http://www.insightmag.com/archive/200003244.shtml
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>A Battle Brewing in the Wild West
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Sean Paige
paige@insightmag.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Elko, Nev., may be but a blip on the radar screen of most Americans, but to many Westerners the town has become a symbol of resistance to growing government intrusion.
Small and rustic Elko, Nev., may be little more than a dot in a road atlas to most Americans. But look more closely, walk down its streets and talk to its rough and rebellious citizens, and this dot becomes a line — a line in the sand, by some accounts, against the encroaching authority of the U.S. government.
For many Westerners, fed up with what they see as the federal government’s high-handed ways, Elko is becoming both a mecca and a battle cry, earning growing fame as a stubborn little town that is standing up to Uncle Sam. Who wins that test of wills is being closely watched in those parts of the West where the Sagebrush Rebellion seems forever at flash point and wherever else in the nation people are bucking under Washington’s big saddle.
Escalating tensions here — highlighted by last fall’s resignation of Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest Supervisor Gloria Flora, citing the potential for violence against herself and Forest Service personnel by alleged Nevada “lunatics” — also have caught the worried attention of Washington. The situation is concerning to the Clinton White House, which watches for signs that Elko’s recalcitrance might unite opposition to the 11th-hour environmental agenda it is ramming through by executive order.
The fitting symbol of the Elko insurrectionists is the shovel — a rudimentary but reliable instrument for removing obstacles and obstructions. Since the new year more than 12,000 shovels have been sent to this town, where they quickly covered the grounds of the Elko County Courthouse. First by the hundreds, then by the thousands, shovels began arriving from Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Arizona, then from as far away as Minnesota, Michigan, Georgia, Arkansas — even New York. Each was a pointed expression of solidarity with the town and the rugged individualism of its people.
In preparation for a Jan. 29 protest rally and parade, attended by an estimated 4,000 people, a 28-foot shovel was erected on the courthouse lawn — an in-your-face sign of defiance that Elko County commissioners, a crusty, cantankerous lot, have refused to remove.
A letter from Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn was read at that largest single gathering in Elko history, voicing support “for those of you gathered here today to peacefully protest the persistent attempts of the federal government to close off access to more and more of the public lands.” The letter expressed opposition to President Clinton’s proposal to set aside as much as 60 million acres of national forest for so-called roadless areas — “especially in light of the fact that more than 85 percent of Nevada’s land already is controlled by the federal government,” the governor wrote.
But to understand the shovel’s significance and the controversy centered in Elko it is necessary to retell the tale of South Canyon Road, which runs along a creek, close by the Idaho line — a road washed out by a storm in the spring of 1995. That flood, jokingly called biblical by some, in fact unleashed a torrent of anger and a standoff of opposing forces almost worthy of the Old Testament.
The road led to several campsites popular with nature-loving locals and provided access to trailheads into the Jarbidge Wilderness, through which it once ran. Facing an emergency after the flooding, in which other road repairs took precedence, the county agreed to let the Forest Service take the lead in fixing South Canyon Road, part of an informal sharing of responsibilities that generally had worked well in the past.
When the Forest Service failed after three years to make good on pledges to clear the road, eventually citing potential threats to trout inhabiting a parallel stream, Elko County moved in 1998 to reopen it. The county claims the road as its own, noting that its creation and use by locals predates the establishment of the national forest. After a day-and-a-half of repair work, however, the county was ordered by the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection to cease and desist for lack of proper permits.
County officials say their backhoe merely had cleared away boulders blocking the stream path, setting the river and road back in their proper places and, in February, a state judge ruled that the county was within its legal rights to reopen the road. But bureaucrats were aswarm and the action drew a threatened federal lawsuit, claiming the county’s work violated the Clean Water Act, potentially meaning millions of dollars in accumulating fines. And U.S. Fish and Wildlife, or USFW — responding, say locals, to petitions from Trout Unlimited (which a USFW spokesman denies) — declared an “emergency listing” of a local species known as the bull trout, though the Nevada Department of Environmental Quality opposes any such federal listing of that fish.
Meanwhile, the Forest Service spent a month-and-a-half in the fall of 1998 undoing what the county had done on the road, then demanded that the county reimburse the feds $460,000 for their trouble. And last spring, just for good measure, the bull trout officially was declared threatened by the USFW, again despite a March 1999 report from the Nevada Department of Wildlife, stating that there was no apparent threat to the fish.
