Are you an environmentalist, revisited

Photo from Grandcanyontreks.org/orphan.htm

Back when I worked for the National Park Service counting buildings and bushes for the List of Classified Structures/Cultural Landscapes Inventory (LCS/CLI), one of the scariest potential experiences I had came during a training held at Grand Canyon National Park (GRCA). The LCS coordinator for the Rocky Mountain Region, which includes Arizona, planned the exercise as a dual purpose activity: we'd all improve our knowledge of what was important to include in the database and we'd also collect data he could use in updating the LCS records for GRCA. The park had a number of sites that were inadequately documented or not in the database at all. Our group would survey them as part of, among other things, assessing their eligibility for possible inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. One of the sites was an industrial one, the Orphan Mine. 

The Orphan Mine perches quite literally on the edge of the South Rim. It's clearly visible from a favorite overlook on the canyon rim, and the South Rim hiking trail detours around it on the way to Hermit's Rest. When I saw the headframe from the overlook, my immediate reaction was, oh, shit, we're all going to die. Turns out the dropoff from the headframe isn't quite as dramatic as that angle made it appear, but it's still not a place to be if either heights or not-maintained-for-many-years equipment make you nervous. 

Orphan Mine headframe and other mine buildings

Fortunately, a decision was made that we lacked the proper safety gear (e.g., ropes and harnesses, hardhats, radiation exposure badges [the Orphan was a uranium mine]). We opted for assessing a mothballed waste water treatment plant* instead. All we had to worry about there was hanta virus: the rodent dung in one of the buildings must have been several inches deep. Hemorrhagic fever? Or death by falling a long, long way down while bouncing off miscellaneous rocks on the way to the river? I'll take the fever -- at least with it odds are a person will be too delirious to realize she's dying. 

And what, the curious reader may be asking, does this have to do with environmentalism? Not much, except that when people start talking about the pristine wilderness and unspoiled vistas in national parks and other "untouched" areas, most don't recognize that the wilderness isn't as pristine as most people like to believe. The Grand Canyon in particular is often cited for its spectacular unspoiled vistas; how people can not notice a uranium mine sitting next to a popular hiking trail is beyond me. Grand Canyon isn't alone -- many of the large "wildnerness parks" are laced with old mine sites: Isle Royale has copper mines, Buffalo National River has extensive zinc mines, North Cascades has prospector's diggings for various minerals, Wrangell-St. Elias has a humongous Kennecott Copper site, and those just happen to be the first four parks I remembered without having to think very hard. National parks, recreational areas, historic battlefields, and national forests all have former farmsteads and ranches, logging camps, railroad grades, quarries, fisheries, various abandoned industrial plants, ghost towns, and old roads. There are very few places in the lower 48 contiguous states that qualify as truly untrammeled or pristine. 

Almost seventy years ago John Bartlow Martin wrote, "Go into the woods today and when  you think you are in wilderness never seen before by man, you'll fall into a prospector's abandoned  test pit or you will stumble over the brush-grown ties of an old logging railroad. Struggle all day to breast the swamps and rocky hills and you may end up in a thicket concealing a rusty four-hundred pound stove that some forgotten trapper carried into camp piece-by-piece fifty or seventy years before you." Martin was describing Michigan's upper Peninsula when he wrote Call It North Country, but his description could have applied to almost any region in the country. Wander around the open grasslands of the Great Plains where the land looks to be totally empty, and sooner or later you'll find abandoned sod houses, old fence lines, and, predating the Euro-Americans, tipi circles or the remnants of earth lodges left by the Pawnee, Ponca, or Lakotah. Decide to escape from civilization by hiking into the back country in the Cascades or Sierras and you'll stumble across old prospectors' diggings. Go walking in the Vermont woods and you'll find numerous remnant rock walls, cellar holes, and ancient orchards deep in what seems like virgin forest.  

