prior to the October 1991 hearing on the Northern Forest
Lands Council (NFLC) cited earlier, Jonathan Malmude, a property
rights activist and professor at St. Joseph's College in York
County, wrote an op-ed article for the Bangor Daily News in
which he claimed that the "super-regulatory NFLC environment
could have a chilling effect on ministers, teachers, or
townspeople who are outspoken on civic issues."  This
suggestion, linking a state and federal government-led effort
to promote debate about the economic future of the Big North
to gag orders on activist preachers, seems carefully designed
to appeal to the strong Christian fundamentalist traditions
of rural Maine.  Bangor is generally considered the center
of those traditions.

Maine's property rights movement is as active, energetic, and
successful as Vermont's, but more splintered.  The primary Wise
Use organization is the Maine Conservation Rights Institute
(MECRI) in Lubec, Maine, which grew out of the Washington County
Alliance, a group that had opposed the preservation of scenic
areas in Washington County.

When contacted by a researcher, a MECRI spokesperson (who chose
not to be identified) claimed the group was funded by $100
membership fees and additional gifts from its over four hundred
members.  Contacted later, Robert Voight, president of the
organization, repeated the claim that the group was funded
completely by membership fees, "or whatever the membership wants
to donate," adding, "We're a grassroots group."

But a MECRI filing with the IRS indicated that the group
expected to receive grants and gifts totaling $134,707 against
$13,000 in membership fees in 1991 and $118,456 against $28,000
in membership fees in 1992.  This would mean that in 1991, MECRI
expected to have 130 dues paying members contribute on average
an additional $1000 per member, and in 1992, expected 280 dues
paying members to contribute on average an additional $400 per
member.  This is an unlikely level of generosity and suggests
additional funding sources to those claimed by MECRI.  Voight
declined to furnish any additional details regarding actual
funding, saying those matters were private.

Several environmentalists who have been involved in conflicts
with the Maine Wise Use movement describe the movement with the
phrase, "I know what they are against; I'm not sure what they
are for."  This perception mirrors the overall negative style
of the national Wise Use movement and its reaction against
environmentalism.  Beyond clearcutting old growth forests,
revising wetlands regulations, and letting dirt bikes race
through endangered ecosystems, the movement has little positive
vision to offer despite its relentless rhetoric about promoting
appropriate environmental protection.  Voight confirmed that
MECRI is a member of the Alliance for America.

In 1991, Ted Johnston of Maine's Forest Products Industry
Council spoke at MECRI's annual conference.  In 1992 the featured
speaker was Ron Arnold.  But the hearings on the Northern Forest
Lands Council remain the watermark for the Maine property rights
movement's influence.  Those hearings attracted a wide variety
of property rights activists.  These included Linda Bean,
granddaughter of L.L. Bean and former funder of the Hannibal
Hamlin Institute, an earlier property rights organization that
fought a bond issue to fund a state program called Land for
Maine's Future.  Bean announced to the media assembled at
the hearing that she was running for the U.S. House of
Representatives.  She later won the Republican primary for
District One in Southwestern Maine but lost in the general
election. MECRI, Malmude, and the John Birch Society were also
at the hearing, as was someone passing out copies of The New
Federalist, newspaper of the Lyndon LaRouche organization.

The New Federalist has run numerous articles alleging that
environmental activists are part of a terrorist conspiracy
to ruin the economy.  The LaRouchites claim this conspiracy
by environmentalists to de-industrialize the country can be
traced backward through the World Wildlife Fund, George
Bernard Shaw, Aristotle, and the Babylonian matriarchy.

** Massachusetts

 So far, Wise Use/property rights organizing in Massachusetts,
New Hampshire, and Connecticut has been less widespread and less
successful than in Maine and Vermont.  Eric Veyhl, who maintains
dual residences in Washington County, Maine, and Concord,
Massachusetts, tried to lead an effort to block a Park Service
study of the Concord River system outside Boston.  His effort
failed and the study is proceeding.

The property rights movement did win one substantial victory in
the southern Berkshires of Massachusetts.  This year a property
rights group called Friends of the Rivers managed to convince
three Massachusetts towns to withdraw their approval of a Park
Service plan to study the upper reaches of the Farmington River
for possible inclusion in the federal Wild and Scenic Rivers
program.