Insight has learned that a nonprofit group in Reno has a Freedom of Information Act request pending before USFW, and depending on the results, the group may be weighing a legal challenge to the bull-trout listing.
This, at long last, is where the shovels come in. Frustrated local folk, tired of the delays and runarounds, resolved last October to take the road’s restoration into their own hands, literally, by finishing the job with hand shovels and horse-drawn drays. “The govern-
ment’s been nipping at our rights for years and years and years. They’re taking just a little piece at a time so that people won’t notice it,” a work-party participant told the local paper. “It’s time for us to start taking those little pieces back.”
The October work party turned impromptu picnic for hundreds of participants, however, when a judge issued a temporary restraining order against three leaders of the event: state Assemblyman John Carpenter, attorney Grant Gerber and businessman O.C. “Chris” Smith. Helen E. Wilson, who has lived in nearby Jarbidge for all her 89 years, said she “almost cried” when the judge’s ruling came down. “You are here today not for just the people of Jarbidge,” she told disappointed road warriors, drowning their sorrows in barbecue under the blazing autumn aspens, “but for all the children and future generations and the freedom that you and I have enjoyed in the past.”
After reading about the event, Montana lumber-mill owner Jim Hurst seized on the idea of sending several hundred shovels to Elko in a show of solidarity with the work party. To Hurst, the fight in Elko is as much about preserving small communities and their uniquely Western way of life as it is about keeping small companies like his afloat. “Everytime I go to a high-school basketball game and see those kids, I worry about the future of this community,” Hurst says from little Eureka, Mont. Though the region has forests aplenty, Hurst has to order timber in from Alberta, Canada, to keep his 150-employee operation going, he tells Insight, all because the U.S. Forest Service, under the Clinton administration, would rather let wood rot on the ground, or burn up in wildfires, than be harvested and sold.
Hurst’s shovels-for-solidarity idea quickly spread through the islands of discontent that cover the American landscape, especially among the communities hardest hit by environmental regulations, and shovels began showing up by the thousands. Thus was born the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade (www.-
jarbidgeshovelbrigade.com), which is pledging to use these thousands of donated shovels on July 4 when another work party, this one undoubtedly larger and more persistent than the last, will return to South Canyon Road and reclaim for the county what locals say is rightfully theirs.
Of course, one washed-out canyon road does not a vendetta make. There were many other clashes leading up to this last straw that locals recount —other disagreements, increasingly bitter, that began to harden hearts and cause locals to dig in their heels. It took the 40 or 50 full-time residents of Jarbidge five years of wrangling and a special act of Congress to get Humboldt-Toiyabe — at 63 million acres the largest national forest in the lower 48 states — to relinquish a mere two of those acres to expand the town cemetery.
Although Elko is relatively prosperous today, riding a regional boom in gold mining, residents here (many refugees from other towns already regulated out of existence) well understand the busts that often follow booms in such industries, raising uncertainty and fear. And they blame misguided government grazing policies for the steep decline in sheep and cattle ranching in the county. (Elko County once ranked second nationally among cow counties; it doesn’t even make the top 100 today.)
Easterners may scoff, but an undeniable factor in the Jarbidge road’s tractor-pull is the unbroken, often unbending character of local folk who jealously guard their freedoms and have a sense of independence, deeply ingrained when the West was wide open and wild.
There are no Starbucks coffeehouses in Elko, no one here wears a Stetson just for show and four-wheel-drive is a necessity, not another yuppie luxury option. Though some accoutrements of modern America can be found, vestiges of the Wild West stubbornly remain. Five legal brothels quietly operate several blocks off Main Street. Two ancient casinos dominate — one that formerly catered to cattle barons, another to the hired hands. Faces are weathered, palms callused, work boots well scuffed. It’s the kind of place where loose bar talk can lead to a well-deserved punch in the nose.
Into this roiling cauldron was added a volatile new element in the summer of 1998: new Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest superintendent Gloria Flora, considered a rising star in the service because of her tenure at the Lewis and Clark National Forest in Montana, where she won plaudits from environmentalists for blocking oil and gas exploration along the Rocky Mountain front.