Further, many places we think of now as being unspoiled or never populated were actually created by ejecting the residents. The Yosemite valley, for example, was home to native Americans, sheepherders, and prospectors when the US government decided to designate it as a national park. In what was to be the pattern for every national park created after that, Step One in turning it into a park was to boot the residents out and try to erase their history. The myth would be created that landscapes were pristine, they were purely the result of natural forces (ignoring the fact that the iconic meadows in the Yosemite valley existed in large part because sheep grazing had kept them open), and that the only resources and history that counted were those associated with the natural world, not humanity. In such an idealized natural world, people visit -- they do not live among the trees and scenic vistas nor do they work. The natural world, the "environment," is reified and turned into something we visit when we want a break from the unnatural world of the suburbs or city streets. This is a problem.

Why is it a problem? Because, as I've noted before, it means that way too often "environmentalists" will couch arguments against various developments in terms of aesthetic values or loss of leisure activities (e.g., don't put a pulpmill there; it will look ugly) instead of focusing on real problems: groundwater contamination, air pollution, depletion of an aquifer, etc. Even better, learn a little something about the history of an area before you start talking about pristine wilderness or the untrammeled great outdoors. Don't rave about the virgin forests when you're talking about stands that have been cut over a dozen times in the past century and you can still see the ruts from the skidders. Don't tell me how unspoiled an area is when you're standing on an old iron ore mining waste rock pile and the hiking trails are abandoned railroad grades. In short, do your homework before you get up on your soapbox, not after. 

[*Definitely National Register eligible, incidentally. It was one of the first treatment plants in the United States to treat waste water for reuse; the reclaimed water was used for irrigating the grounds around the hotels and employee housing.]

Are you an environmentalist, or do you work for a living?

Empire Mine, Palmer, Michigan. 

Over at The Lake is the Boss, DaveO's done several interesting posts about a proposed mining operation in northern Wisconsin. I don't have a real strong opinion about this specific project one way or the other, but I know Dave started to lose me as a potential mine opponent when his rhetoric switched from talking about contamination of a watershed and possible toxic byproducts to damage to the viewshed and degradation of aesthetic values. Loss of scenic vistas doesn't strike me as much of an argument against anything: to be blunt about it, you can't eat scenery.

I found myself thinking about a 1995 article by historian Richard White -- "Are you an environmentalist, or do you work for a living?" -- that generated a lot of discussion when it first appeared. White's point was that for many people, the environment is something "out there" somewhere, a place to visit and to recreate in but not a place where they actually make a living. They like looking at it; it's a playground. Naturally, whole herds of environmentalists were (and still are) extremely unhappy about being portrayed as elitist asshats. 

I, quite frankly, wasn't much surprised by White's paper. Back when I was still pretending to be a sociologist with an interest in voluntary associations, I studied a group known as the Friends of the Land of Keweenaw (FOLK). FOLK was organized as part of an effort to prevent construction of a pulpmill in northern Baraga County, Michigan. For various reasons, the mill never materialized -- how much the local opposition contributed to it not being built is debatable (my memory is that the overall economic climate in the pulp and paper industry had more to do with the project being abandoned than anything else) -- but its construction (or not) wasn't the point of my study. I was interested in FOLK -- how it was organized, what the demographics looked like for the membership, etc. The research also included a content analysis of letters to the editor in local papers. What did I find? 

Nothing earthshaking. I simply confirmed what numerous other sociologists have found: the environmentalists (anti-mill) tended to be people who worked, loosely speaking, at white collar occupations; the pro-mill were more hands on, i.e., blue collar. Anti-mill types were either working with nonmaterial items (e.g., an insurance salesman) or retired; the pro-mill had occupations that were more directly connected with industry (e.g., machinist). The anti-mill letter writers worried about aesthetics ("a mill is ugly," "pulpmills stink," logging trucks are noisy"); the pro-mill writers focused on the economic benefits ("increased tax base for local schools" "good paying jobs"). It was kind of a head*desk experience. I really did not want to read self-centered crap like "When I retired, I moved here to get away from industry" or "An ugly pulpmill right on US-41 will upset tourists." Holy fuck. It was like a confirmation of every negative stereotype I'd ever heard about clueless tree huggers.  There were a handful of anti-mill types who had brains enough to point out that maybe, just maybe pollution of Lake Superior should be a concern or that perhaps the timber resources of the area weren't sufficient to support an operation on the scale being discussed, but overall it was "don't mess with my playground." In short, NIMBY-ism.

