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
History Co founder Purpose
Recent Minutes
Wise Use
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. |