The chemistry and communication between Flora and Elko County started badly and got worse. She was seen by some county commissioners as remote and agenda-driven; at least one person with whom Insight spoke suggests she is a “nature-worshipper.” And, in light of ensuing events, others have said she was temperamentally miscast for this sensitive position. Many locals claim she is responsible, through inflammatory statements and misrepresentations of fact, for the situation spinning out of control.
The always-fiery Flora, for instance, said she was “shocked and appalled” that the organizers of the citizen road crew would lead what she called “an illegal action against the American people.” Some locals also were incensed when Flora at one point suggested that traveling to Jarbidge might somehow endanger her personal safety, even though work-party organizers consistently had stressed — as the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade does today — that their protests are peaceful and law-abiding. Key members of the resistance say it was Flora who injected the specter of possible violence into the atmosphere.
When it finally came last fall, Flora’s departure from the post was no less tempestuous than had been her short tenure. In the days before her resignation, she tore into Idaho GOP Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage, chairman of the House Resources subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health, charging that the Nov. 13 congressional hearing she planned to hold in Elko would amount to a “public inquisition of federal employees.” Chenoweth-Hage had a conflict of interest in participating, Flora alleged, because her husband, Nye County, Nev., rancher Wayne Hage, has an ongoing lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service about grazing issues.
“It disturbs me that 2 million people in this state watch silently, or worse, in amusement, as a small percent of their number break laws and trounce the rights of others with impunity,” Flora said at the time. “But when a member of the United States Congress joins forces with them, using the power of the office to stage a public inquisition of federal employees followed by a political fund-raiser, I must protest.”
Flora refused to participate in the hearing and resigned shortly thereafter, firing off a tart open letter and press release that further escalated the rhetoric. “Fed-bashing is a sport here and I refuse to sit by quietly and let it happen as many others are doing,” Flora said in her release. “When I speak against the half-truths of the Sagebrush Rebellion, I am labeled a liar and personally vilified in an attempt to silence me. When I express concerns for Forest Service employees’ safety, I am accused of inciting violence.”
Regarding the lack of respect area Forest Service personnel endure, Flora stated: “I could go on and on with examples of those of you who have been castigated in public, shunned in your
communities, refused service in restaurants, kicked out of motels … just because of who you work with. We cannot forget those who have been ha-rassed, called before kangaroo courts or had their very lives threatened.”
“I just can’t fathom that that’s true,” assemblyman and Shovel Brigade leader Carpenter said at the time of the allegations. “If she has documentation that people have been threatened or been discriminated against, then she should come forward with names and times and dates so we can take care of those problems.”
Flora’s allegations were rejected by locals — and she has acknowledged that the Forest Service keeps no documentary record of such occurrences. While a Forest Service investigation found that no prosecutable actions had been taken against government personnel in Elko County, it did report several dozen incidents of inhospitable behavior.
In recognition of the significant risks Flora supposedly took at Humboldt-Toiyabe, environmentalists at the Wilderness Society recently gave her its award for public-land manager of the year. And since going on administrative leave, Flora also has addressed several chapters of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, a group of government personnel who work from the inside to steer federal land-management agencies on an environmentalist course.
In an interview with Insight, Flora says she regrets having called Ne-vadans “lunatics” and expressed empathy for the struggles of people who eke out a living off the land. But she says that cattle ranchers and timber cutters have to adapt to changing times and recognize that their right to work and play on public land has limits.
Meanwhile, the battle that began over a single road today is taking on a larger cause and significance. The Jarbidge Shovel Brigade is riding an upwelling of resistance to Clinton’s October 1999 proposal to declare millions of acres of national forest, much of it in the West, as roadless areas. Many Westerners view the plan as having more to do with controlling people and limiting access to public lands than with roads. And most participants concede that the fight has become about something even more fundamental — about how much control the federal government can exercise over states and localities and whether traditional ways of life in the West, ranching and mining and timber cutting, can survive in an era of runaway environmental regulation.
But as it turns out, locals aren’t the only ones with doubts about the roadless plan. In an internal memo recently published by the Associated Press, several senior Forest Service officials questioned the wisdom of the plan, warning Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck — on whose watch the agency has undergone a radical transformation away from its traditional multiple-use management style — that the policy was “flat wrong” and could lead to trouble.