Friends of the Rivers relied on Don Rupp of New York and the
Alliance for America for strategic guidance.  Rupp has long been
opposed to Wild and Scenic designation along the upper Delaware
River.  He claims that Wild and Scenic designation is an
inevitable prelude to the establishment of a national park,
that Wild and Scenic designation causes homes to be bulldozed,
landowners to be bought off their land, and property values to
fall.  None of this has happened along the upper Delaware.  In
fact Rupp, who in 1981 lost his gas station for failing to pay
state sales tax, currently earns his living as a real estate
agent selling homes and land that have appreciated in value as
a result of Wild and Scenic designation of the upper Delaware.

"Rupp obscured the real issue," said Gary Pontier, editor of The
River Reporter, a newspaper based in the Upper Delaware Valley.
No program, federal or otherwise, is perfect.  Because of Rupp's
domination and disruption of the debate, the real potential
problems for riverbank landholders from Wild and Scenic
designation were never discussed in Rupp's home region.  "The
cruelest thing [Rupp] has done is that he's stirred up people
saying that property values will drop."  Pontier noted that
there is a problem along the Upper Delaware for small
landholders and farmers who do not wish to sell their property
but face rising real estate taxes as their land's paper value
increases.  Such landholders are often forced to sell off chunks
of property to meet their tax burden, thus feeding the real
estate market and by implication, Don Rupp.

Rupp made other statements that mislead people and inflame
fears.  Rupp reportedly told residents along the Farmington
River that the Wild and Scenic designation was being pushed by
legislators paid off by the environmental groups.  He failed to
mention that Chuck Cushman of the National Inholders Association
had convinced the Park Service to allow the towns along the
Upper Delaware to hire their own planners to come up with
riverbank zoning plans that would comply with the Wild and
Scenic plan.  Rupp told one Massachusetts audience that they
should not participate in the planning process in any way
because this would allow the federal government and its behind-
the-scenes allies, the conservation groups, to exercise complete
control over their land.

Friends of the Rivers (FOR) formed to oppose the Farmington
River Wild and Scenic study.  Prominent members included the
Campetti family of Sandisfield, proprietors of an oil business
and an off road vehicle dealership.  The Campettis recently
turned a wetland along the Farmington into a landfill for
roadway and construction debris.  Another FOR stalwart is
Francis Deming, who operates his over one hundred acres of
property in Tolland as a pay-as-you-dump waste disposal site.

Certainly no one can object to local business people banding
together to express their will on an issue they deem important.
But Friends of the Rivers hewed to the familiar Wise
Use/property rights pattern of spreading horror stories and
disinformation.  FOR literature claimed at various times that
Wild and Scenic would mean the land along the river would
automatically become a wildlife refuge, that the federal
government would impose strict zoning along the river, and that
a long list of businesses in the affected towns would be closed.
FOR also dutifully repeated Rupp's claim that Wild and Scenic
designation devalues property.  None of those statements was
true.

FOR hung a poster in the center of Sandisfield claiming that
Robert Tarasuk, the town's representative on the Wild and Scenic
Study Committee, was a paid federal agent.  Their evidence was a
copy of Tarasuk's resume which revealed that over a decade ago,
Tarasuk had a summer job with the Bureau of Land Management.
"There is no better tactic than to threaten someone's land,"
Tarasuk said.  "Get somebody who lives on their land and that's
all they have and then tell them that the government is coming
to take it.  Fear works.  The Alliance for America knows this
and I believe that they coach [local groups]," he said.  "Your
land has been stolen," read a FOR flier distributed along the
Farmington.

At one public forum in Otis, Massachusetts, Rupp and John Conner
of the Alliance for America represented FOR.  Dave Howard,
president of Alliance for America, was also in the audience.
Conner was also a vocal advocate for Florida developer Andrew
DeLillo's proposal to build a giant landfill in nearby Hinsdale,
Massachusetts.  DeLillo's proposal was defeated when the people
of the town banded together and convinced the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts to declare the site of the proposed landfill an
Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC). Conner has since
formed a group called ACEC Inholders to lobby against the state
program.  Conner's current project is an effort to site a waste
disposal facility in the Berkshires.