Well, if not in your backyard, who should get stuck with it? None of us like thinking about the obvious  philosophical and ethical questions -- if we like living with all the benefits of a highly technological society (smart phones, central heating, automobiles, whatever), how much of a price are we personally willing to pay to enjoy those goodies? We want the electricity -- shouldn't we be willing to live next to the power plant? And if we generate the garbage, shouldn't we be willing to live next to the dump? 

Book Review: Jack Ward Thomas: The Journals of Forest Service Chief

This book was a surprise.  I had low expectations going into it -- it wasn't a work I had much interest in reading prior to 'winning' it at the Forest History Society breakfast meeting in Portland back in March.  There were some really good books given away at that breakfast, and what did I get stuck with?  A tome that I fully expected to be laced with a lot of self-serving revisionist history.  I had never heard anything bad about Chief Thomas, but like most federal employees I'm pretty skeptical about the folks in the Washington offices.  After all, who in their right mind would actually want  to manage any federal agency? 

Turns out the answer to that question is not Jack Ward Thomas, at least according to him.  He had been the lead agency scientist dealing with the spotted owl controversy in the Pacific Northwest so had plenty of first-hand experience with Congressional committees and the mess politics can make of what to the professionals in the field look like pretty straightforward issues. He had even spent most of his career deliberately avoiding the training that would make him eligible for the Senior Executive Service (a prerequiste for anyone aspiring to the Chief's seat in DC; by tradition it was strictly a civil service position, not a political appointment).  All the previous chiefs had been foresters, a term that means a lot more within the Forest Service than it does to the general public because, among other things, it implies management responsibilities, and had along the way served as a forest supervisor or regional forester.  Thomas came from the wildlife research side of the agency, a dramatic switch for an agency that worships the memory of Gifford Pinchot.  Although Thomas doesn't dwell on it, by coming from wildlife rather than from forestry, he had to know there a huge old boy network within the agency that he had never been and never would be part of.  He was also the first Chief to be a political appointtee, and that he does dwell on -- he wasn't happy about it, and reiterates numerous times that he really wanted whoever succeeded him to be a return to the old tradition.

Thomas also doesn't speculate much about why he got tapped in 1992 by the Clinton administration to replace Chief Dale Robertson, but given his background -- wildlife management, not forestry -- and his involvement with the spotted owl study it seems like a fairly obvious signal to the environmental activist community that the new administration wasn't going to let the 'timber shop' drive the agency any longer.  Unfortunately, as Thomas makes clear, if there was any relationship that personified the dilemma of your friends causing more problems than your enemies, it might be that between environmental activists and the Clinton administration.  Thomas's descriptions of well-designed plans being stymied by the group they had been designed to help reminded me of a quote attributed to President Warren G. Harding -- Harding reportedly said he could deal with his enemies, but "Lord, save me from my friends."  Invariably, at least from Thomas's perspective, the result of environmental activism was to create more long-term problems than it solved.

It didn't help that the perception within the Forest Service, a perception that contributed a great deal to damaging employee morale, was that the Clinton administration was bending over backwards to cater to the environmentalists in an effort to gain the support of urban voters in Portland, Seattle, and other west coast cities.  There's no doubt a great deal of truth in that.  The problem was (and still is) that the environmental movement is extremely diverse, it includes people holding a wide range of opinions, and an action that satisfies one segment of that movement is almost always guaranteed to anger another.  Industry, in contrast, could easily present a unified message.  End result?  Major headaches out in the field, as local staff had to cope with demonstrations and protests, and major headaches in Washington, as Thomas and others tried to satisfy Congress.