“It is important for you to understand that people here are walking on edge,” Clearwater National Forest supervisor James Caswell warned Dombeck in the memo. “There WILL be civil disobedience and possibly worse. The local people are that scared, threatened and frustrated.” Caswell, whose forest spans parts of Idaho and Montana, reported that public hearings on the roadless plan have shown overwhelming opposition.
Dombeck acknowledged the dissent in a recent letter to service employees but implored them to stay the course. “Natural-resource management has always been controversial and political,” Dombeck wrote. “It has always been the responsibility of the Forest Service to respond to changing public values and new information.”
But because the policy is being made through one president’s executive orders, end-running Congress, questions remain about whose “values” are being served by the actions. Critics contend that the administration, with time running out and nothing to lose politically, has thrown caution to the wind in pursuit of an 11th-hour environmental agenda catering to green special interests.
Documents recently acquired by Chenoweth-Hage’s Forests and Forest Health subcommittee seem to confirm as much, according to a committee source, showing that the administration used a small cadre of environmental special-interest groups to craft its roadless plan, possibly violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
“The bad news is that [the administration] is falling all over itself to do everything the enviros want before the presidential election,” says one Capitol Hill committee source, “but the good news is that they’re doing it so fast that the Forest Service and administration are making many mistakes as they go along.” Roadless-initiative opponents may be able to capitalize on those mistakes, according to the source, by using the same methods long-perfected by environmentalists — through protest and lawsuits.
Others put their hope in unifying scattered resistance behind groups such as the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade and awakening fellow Americans to the plight of Westerners who, because of the government’s huge presence here, feel most directly the effects of misguided management policies. “It’s one thing to be seen as taking on big-industry interests,” says lumberman Hurst, “but another when people begin to realize that what they’re really doing is killing small towns.”
“Easterners don’t give a damn about ranchers,” adds an Arizona cattleman who’s feeling the pinch of administration policies, “so we have to frame the issue in terms of freedom. Because if the government can arbitrarily take away our livelihoods and our freedoms, what’s to stop it from taking away theirs?”
[/quote]
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John/az
"The middle of the road between the extremes of good and evil, is evil. When freedom is at stake, your silence is not golden, it's yellow..." RKBA!
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>A Battle Brewing in the Wild West
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Sean Paige
paige@insightmag.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Elko, Nev., may be but a blip on the radar screen of most Americans, but to many Westerners the town has become a symbol of resistance to growing government intrusion.
Small and rustic Elko, Nev., may be little more than a dot in a road atlas to most Americans. But look more closely, walk down its streets and talk to its rough and rebellious citizens, and this dot becomes a line — a line in the sand, by some accounts, against the encroaching authority of the U.S. government.
For many Westerners, fed up with what they see as the federal government’s high-handed ways, Elko is becoming both a mecca and a battle cry, earning growing fame as a stubborn little town that is standing up to Uncle Sam. Who wins that test of wills is being closely watched in those parts of the West where the Sagebrush Rebellion seems forever at flash point and wherever else in the nation people are bucking under Washington’s big saddle.
Escalating tensions here — highlighted by last fall’s resignation of Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest Supervisor Gloria Flora, citing the potential for violence against herself and Forest Service personnel by alleged Nevada “lunatics” — also have caught the worried attention of Washington. The situation is concerning to the Clinton White House, which watches for signs that Elko’s recalcitrance might unite opposition to the 11th-hour environmental agenda it is ramming through by executive order.
The fitting symbol of the Elko insurrectionists is the shovel — a rudimentary but reliable instrument for removing obstacles and obstructions. Since the new year more than 12,000 shovels have been sent to this town, where they quickly covered the grounds of the Elko County Courthouse. First by the hundreds, then by the thousands, shovels began arriving from Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Arizona, then from as far away as Minnesota, Michigan, Georgia, Arkansas — even New York. Each was a pointed expression of solidarity with the town and the rugged individualism of its people.
In preparation for a Jan. 29 protest rally and parade, attended by an estimated 4,000 people, a 28-foot shovel was erected on the courthouse lawn — an in-your-face sign of defiance that Elko County commissioners, a crusty, cantankerous lot, have refused to remove.