Despite their financial interests in preventing environmental
protection and their reliance on misinformation and character
smears, FOR was able to destroy confidence in the National Park
Service along the Farmington.  "Their message was you can't
trust those [Park Service] bastards," the Farmington River Park
Service project manager said.

** Connecticut 

 Friends of the River was not so successful when they tried to
organize opposition to Wild and Scenic designation along the
lower reaches of the Farmington River in northwest Connecticut.
This was due in no small part to the fact that Connecticut
residents of the Farmington River Valley have seen three valleys
flooded to provide drinking water for Hartford, Connecticut.
The Farmington River Watershed Association (FRWA), a river
protection group founded in 1953, was able to counter FOR claims
of "land grabs" and "preservationist lock-ups" of resources with
the facts about Wild and Scenic designation.

Along the Farmington, FOR's main tool for inflaming citizens'
fears was a videotaped film documentary about Park Service
preservation efforts in the Cuyahoga River Valley in Ohio.
That film, which was later adapted for the PBS series Frontline,
documents an aggressive Park Service land acquisition program in
that region during the early 1970s.  It is worth noting that the
film contains some distortions, such as not mentioning that one
of the primary examples of a "victimized landholder," Leonard
Stein-Sapir, was a man who bought undeveloped property in the
region after the Park Service announced its plans to acquire
land.  He then subdivided the land into residential lots and
sold it to the Park Service for $248,250. Nevertheless, he
appears in the film as the selfless hero of the landholders
victimized by the Park Service.

The Park Service project manager for the Farmington River
did admit that the agency has in the past used a "top-down"
management approach that did not take individual landholders
into account.  The structure of the Farmington project is meant
to be an early example of a new model for providing rivers
with federal Wild and Scenic protection while local control
is retained.

This model has worked, if not perfectly, in New York along the
Upper Delaware.  Rising real estate values there (now in a
cyclical decline due to the national recession) provide Don Rupp
with his living.  Wild and Scenic designation provides residents
of the Upper Delaware Valley with the security of knowing that,
if New York City tries to flood their homes for a reservoir, the
federal government will stand in the way of any dam project and
force the rigorous study of any diversion schemes.

Wild and Scenic designation allows federal control only over
the waters of the river.  Riverbanks remain under local
jurisdiction, though towns must formulate zoning plans that
will protect a buffer zone, usually about one hundred feet
wide, along the banks in order to qualify for the Wild and
Scenic program.

By carefully explaining the details of local control to area
landholders worried by FOR's false claims of land grabs,
Farmington River Watershed Association members prevented
FOR's rumors of "federal land grabs" from taking hold.

The Wise Use/property rights activists had one major success
in Connecticut. Their distortions of the meaning and effect of
Wild and Scenic designation significantly influenced coverage
of the issue by Joseph A. O'Brien of the Hartford Courant.

Here is the conclusion of O'Brien's article about a town meeting
in Tolland, Massachusetts, which voted to abandon the Wild and
Scenic study:

>>   Part of Tolland borders the Colebrook
>>   river reservoir, which covers the area where
>>   the village of Colebrook River once stood.

>>   "I'm sure you're aware of the town of Colebrook
>>   River that was wiped out," said Julian C. Work,
>>   chairman of Tolland's planning board. "Anything
>>   that smacks of that sort of control I'm against."

>>   "I hope this sends a message to other
>>   federal protectionist programs," said Joseph
>>   J. Clark III of Tolland, spokesman for a group
>>   opposed to the designation.

>>   "We want local control, we want to make
>>   our own decisions. We've got problems
>>   with federal decisions," Stephen Palmer,
>>   a machinist from Tolland, said.  "People
>>   say we don't understand.  We do understand.
>>   We feel confident with our own decisions." 

                     Hartford Courant
                     3/8/92

Federal Wild and Scenic River designation is primarily a means
for providing protection for scenic riverways, and the towns,
businesses, and homes that lie along them from precisely the
sort of large scale reservoir project that flooded the town of
Colebrook River.

O'Brien's article allowed the property rights advocates to turn
the facts of the Farmington situation on their head -- without
any substantive reply from a river protection advocate.