Of course, one thing that employees in the field could not know for sure, but that Thomas was seeing up close was the penchant of administration officials, political appointees like Leon Panetta, to ignore the advice coming from within the agency.  Field staff from the various agencies involved in natural resource management -- Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife, the Bureau of Land Management, and so on -- would spend many months working on Environmental Impact Statements, soliciting public comments, exploring various alternates -- and then just before a plan, after years of work, was finally going to be implemented,  the White House would get a phone call from someone with a lot of personal influence and almost no actual knowledge of the facts on the ground,  and that was that.  Thomas mentions several examples of being blindsided by Panetta or someone else in the administration.  It's actually moderately amazing he stayed on as Chief as long as he did -- the job sounds like one long exercise in frustration.

Whether or not the Clinton administration was any better or worse than any other at engaging in micromanaging and second guessing the professional civil service is, of course, debatable.  If anything, it was probably typical.  Every administration comes in totally convinced that the outgoing administration managed to staff the upper levels of every agency with party hacks, various lobbyists had undo influence, and that policy was being driven totally by political considerations.  They spend a huge amount of time trying to 'clean house,' and by the time they figure out that some of the agency professionals do actually know what they're doing, they're running out of time to accomplish anything worthwhile before the next election.  And then it starts all over again.

Thomas does seem to have a thoroughly low and essentially nonpartisan opinion of politicians in general.  The Republicans might be industry tools, but the Democrats are equally lazy and ill-informed.  Hearings are called, but Senators and Representatives put in only token appearances, with a typical  Congressman or Senator showing up just long enough to do a little posturing that will make a good sound bite for the news media back in his or her home state and then vanishing.  After sitting through numerous Congressional hearings and seeing how remarkably ignorant and lazy the typical Congress critter was, Thomas is quietly appalled by his growing realization that what was actually shaping U.S. environmental policy is litigation.  Where does the real power in the federal government lie?  The Department of Justice.  DOJ decides which rules to enforce through criminal prosecution or civil litigation, DOJ decides which cases need to work their way up through the appeals process and which they'll try to find fast out of court settlements for, and they'll do it all without bothering to consult with the technical experts in any of the natural resource management agencies.  The hearings, the discussions, the fact-finding efforts are all just theater -- it's DOJ that decides what's actually going to happen.

Thomas's descriptions of some of the Senators and Representatives he had to deal with make it obvious politicians do not get elected based on brains.  It's quite clear he's convinced that the late Helen Chenoweth made the proverbial box of rocks look sentient in comparison, and Larry Craig wasn't much better.  Maybe it was something in the water in Idaho?

Overall, this book proved to be much more interesting than I was anticipating.  It was also oddly reassuring.  We hear so much these days about the partisan bickering in Washington, the inability of Congress to work together, and the general gridlock when it comes to changing or implementing policy.  But as I was reading this book, it read as though Thomas could have been writing his journal entries last month, not almost 20 years ago.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.  Should I be comforted by the fact that politicians haven't changed much, that Cabinet secretaries still fight turf battles, and that sometimes the good stuff that comes out of a decision is the result of unintended consequences and not actual thought?  Probably not, but it was reassuring to see that no matter what weirdness happens in DC there are still career civil servants out in the field fighting the good fight and doing their best to hold back chaos.

[A minor side note:  as a civil servant myself, one of the things that amused me was Thomas grousing about his annual performance review.  He's the Chief of the Forest Service, and he's as unhappy as any GS-4 technician about getting dinged for being less than "exceptional" on one aspect of the review.  It's the one thing everyone in federal service has in common -- we're all convinced our supervisors don't have a clue when they're assessing how good we are at our jobs.]

More proof the U.P. is different

Having been born and raised in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, I've gotten used to people asking "is that part of Canada?" However, I did not expect fellow historians and scholars to assume it actually had successfully seceded from the downer peninsula. I was wrong.

