The Northern Counties Land Use Coordinating Board is a formerly quasi governmental body that now persists and is being utilized as a forum for county officials to gather and make plans for use of natural resources in Northern Minnesota.  The organization has it's roots in the "wise use" movement. 


The meetings are open to the public, are attended by DNR and County Officials.  

Anyone interested should contact dpskrief@mac.com



NCLUCB Land USE Decison Making

The Northern Counties Land Use Coordinating Board

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Wise Use



"Wise Use" in the White House
Yesterday's fringe, today's Cabinet official.
by David Helvarg

Fifteen years ago the anti-environmental "wise use" movement made a splash with its talk of timber wars, threats to shoot "jackbooted" park rangers and resource managers, and attacks on grassroots environmental activists. You don't hear much about wise use anymore, but that's not because the wise-users went away.

Far from it. Just as neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle long pushed their hawkish agenda from the sidelines before becoming key officials, veterans of once-discredited militant anti-environmental groups are now setting natural-resource policy for the Bush administration.

Wise use arose in 1988, combining property-rights activists with elements of the timber, mining, oil, and off-road-vehicle industries and a smattering of Reagan administration leftovers. Its original focus was the perceived threat that George H. W. Bush would follow through on his pledge to be "the environmental president."

Wise-use activists went on to confront the Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, and local environmental activists, sometimes with vigilante-style tactics ranging from telephone death-threats to arson and shootings. In Washington, Idaho, Montana, and New Mexico, a number of wise-users even united with the militia movement.

That alliance proved their undoing: Following the deadly 1995 attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by militia associates Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, wise use lost much of its industry backing and went into decline.

Today wise-use veterans and their lawyers and lobbyists are back, working for the son of the president they once detested. Among prominent appointees in the administration with wise-use backgrounds is Interior Department secretary Gale Norton, who began her career at the Mountain States Legal Foundation back when it billed itself as the "litigation arm of Wise Use."

Mountain States was the brainchild of Reagan's notoriously anti-environmental Interior secretary James Watt. (After being forced to resign, Watt told a group of ranchers that "if the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used.")

Department of Agriculture secretary Ann Veneman also has roots in the movement. As a lawyer in California, Veneman represented wise-use activists opposed to a federal conservation plan for the Sierra Nevada. Her chief of staff, Dale Moore, is a former lobbyist for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, a stalwart member of the wise-use coalition, while her undersecretary for natural resources, Mark Rey, was a timber lobbyist and featured speaker at wise-use events through the late 1990s.

Back in its heyday, the movement put forth a 25-point "Wise Use Agenda," which at the time was dismissed as right-wing fantasy. It included a call to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to log Alaska's Tongass National Forest, to gut the Endangered Species Act, and to open up public lands to motorized recreation. These and other wise-use bullet points now frame Bush administration environmental policy.

Drilling for oil in the Arctic Refuge has been a constant preoccupation, and the Tongass was opened to wide-scale logging last December. The Endangered Species Act has been continuously undercut. Secretary Norton reversed a plan to ban snowmobiles from several national parks, instead increasing their numbers. She also directed the Bureau of Land Management to find ways to expedite coal, oil, and gas development on 250 million acres of public lands.

The Wise Use Agenda also called for privatizing the national parks and handing them over to people "with expertise in people-moving such as Walt Disney." Norton has promoted "outsourcing" thousands of National Park Service jobs to the private sector to provide "better delivery of services to the public."

"I wish we could take credit for that, but we can't," demurs wise use's founding ideologue Ron Arnold of the Center for Defense of Free Enterprise. "Dick Cheney sits on my board of directors, but we're not pen pals. Sometimes you just put something out there long enough and it gets picked up, despite what you do."

One victory wise use will take credit for goes back to the early days of the Bush administration, when it appeared the White House might appoint John Turner as Interior secretary. Turner had been head of the Fish and Wildlife Service under the elder Bush, and was a fishing buddy of Dick Cheney's.

But he was also president of the Conservation Fund, a "non-membership, non-advocacy" land preservation organization, so wise use considered him a "land-grabber" aligned with "the Rockefeller Family Foundation and their financing of the environmental left," according to Chuck Cushman of the American Land Rights Association. Cushman (known to his admirers as "Rent-a-Riot") organized an anti-Turner campaign; the angry protest spooked the Bush White House, and Turner's name was replaced by Gale Norton's.

"They caved, they blinked," says wise-use founder Arnold. "Cheney's probably angry at us, but who cares? Norton is a friend."

This spring, wise use again stepped in to block the Senate from ratifying the Law of the Seas treaty, an innocuous framework agreement for ocean management and marine protection. With broad support from the Navy, oil companies, the White House, and environmentalists, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had voted 19—0 to take the agreement to a final vote.

Then wise-use veteran Henry Lamb, former head of the so-called Environmental Conservation Organization (a group founded by developers opposed to wetlands protection) got involved. His new group, Sovereignty International, claimed that the Law of the Seas treaty was a plot to undermine the United States by establishing a "blue hull" United Nations navy (from which presumably to launch the black helicopters of militia-movement fantasy).

Lamb's group got Senator James Inhofe (R) of Oklahoma to call a hearing regarding "national security concerns" over the treaty, leading Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to put off the vote until after the presidential elections so as not to alienate Bush's supporters on the far right.