A letter from Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn was read at that largest single gathering in Elko history, voicing support “for those of you gathered here today to peacefully protest the persistent attempts of the federal government to close off access to more and more of the public lands.” The letter expressed opposition to President Clinton’s proposal to set aside as much as 60 million acres of national forest for so-called roadless areas — “especially in light of the fact that more than 85 percent of Nevada’s land already is controlled by the federal government,” the governor wrote.
But to understand the shovel’s significance and the controversy centered in Elko it is necessary to retell the tale of South Canyon Road, which runs along a creek, close by the Idaho line — a road washed out by a storm in the spring of 1995. That flood, jokingly called biblical by some, in fact unleashed a torrent of anger and a standoff of opposing forces almost worthy of the Old Testament.
The road led to several campsites popular with nature-loving locals and provided access to trailheads into the Jarbidge Wilderness, through which it once ran. Facing an emergency after the flooding, in which other road repairs took precedence, the county agreed to let the Forest Service take the lead in fixing South Canyon Road, part of an informal sharing of responsibilities that generally had worked well in the past.
When the Forest Service failed after three years to make good on pledges to clear the road, eventually citing potential threats to trout inhabiting a parallel stream, Elko County moved in 1998 to reopen it. The county claims the road as its own, noting that its creation and use by locals predates the establishment of the national forest. After a day-and-a-half of repair work, however, the county was ordered by the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection to cease and desist for lack of proper permits.
County officials say their backhoe merely had cleared away boulders blocking the stream path, setting the river and road back in their proper places and, in February, a state judge ruled that the county was within its legal rights to reopen the road. But bureaucrats were aswarm and the action drew a threatened federal lawsuit, claiming the county’s work violated the Clean Water Act, potentially meaning millions of dollars in accumulating fines. And U.S. Fish and Wildlife, or USFW — responding, say locals, to petitions from Trout Unlimited (which a USFW spokesman denies) — declared an “emergency listing” of a local species known as the bull trout, though the Nevada Department of Environmental Quality opposes any such federal listing of that fish.
Meanwhile, the Forest Service spent a month-and-a-half in the fall of 1998 undoing what the county had done on the road, then demanded that the county reimburse the feds $460,000 for their trouble. And last spring, just for good measure, the bull trout officially was declared threatened by the USFW, again despite a March 1999 report from the Nevada Department of Wildlife, stating that there was no apparent threat to the fish.
Insight has learned that a nonprofit group in Reno has a Freedom of Information Act request pending before USFW, and depending on the results, the group may be weighing a legal challenge to the bull-trout listing.
This, at long last, is where the shovels come in. Frustrated local folk, tired of the delays and runarounds, resolved last October to take the road’s restoration into their own hands, literally, by finishing the job with hand shovels and horse-drawn drays. “The govern-
ment’s been nipping at our rights for years and years and years. They’re taking just a little piece at a time so that people won’t notice it,” a work-party participant told the local paper. “It’s time for us to start taking those little pieces back.”
The October work party turned impromptu picnic for hundreds of participants, however, when a judge issued a temporary restraining order against three leaders of the event: state Assemblyman John Carpenter, attorney Grant Gerber and businessman O.C. “Chris” Smith. Helen E. Wilson, who has lived in nearby Jarbidge for all her 89 years, said she “almost cried” when the judge’s ruling came down. “You are here today not for just the people of Jarbidge,” she told disappointed road warriors, drowning their sorrows in barbecue under the blazing autumn aspens, “but for all the children and future generations and the freedom that you and I have enjoyed in the past.”
After reading about the event, Montana lumber-mill owner Jim Hurst seized on the idea of sending several hundred shovels to Elko in a show of solidarity with the work party. To Hurst, the fight in Elko is as much about preserving small communities and their uniquely Western way of life as it is about keeping small companies like his afloat. “Everytime I go to a high-school basketball game and see those kids, I worry about the future of this community,” Hurst says from little Eureka, Mont. Though the region has forests aplenty, Hurst has to order timber in from Alberta, Canada, to keep his 150-employee operation going, he tells Insight, all because the U.S. Forest Service, under the Clinton administration, would rather let wood rot on the ground, or burn up in wildfires, than be harvested and sold.