Earlier this week the American Society for Environmental History notified me a paper I proposed for presentation at the 2010 annual meeting has been accepted. The topic of the paper? A civil engineer's response to an 1893 typhoid epidemic in Ironwood, Michigan. The theme of the panel I've been placed in? International perspectives on water pollution and health. The other three papers focus on events during the colonial period in third world nations.

Then again, considering what conditions were like in Ironwood in the 1890s, maybe it's an accurate placement.

Life's little mysteries: A review of Lazy B by Sandra Day O'Connor

A few weeks ago Tracy over at Possum Living had a review of Sandra Day O'Connor's memoir, Lazy B. The book is loose collection of anecdotes about growing up on a large cattle ranch in eastern Arizona. Tracy owns a patch of desert in western Texas, so he was naturally intrigued by Justice O'Connor's descriptions of the ranching life on what has to be equally arid ground.

Tracy also tends to be more than a tad skeptical about the ability of the federal government to manage anything, so he pretty much agreed with Justice O'Connor's conclusions regarding the role of the Bureau of Land Management in pushing ranchers out of the business. My skepticism usually falls in a slightly different direction -- I don't trust memoirs (people self-edit) and I don't trust family histories (they miss the bigger context). We did a little back and forth discussion about the book, I recommended a book or two that provides more of a big picture view of ranching (Starr's Let the Cowboy Ride, for example) and I promised him I'd read Lazy B for myself when I had the chance. And I did.

First, the good stuff: Justice O'Connor's descriptions of her childhood, the ranch, and the ranch hands are fascinating. She contradicts herself a lot -- for example, at one point she says all the hired help were bachelors, and then a few pages later she describes a rather colorful character, a long-time employee, who married, divorced, and remarried -- but that's a minor quibble in a memoir. This isn't a book written to provide a definitive history of anything; it's a memoir in which Justice O'Connor gets to remember fondly her pet bobcat. Her brother, Alan, is credited on the cover, too, so I have a hunch the book was "written" by the two of them sitting down and swapping stories in front of a tape recorder.

If a person is interested in Justice O'Connor as a person this book might provide some insight into things that may have shaped her character, but it's not going to tell you much about her life as an adult. She was the oldest child, and there was a long gap between her birth and those of her two younger siblings. When she reached school age, her parents sent her to El Paso to live with her grandmother during the school year. The Lazy B became a place where she lived for only a few months out of the year, and that she then left behind fairly quickly after going off to college. She entered Stanford at 16, combined her last year of undergraduate studies with her first year of law school, and was married about the same time she passed the bar exam.

In any case, although the book would have benefited from tighter editing, it is an interesting and easy read, and you do learn a lot along the way about ranching in Arizona in the first half of the 20th century. That's the good part.

Now for the slice and dice -- and why I referred to life's little mysteries. One of those little mysteries to me has always been why the people who benefit the most from government largesse/subsidies/handouts/freebies/whatever are the same people who always bitch the loudest about government interference. This is particularly true in the western and southern states. According to Justice O'Connor, the Day family ranch, the Lazy B established by her grandfather in the 1880s, the land they considered theirs in terms of where they ran their cattle, consisted of over 160,000 acres. How much of it did they actually own? About 1/2 of a percent, or approximately 8,000 acres. The rest was owned by the state of Arizona, the state of New Mexico, and, of course, the largest land owner of all: the federal government in the form of either the BLM or the U.S. Forest Service. For the first fifty years the Days used that federal government land they paid nothing to do so -- no grazing fees, no leases, not a dime in property taxes or other land ownership costs. They had labor costs (the cowboys), they had livestock costs, but the majority of the land they used as pasturage was essentially gratis -- all they had to do was push the cows on to it and persuade the neighbors not to run their stock there, too.