While traditional wise-use paranoia still proves effective, its rhetoric is softening. Where once leaders like Arnold railed against environmentalists ("We're out to kill the f––s. We're simply trying to eliminate them. Our goal is to destroy environmentalism once and for all"), today's wise-use veterans like Interior secretary Norton take a softer tone.

"We have in many ways reached the limits of what we can do through government regulation," she blandly asserts. Now that they occupy the seat of power, the wise-use movement no longer needs its blowhards and bullies as it quietly and effectively implements its radical agenda.


David Helvarg is author of The War Against the Greens (revised and updated 2004, Johnson Books) and president of the Blue Frontier Campaign.

Illustration by Victor Juhasz.




Bill would turn tide on wetland protection
John Myers
Duluth News Tribune - 10/18/2007
Exactly 35 years after President Nixon signed the Clean Water Act into law, a battle is raging over exactly what water the federal law should protect.

For more than three decades the federal government enforced the act not just on big federal waterways such as the Great Lakes and Mississippi River, but ponds and tributaries, too.

The law is credited with cleaning up the nation’s nastiest waters, including the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, which once was so polluted it erupted in flames, and the Northland’s St. Louis River, which was a cesspool of industrial and municipal waste.

Not only did the federal government begin regulating waterways, but it began to pay to clean them up. And the act kept some small waters and wetland areas from being bulldozed under.

Some of those protections ended, however, after two U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The court ruled in split decisions in 2001 and 2006 that federal regulators must prove the connection to larger, “n avigable’’ waters before the government can intervene to protect small waters.

The Supreme Court decisions especially affected shallow wetlands, those well upstream of big lakes and rivers, which now have little or no federal protection against filling and draining. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says the decisions left 20 percent of the nation’s remaining wetlands vulnerable.

Private property groups, mining companies and developers lauded the court’s actions, saying it frees landowners and local governments to do as they see fit with small waterways.

But legislation proposed by U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., and U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., would turn back the court decisions. The Clean Water Restoration Act, which has 170 Republican and Democratic co-sponsors in the House, restores what Oberstar says was the original intent of the 1972 act, namely to protect almost all waters in the U.S., not just navigable waters.

Oberstar called the court’s rulings a “shameless’’ effort to legislate from the bench as well as a misinterpretation of the law Nixon signed and which Oberstar helped draft as a Congressional aide.

Many scientists and conservation groups say that protecting small waters, even those seemingly disconnected from larger water bodies, is critical to protect against erosion, filter pollution, buffer against floods and provide critical fish and wildlife habitat.

“The science on this is clear. But in recent years, we’ve seen a disconnect between the science and the law on this issue,’’ Judy Meyer, a University of Georgia research scientist, said in July during House hearings on the Oberstar bill. “These really are not isolated waters but are indeed hydrologically, chemically and biologically connected and are integral to downstream waters.’’

CONSERVATION OR

RIGHTS infringement?

The bill is opposed by the nation’s largest farm industry groups, along with developers, pap er industry and mining organizations, anti-tax groups and conservative think tanks that say the legislation would expand the reach of federal regulation.

Some northern Minnesota property rights advocates and county commissioners say the Supreme Court got it right, and that efforts to restore protections to small waters will erode the rights of private property owners.

The latest opposition comes from the little-known Northern Counties Land Use Coordinating Board and the Twin Cities-based American Property Coalition that is run by Linda Runbeck, a former Minnesota state senator and the campaign manager for Rod Grams in his unsuccessful 2006 bid to unseat Oberstar.

Runbeck and Don Parmeter, director of the coalition, spoke against the bill last month at two public hearings held by the Northern Counties Land Use Coordinating Board in Thief River Falls, Minn., and International Falls.

Parmeter calls the bill “arguably the biggest federal power grab in th e nation’s history.”

“The bill is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Oberstar is using the popular political appeal of clean water and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972 to expand federal jurisdiction over land and water. The bill replaces the term ‘navigable’ with ‘waters of the U.S.’ which includes wetlands, sloughs, meadows, prairie potholes, playa lakes, ponds, mudflats, sandflats and intermittent streams,’’ Parmeter said. “This is not a restoration bill. It is an expansion bill that infringes on the constitutional rights of citizens and state and local governments.’’

The debate has caused some strange rifts. Marcus Hall, director of public works for St. Louis County, testified in Washington in July that the Oberstar bill is needed to clear up confusion among regulators and allow stalled projects to move forward. But St. Louis County Commissioner Dennis Fink strongly opposes the bill.

More than 300 organizations — representing hunters, family f armers, conservation groups, natural resource agencies, environmentalists and others — are on record in support of the Oberstar bill.

“Without the act’s protection for all important wetlands, waterfowl in the most vital wetlands in North America are imperiled,’’ Alan Wentz, Ducks Unlimited conservation and communications manager, said in a statement Tuesday. “Ducks are at risk, and the future of duck hunting is at risk.’’

Oberstar, chairman of House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said he expects to move the bill from committee to the House floor in coming weeks. Feingold said he expects to move his bill later this year.

JOHN MYERS can be reached at (218) 723-5344 or (800) 456-8282, or by e-mail at jmyers@

duluthnews.com.