Hurst’s shovels-for-solidarity idea quickly spread through the islands of discontent that cover the American landscape, especially among the communities hardest hit by environmental regulations, and shovels began showing up by the thousands. Thus was born the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade (www.-
jarbidgeshovelbrigade.com), which is pledging to use these thousands of donated shovels on July 4 when another work party, this one undoubtedly larger and more persistent than the last, will return to South Canyon Road and reclaim for the county what locals say is rightfully theirs.
Of course, one washed-out canyon road does not a vendetta make. There were many other clashes leading up to this last straw that locals recount —other disagreements, increasingly bitter, that began to harden hearts and cause locals to dig in their heels. It took the 40 or 50 full-time residents of Jarbidge five years of wrangling and a special act of Congress to get Humboldt-Toiyabe — at 63 million acres the largest national forest in the lower 48 states — to relinquish a mere two of those acres to expand the town cemetery.
Although Elko is relatively prosperous today, riding a regional boom in gold mining, residents here (many refugees from other towns already regulated out of existence) well understand the busts that often follow booms in such industries, raising uncertainty and fear. And they blame misguided government grazing policies for the steep decline in sheep and cattle ranching in the county. (Elko County once ranked second nationally among cow counties; it doesn’t even make the top 100 today.)
Easterners may scoff, but an undeniable factor in the Jarbidge road’s tractor-pull is the unbroken, often unbending character of local folk who jealously guard their freedoms and have a sense of independence, deeply ingrained when the West was wide open and wild.
There are no Starbucks coffeehouses in Elko, no one here wears a Stetson just for show and four-wheel-drive is a necessity, not another yuppie luxury option. Though some accoutrements of modern America can be found, vestiges of the Wild West stubbornly remain. Five legal brothels quietly operate several blocks off Main Street. Two ancient casinos dominate — one that formerly catered to cattle barons, another to the hired hands. Faces are weathered, palms callused, work boots well scuffed. It’s the kind of place where loose bar talk can lead to a well-deserved punch in the nose.
Into this roiling cauldron was added a volatile new element in the summer of 1998: new Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest superintendent Gloria Flora, considered a rising star in the service because of her tenure at the Lewis and Clark National Forest in Montana, where she won plaudits from environmentalists for blocking oil and gas exploration along the Rocky Mountain front.
The chemistry and communication between Flora and Elko County started badly and got worse. She was seen by some county commissioners as remote and agenda-driven; at least one person with whom Insight spoke suggests she is a “nature-worshipper.” And, in light of ensuing events, others have said she was temperamentally miscast for this sensitive position. Many locals claim she is responsible, through inflammatory statements and misrepresentations of fact, for the situation spinning out of control.
The always-fiery Flora, for instance, said she was “shocked and appalled” that the organizers of the citizen road crew would lead what she called “an illegal action against the American people.” Some locals also were incensed when Flora at one point suggested that traveling to Jarbidge might somehow endanger her personal safety, even though work-party organizers consistently had stressed — as the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade does today — that their protests are peaceful and law-abiding. Key members of the resistance say it was Flora who injected the specter of possible violence into the atmosphere.
When it finally came last fall, Flora’s departure from the post was no less tempestuous than had been her short tenure. In the days before her resignation, she tore into Idaho GOP Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage, chairman of the House Resources subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health, charging that the Nov. 13 congressional hearing she planned to hold in Elko would amount to a “public inquisition of federal employees.” Chenoweth-Hage had a conflict of interest in participating, Flora alleged, because her husband, Nye County, Nev., rancher Wayne Hage, has an ongoing lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service about grazing issues.
“It disturbs me that 2 million people in this state watch silently, or worse, in amusement, as a small percent of their number break laws and trounce the rights of others with impunity,” Flora said at the time. “But when a member of the United States Congress joins forces with them, using the power of the office to stage a public inquisition of federal employees followed by a political fund-raiser, I must protest.”
Flora refused to participate in the hearing and resigned shortly thereafter, firing off a tart open letter and press release that further escalated the rhetoric. “Fed-bashing is a sport here and I refuse to sit by quietly and let it happen as many others are doing,” Flora said in her release. “When I speak against the half-truths of the Sagebrush Rebellion, I am labeled a liar and personally vilified in an attempt to silence me. When I express concerns for Forest Service employees’ safety, I am accused of inciting violence.”
Regarding the lack of respect area Forest Service personnel endure, Flora stated: “I could go on and on with examples of those of you who have been castigated in public, shunned in your
communities, refused service in restaurants, kicked out of motels … just because of who you work with. We cannot forget those who have been ha-rassed, called before kangaroo courts or had their very lives threatened.”