Which in turn explains a great deal as to how the Days were able to make any money at all ranching in desert country. Based on the numbers Justice O'Connor provides, it took 80 acres of land to support one animal unit. 80 acres! No wonder every dry year found cows dropping dead from starvation. Carrying capacity, in contrast, in the Nebraska sandhills (also a dry, fragile environment, but obviously not nearly as dry and fragile as Arizona desert) ranges from 15 acres to 30 acres per animal unit, with the eastern Sandhills having a higher carrying capacity than the western regions. Having done a fair amount of research into ranching while working on a history of the Niobrara drainage, I know that 30 acres is considered the upper limit for being able to run cattle and still make money. After that the critters are walking too much to find food to put on the weight they need to be marketable as anything other than canners and cutters. In short, if the land hadn't been available free no one in their right mind would have tried ranching on it.

Apologists for ranching always claim that the ranchers didn't own the land because land laws prevented them from buying it. Hence, they were forced against their will into exploiting the public domain. Unfortunately for them, that explanation is totally bogus. The truth is that as long as public domain land was available at effectively no cost, there was little incentive for ranchers to spend money acquiring anything other than the key to western livestock success: the acreage that controlled access to water. So a rancher (and selected hired hands) would homestead a few hundred acres and end up controlling many thousands. The fact that the Days themselves wound up owning 8000+ acres fee simple stands as proof it was possible to buy the land; the Day family chose not to.

In any event, the entirely foreseeable consequence of being allowed to graze with minimal regulation on the public domain was that the public domain was thoroughly abused. Historian Donald Worster noted in 1992 that "after more than a hundred years of ranching, more than half the lands devoted to it are still in poor to very poor condition." As early as 1929 historians such as Ernest Osgood began documenting western history and describing how ranchers routinely overstocked the range as the cattle industry overall followed a boom and bust mentality well into the 20th century. The cattlemen eventually learned to make hay and practice a more intensive style of ranching on land in private ownership, but continued to abuse the public domain until forced by law, e.g., the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act, to change their ways.

The Days were quite obviously no different than their peers when it came to using and abusing the land. Like every apologist for ranching I've ever read, Justice O'Connor trots out the line about ranchers being good stewards. Pshaw. It's utter humbug*, and O'Connor herself provides the proof: the only examples she provides of good stewardship, if they can be called that, are of her family drilling wells on the land they owned. When asked to invest money in a spreader dam project designed by the BLM to reverse generations of erosion and ecological damage, a 15% match to the government's paying 85% of the cost, O'Connor's father's response was to say no. At that point in the 1950s, the Days had been ranching on the Lazy B, sucking off the government teat for close to 80 years, but Mr. Day was unwilling to give anything back. Justice O'Connor's mother said she'd put up the money herself, and the project went forward.

It proved highly successful and became a demonstration project used to persuade other ranchers to undertake similar efforts. Once that happened, of course, Mr. Day promoted it as though it had been his own idea.

In the final chapters of the book, Justice O'Connor lays many of the woes of the ranching industry in the dry states at the feet of the overbearing and meddlesome federal government, e.g., unreasonable regulations promulgated by the Bureau of Land Management. She tells a sad story about a neighbor who willfully and repeatedly breaks the rules by running more cattle on federal land than his BLM lease allows, as well as refusing to practice rest and rotation as instructed, and then she is horrified and sympathetic when he's made to pay the consequences for doing so. I find it distinctly odd that a former Supreme Court justice thinks it's fine for laws to broken when they're a personal inconvenience, but perhaps Justice O'Connor is more of moral relativist and judicial activist than I thought.

[*Worster notes that "every study of the Western range made since the 1930s has tended to the same conclusion: the combination of scientifically trained, disinterested supervisors and public land tenure provides better protection for the range environment, on the whole, than simple private ownership."]

Sources:
Benjamin Hibbard, A History of the Public Land Policies, NY: Peter Smith, 1939 [1924]; Ernest Staples Osgood, The Day of the Cattleman, University of Minnesota Press, 1929; E. Louise Peffer, The Closing of the Public Domain: Disposal and Reservation Policies 1900-50, Stanford University Press, 1951; Richard White, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991; Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West, Oxford University Press, 1992.