Property Battle The People Behind Wise Use Movement Sound Like Militias

The bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City has drawn attention to links between militant right-wing activism and the anti-environmental movement known as Wise Use.

Conventional wisdom sees the Wise Use Movement as a cluster of industry front groups, and that is how it began. In the 1980s, corporations that exploit natural resources hired organizers to go into rural communities and stir up distrust. Off-road vehicle dealers and manufacturers, for instance, funded the Idaho-based Blue Ribbon Coalition - a Wise Use group that hopes to open wilderness and park lands to snowmobile and motorcycle riders. That same industry hires lobbyists to badger politicians into voting down environmental laws.

Wise Use industry groups are especially active in Washington state, which now is facing the most stringent anti-environmental property-rights measure in the nation. Initiative 164 will become law on July 23 unless organizers of Referendum 48 can gather the 90,000 signatures needed to put the issue to a vote in November.

Initiative 164 is “the most extreme takings measure to be passed anywhere in the country,” says Tarso Ramos of the Western States Center in Portland, where the Montana AFL-CIO, alarmed by Wise Use anti-labor activities, has funded the Wise Use Exposure project. I-164 succeeded largely on financial support from Realtors and developers, Ramos says, as well as from timber companies such as Boise Cascade, Simpson Timber and Plum Creek.

Corporations, which will gain most from gutting regulations, not only fund the Wise Use Movement but spread misinformation, fertilizing the fears and prejudices of people who earn livings extracting natural resources.

Wise Use interests unite in the goal of repealing or drastically modifying all environmental regulations. But a militant faction intimately allied to national hate groups has a broader and more pernicious agenda.

At a public meeting last fall, a Wise Use activist in Snohomish County placed a hangman’s noose on a chair next to an Audubon Society volunteer, telling her, “This is a message for you.” Dan Junas, a reporter for Covert Action Quarterly, which investigates extremist groups, says the activist also distributed cards that pictured a noose and said, “Treason=Death” on one side, and “Eco fascists go home” on the other.

A Kettle Falls man opened a February meeting in Colville by spreading unrest about the New World Order and denouncing “commie Nazis” who he claimed have infiltrated the federal government and are set to take over the United States - “a Christian nation.” A second speaker asserted that journalists who now discuss counties as “regions” are taking a subtle step toward abolishing traditional borders. To prove his point, he pinned up an ecosystem map entitled “Nature Has No Borders,” from a scientific conference sponsored by the University of Washington.

The National Federal Lands Conference of Bountiful, Utah, has been peddling unconstitutional county-rule ordinances and endorsing the formation of militias to resist federal laws on federal lands. More than 100 jurisdictions have adopted such laws. The group’s advisers include Ron Arnold, the Bellevue, Wash., co-founder of the Wise Use Movement. The NFLC’s list of enemies includes the EPA, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, as well as the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

But the most influential Wise Use figure may be Dick Carver, a Nye County, Nev., commissioner who is famous for confrontations with federal agents as well as for his red-faced, podium-pounding rap. At a March 30 meeting hosted by the Snohomish County Property Rights Alliance and the Everett Freedom Forum, Carver brought the crowd to its feet as he declared himself a leader in the “Third American Revolution.”

Last fall, Carver started a bulldozer and opened a federal road closed to motor vehicles in his Nevada county. As much coverage as he got for that act, however, reporters have not commented on the startling similarity between Carver’s bizarre legal theories and those of the Posse Comitatus, a racist and anti-Semitic group that preached that county governments are supreme and that the United States is controlled by a conspiracy called ZOG, for Zionist Occupation Government.

The shock waves of the Oklahoma City bombing, however, may at last alert complacent voters and law enforcement officials that they need to investigate the tight connections between the Wise Use Movement and the violent, militant factions of the American right.

MEMO: Two sidebars appeared with the story: 1. In Olympia this year, the Washington Legislature passed Initiative I64, a proposal that rquires taxpayers to compensate property owners if government regulations curtail the use of their property to achieve a public benefit. The Washington Environmental Council now is collectiong signatures for Referendum 48 to prevent the initiative from taking effect July 24 and to force a public vote on it in November. Below are two readers’ opinions.

2. We want your input Doug Floyd wants to know your reaction to these columns. You can submit comments to him at The Spokesman-Review, W. 999 Riverside Ave., Spokane 99201 or leave a voice mail message (from a TouchTone phone) at 459-5577, extension 5466. You also can send e-mail to celh27b@prodigy.com.

For the opposing view see the story under the headline: Property Battle This initiative gives us local control of our property rights

(Paul Lindholdt is a free-lance writer and a member of the Inland Empire Public Lands Council.)