In light of Wise Use/property rights movement founder Ron
Arnold's dictum that "facts don't matter, in politics perception
is reality," and the relentless consistency of property rights
movement tactics across New England, O'Brien's story should
forewarn New England's journalists to do extra homework on the
details of politically charged land use and environmental issues
when dealing with local examples of the national property rights
movement.

** New Hampshire

 At the recent Wise Use gathering in Reno, Nevada, a glossy
pamphlet was distributed that promoted the Alliance for America.
After a short description of the Alliance's birth at a "fly in
for freedom" in September 1991, the pamphlet goes on to list the
group's goals and ask for contributions in categories ranging
from "patron" ($10,000+) to "individual/family" ($15).  First
among the goals listed is: "Achieve representation in all
50 states."  Other goals include: "Create a positive public
identity," and "Become a voice in the 1992 political campaign."
That pamphlet, which reflects the Alliance's perfectly
legitimate desire to form a lobbying alliance among large
businesses, wealthy individuals, and people of moderate means to
oppose environmental regulation and the end of federal subsidies
for mining and grazing on public lands, has everything to do
with a series of events along the Pemigewasset, a scenic river
that flows from the White Mountains of New Hampshire down into
the Merrimack River Valley.

Ed Clark, a local businessman and owner of several hydroelectric
facilities, had long wanted to erect a dam at Livermore Falls
in the town of Campton, New Hampshire. Livermore Falls is a
scenic area where the river drops through a gorge carved through
reddish stone.  A small beach just above the falls provides
residents of Campton and Plymouth, New Hampshire, with a place
to sunbathe and relax. The ruins of a mill and an iron bridge
that spans the gorge below the falls remind visitors of the
region's industrial past.  Town officials also know the falls as
a prime place for thrill seekers to drink a little too much and
kill themselves jumping off the rocks or climbing on the rusted
spans of the "Pumpkinseed" bridge (so-called because of its
shape, a slender pointed oval perched atop the gorge's granite
outcrops).

Clark's plan would have flooded the falls and the beach, and
provided electricity three or four months a year.  Even
opponents of the dam acknowledged that it was a sensitively
planned project that would have been both a historically-minded
reconstruction and a working hydroelectric facility.  Two groups
formed around the dam project.  One, which eventually became
the New Hampshire Landholder's Alliance, favored the dam.
Its primary early leaders were Don and Cheryl Johnson. Cheryl
Johnson was a partner in a local printing business and her
husband Don was an employee of Ed Clark. Opposed to the dam
project was the Pemigewasset River Council, headed by Patricia
Schlesinger.

At New Hampshire state legislative hearings, people who seek to
testify sign cards indicating their position.  These cards allow
the representatives running the hearing to organize and document
the presentations.  At a hearing on the dam project in February
1991, Ed Clark's allies produced over eight hundred of these
cards as evidence the public wanted the dam.  It turned out
the cards had not been issued by the state, but were privately
printed copies.  Moreover, New Hampshire state legislator Mary
Anne Lewis had her staff conduct a quick phone survey, and now
estimates that two-thirds of the cards bore the names of people
who had no memory of signing anything related to the river
project.

Clark's dam project was essentially killed when the Pemigewasset
was enrolled in a State of New Hampshire river management
program.  The New Hampshire Landholder's Alliance (NHLA)
incorporated as a non-profit organization and began distributing
literature opposing river protection and environmentalism in
general.  Bill Lane, manager of the Campton Sand and Gravel
Company, also became active in the organization.  Jerri Ballou,
another early NHLA activist, apparently dropped out of the
movement after she was finally able to sell her riverfront
land to the New Hampshire Land Conservation Investment Program.

NHLA focused its opposition on an ongoing study aimed at
enrolling the Pemigewasset in the federal Wild and Scenic Rivers
program.  Not surprisingly Don Rupp and David Howard of the
Alliance for America brought their message to the region at
forums sponsored by the NHLA.  According to observers at the
two forums, public attendance, aside from the core membership
of NHLA and members of the Pemigewasset River Council, was
sparse:  about twenty at one forum and nine at the other.
The NHLA newsletter reported the combined attendance as
nearly two hundred.