“I just can’t fathom that that’s true,” assemblyman and Shovel Brigade leader Carpenter said at the time of the allegations. “If she has documentation that people have been threatened or been discriminated against, then she should come forward with names and times and dates so we can take care of those problems.”
Flora’s allegations were rejected by locals — and she has acknowledged that the Forest Service keeps no documentary record of such occurrences. While a Forest Service investigation found that no prosecutable actions had been taken against government personnel in Elko County, it did report several dozen incidents of inhospitable behavior.
In recognition of the significant risks Flora supposedly took at Humboldt-Toiyabe, environmentalists at the Wilderness Society recently gave her its award for public-land manager of the year. And since going on administrative leave, Flora also has addressed several chapters of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, a group of government personnel who work from the inside to steer federal land-management agencies on an environmentalist course.
In an interview with Insight, Flora says she regrets having called Ne-vadans “lunatics” and expressed empathy for the struggles of people who eke out a living off the land. But she says that cattle ranchers and timber cutters have to adapt to changing times and recognize that their right to work and play on public land has limits.
Meanwhile, the battle that began over a single road today is taking on a larger cause and significance. The Jarbidge Shovel Brigade is riding an upwelling of resistance to Clinton’s October 1999 proposal to declare millions of acres of national forest, much of it in the West, as roadless areas. Many Westerners view the plan as having more to do with controlling people and limiting access to public lands than with roads. And most participants concede that the fight has become about something even more fundamental — about how much control the federal government can exercise over states and localities and whether traditional ways of life in the West, ranching and mining and timber cutting, can survive in an era of runaway environmental regulation.
But as it turns out, locals aren’t the only ones with doubts about the roadless plan. In an internal memo recently published by the Associated Press, several senior Forest Service officials questioned the wisdom of the plan, warning Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck — on whose watch the agency has undergone a radical transformation away from its traditional multiple-use management style — that the policy was “flat wrong” and could lead to trouble.
“It is important for you to understand that people here are walking on edge,” Clearwater National Forest supervisor James Caswell warned Dombeck in the memo. “There WILL be civil disobedience and possibly worse. The local people are that scared, threatened and frustrated.” Caswell, whose forest spans parts of Idaho and Montana, reported that public hearings on the roadless plan have shown overwhelming opposition.
Dombeck acknowledged the dissent in a recent letter to service employees but implored them to stay the course. “Natural-resource management has always been controversial and political,” Dombeck wrote. “It has always been the responsibility of the Forest Service to respond to changing public values and new information.”
But because the policy is being made through one president’s executive orders, end-running Congress, questions remain about whose “values” are being served by the actions. Critics contend that the administration, with time running out and nothing to lose politically, has thrown caution to the wind in pursuit of an 11th-hour environmental agenda catering to green special interests.
Documents recently acquired by Chenoweth-Hage’s Forests and Forest Health subcommittee seem to confirm as much, according to a committee source, showing that the administration used a small cadre of environmental special-interest groups to craft its roadless plan, possibly violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
“The bad news is that [the administration] is falling all over itself to do everything the enviros want before the presidential election,” says one Capitol Hill committee source, “but the good news is that they’re doing it so fast that the Forest Service and administration are making many mistakes as they go along.” Roadless-initiative opponents may be able to capitalize on those mistakes, according to the source, by using the same methods long-perfected by environmentalists — through protest and lawsuits.
Others put their hope in unifying scattered resistance behind groups such as the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade and awakening fellow Americans to the plight of Westerners who, because of the government’s huge presence here, feel most directly the effects of misguided management policies. “It’s one thing to be seen as taking on big-industry interests,” says lumberman Hurst, “but another when people begin to realize that what they’re really doing is killing small towns.”
“Easterners don’t give a damn about ranchers,” adds an Arizona cattleman who’s feeling the pinch of administration policies, “so we have to frame the issue in terms of freedom. Because if the government can arbitrarily take away our livelihoods and our freedoms, what’s to stop it from taking away theirs?”
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John/az
"The middle of the road between the extremes of good and evil, is evil. When freedom is at stake, your silence is not golden, it's yellow..." RKBA!
