Weapons Of Choice: Lies, Distortions And ‘Counterscience’

In one of the fax alerts that have become his favorite organizing device, Charles Cushman urged his followers to dissolve the National Biological Service.

Cushman, one of the founders of the Wise Use Movement, warned that Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt is using the NBS “to send special federal agents out on to your private property, mining claim or grazing permit to look for endangered species. If species are found, Babbitt will use the ESA (Endangered Species Act) to shut you down and put land-use controls on your private property!”

Cushman is only one of a growing number of organizers, politicians, and industry operatives in the wise use movement who alarm the American public with anti-environmental propaganda. This propaganda sometimes takes the form of contrary science - “counterscience” - that has not received peer sanction or consensus.

Here’s an example. When the U.S. Geological Survey published reports that would require mining companies to pay for cleaning up mining wastes the survey claimed were polluting the Spokane-Coeur d’Alene watershed, the mining companies hired a scientist who refuted the Survey findings.

The mining industry scientist’s findings were never peer-reviewed, however. That’s “counterscience,” and it’s a tactic the wise use movement has embraced. If it had been reputable scholarship, it would have gained the consensus of peers in the field - as the survey reports did.

In his 1994 book, “The War Against the Greens,” author David Helvarg quotes Ron Arnold, a former public relations consultant to industry, as saying he wants to “systematically destroy the environmental movement,” which he believes to be “polluted with a hatred of humans.”

Support for the wise use movement comes from farming, ranching, mineral, timber, and off-road vehicle trade associations that hire organizers like Arnold and Cushman to go into rural communities and stir up just enough distrust to create the facade of a grass-roots base. At its fringes, the wise use movement forges common cause with a variety of anti-democratic players - conspiracy theorists and anti-abortion activists, tax protestors and libertarians, militias and white supremacists.

Those of us raised in Washington state can recall one-time Gov. Dixy Lee Ray’s fierce advocacy of nuclear energy. Ray could fly in the face of any scientific evidence that contradicted her energy and natural-resource policies. As a darling for the wise use movement, she lent her credentials to many anti-environmental ideologies before her death in 1994.

Today, other would-be scholars, like Rush Limbaugh, use Ray’s findings as ammunition for their own counterscientific claims.

In interviews, Ray maintained that environmentalists are the cause of disease outbreaks, that wetlands protection is an error perpetrated by environmentalists - an error that privileges pest and predator species above human beings.

Wetlands protect mosquitoes, she argued, and scientists support wetlands protection. Mosquito populations thus are booming, and enormous increases in insect-borne diseases like encephalitis are the upshot. Moreover, Ray claimed, “the central valleys of California are areas of endemic malaria.”

Ray’s alarmist charge that environmentalists are to blame for disease epidemics is both contrived and grotesquely dishonest. This fraud, like the manufactured information of local mining companies, was perpetrated upon a scientifically gullible American public by a public servant-become-hired gun.

Nor did the hysteria end there. The wetlands-malaria hoax would continue to find credulous readers in right-wing periodicals. Some authors have claimed that Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (1962) was evidence of a plot to discredit pesticides and their producers, to elevate disease levels in Third-World nations, and thereby to hasten death rates as part of a scheme to roll back planetary human populations. Carson was and still is vilified by the chemical industry and the wise use movement.

In Washington state, wise use movement forces are pressuring managers of wildlife refuges. A wise use movement-inspired bill before Congress, HR 1675, could have dire effects on refuge management budgets.

At the Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge near Cheney, set aside originally to furnish waterfowl habitat, manager Nancy Curry discontinued the livestock grazing program after decades of use by area ranchers. She has suffered budget cuts already. On the larger Little Pend Oreille National Wildlife Refuge to the north, manager Lisa Langelier is guiding the transition from state to federal management. Both women are asking for public input as they face HR 1675, which could gut their management budgets.

Environmental activists elsewhere have come under fire. Ellen Gray, an Audubon Society organizer, had just finished testifying at a Snohomish County Council hearing in Everett, Wash., on behalf of wetlands protection ordinances when a man with a hangman’s noose confronted her and said, “This is for you.” He also passed out cards with pictures of nooses that said “Treason = Death” on one side, and “Eco fascists go home” on the other. The man was an elected representative of a wise use group known as the Snohomish County Property Rights Alliance.

Oversimplification, misrepresentation, dirty tricks and lies may work for a time. An American public jaded by big money and big government may continue to equate conservation efforts of all sorts with the large environmental groups. But the most well-endowed special-interest groups of all are the extractive industries that have kept the wise use movement coffers full. They maintain the facade of a grass-roots base while slyly buying counterscientific “research” to keep them off the hook.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Paul Lindholdt Contributing writer