The low attendance at the NHLA forums was preceded by profuse
amounts of literature distributed throughout local communities
proclaiming familiar warnings of the perils of the Wild and
Scenic Rivers program.  Since Cheryl Johnson started printing
and distributing the Alliance For America's Alliance News, she
has reportedly made plans to form her own printing company.
Johnson earlier had asked the Wild and Scenic Study Committee,
on which she serves, to change the locations of two meetings
to Campton because she was planning to buy Campton printing
and could not spare the time to drive to the meetings.  The
committee agreed, but Johnson still missed the meetings.  She
now reportedly has the contract to provide all of Alliance for
America's publications and literature.

In effect, the NHLA seems to be funded directly by the national
Alliance for America through Cheryl Johnson's business ventures.
There is obviously nothing wrong with the national Alliance for
America creating a "grassroots" group to spread the bad word
about the Park Service.  But the reliance upon Don Rupp, who
routinely tells blatant falsehoods about the Park Service, and
the NHLA's concentration of people with a financial interest in
battling river protection should caution against taking NHLA's
claims at face value.  Nor does David Howard work to clarify
complex issues.  His main rhetorical tactic is to lump all
government land and water protection programs into one category,
as "threats to property rights."  This is an effective tactic
for manipulating media coverage, since people who question
Howard's assumptions find their arguments reduced to one line
responses that environmental issues are "more complex" than
his videos about spotted owls versus loggers suggest.  (For
an example see "Landowner: People Belong in Environmental
Picture" the Manchester, NH, Union Leader, 3/28/92).

As this report was being completed, Gary Weiner, the Park
Service employee in charge of the Pemigewasset River Wild and
Scenic Study, led a canoe ride down the river to survey various
scenic features of the river.  Cheryl Johnson had been invited
as a member of the committee, but after receiving the invitation
she scheduled an NHLA fundraising auction for that day.  But
her spirit, and apparently the fruits of her printing press,
accompanied the trip.  All along the route of the canoe trip
were signs proclaiming, "Go Away Park Service," "No Wild and
Scenic," and "Go Away Gary."  When the canoe trip reached its
destination a parked bulldozer was blocking their taking-out
point.

The NHLA, like every other property rights group presented in
this report, displays no interest in promoting debate or public
education.  While providing information tailored to advance
one's public affairs agenda is perfectly acceptable in a
democracy, flat-out lying is not.  A movement that combines the
routine use of falsehood, an aggressive and intimidating style
of discourse, and the careful concealment of its own financial
interests in manipulating public opinion deserves more complete
scrutiny from the press and public officials than the property
rights movement has so far received.

* Conclusion

 The year 1992 represents a political watershed for the
discussion of environmental issues in the U.S. Recently
President George Bush backed Dan Quayle's Council on
Competitiveness over his own appointees at the Environmental
Protection Agency.  Bush upheld a Competitiveness Council ruling
that allows factories to increase pollution emissions by up to
245 tons without a public hearing (N.Y. Times 6/26/92).  David
McIntosh, the Competitiveness Council's point man for such
deregulation efforts, spoke at the most recent national Wise
Use gathering in Reno, Nevada.  In several recent environmental
photo opportunities and public statements, President Bush
voiced the Wise Use argument that an extremist application
of environmental protection laws harms economic growth.  The
election of Bill Clinton and Al Gore changes the atmosphere
in Washington, D.C., but the Wise Use/property rights movement
will undoubtedly continue to target state and local
environmental projects.

Environmental regulations may impede certain development
projects, especially those planned for fragile or valuable
eco-systems, but there is ample evidence that environmental
concerns can equally well serve as the basis for rebuilding our
economy and infrastructure.  This environmental point of view
holds that our society needs to move from environmental
regulation to environmental investment.  By protecting vanishing
resources, we lower the net social costs to future generations
from foul air and water.  The corollary to this argument, that
it is possible to build a sustainable economy by promoting energy
conservation and the growth of industries like recycling and
solar power, has so far gotten little national airplay.

These are serious issues that deserve wide public debate.
Some applications of environmental regulations are no doubt
burdensome to resource extracting industries and developers.
If both our nation and the ecosystems that make human life and
prosperity possible are to survive, it is important that all
sectors of U.S. society debate ways of continuing to expand
environmental reforms while promoting economic activity.
But at the national level -- and in New England -- the Wise
Use/property rights movement is dedicated to preventing such
open, fair debate.  Intimidation and misinformation are not
the basis of a free society.

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