From: cberlet@igc.apc.org (NLG Civil Liberties Committee)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Subject: Re: Wise Use in Northeast (anti-Green)
Date: 13 Dec 92 22:24:00 GMT
Nf-ID: #R:cdp:1425500034:cdp:1425500036:000:10245
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!cberlet    Dec 13 14:24:00 1992


/* Written  2:10 pm  Dec 13, 1992 by cberlet in igc:publiceye */
The Scent of Opportunity:

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

by William Kevin Burke

December 12, 1992

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.