Connecting people with wild places and wild creatures
by REP President Martha Marks
Keynote speech at the "Wild Rockies Rendezvous," Missoula, Montana; September 18, 1999
The very first thing that struck me after Mike Bader invited me to speak to you this evening, was what an oddly ironic moment this was going to be. Here, in this spectacular mountain setting, before this assembly of dedicated western conservationists, the night before a series of wonderful wilderness workshops, up stands a Republican woman from an urban corner of a pancake-flat Midwestern state, someone who has never actually lived in the American west... to set the tone for this 1999 Wild Rockies Rendezvous.
To be honest, I was a bit worried about the reception I might find here tonight. In my mind, I could hear the snickering in the audience, the catcalls from the back of the room, the deafening sound of silence from vast rows of empty seats. I knew there were bound to be at least a few raised eyebrows when folks saw who it was that Mike had invited to launch this year’s Rendezvous.
Well, I want to reassure you that it’s okay to find it odd that I'm the one speaking to you tonight, because that’s just exactly what I’m planning to talk about… a few odd things.
First off… I’ll grant you that it does seem odd in today’s political climate for a Republican to be speaking up for wilderness, but that wasn’t always the case. And we at REP America believe that as our organization grows and gains clout within the GOP, it won’t seem at all odd for future generations of Republicans to address gatherings like this in the 21st century and beyond.
And while it may seem odd for a Midwesterner from an urban corner of a pancake-flat state to be giving this particular talk to this particular audience, that’s really not all that odd either. I’ll tell you why in just a few minutes.
And while it may seem odd for a grassroots group like REP America, which has assigned itself the task of reforming the GOP (a task tantamount to pushing a pea up the side of Trapper Peak with your nose) at the same time that we’re working to eliminate polluter pork and preserve our rivers and coastlines, forests and prairies, deserts and swamps… While it may seem odd for such a group to have come out so strongly in support of the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, when we haven’t done so for several other good legislative proposals… that’s not really such an odd thing either. I’ll talk about our reasons for supporting NREPA, in a few minutes.
I promise to come back to those three odd things, but first I’d like to tell you an even stranger story… how this woman from an urban corner of a pancake-flat Midwestern state embarked on the course that led to my being here with you tonight.
Mike has already filled you in on some of my background. He’s told you about my academic pursuits and my political pursuits and my writing pursuits and my photographic pursuits. As you can see, I’ve dabbled in a whole lot of different pursuits!
The first phase of my career, the academic phase, was quite well planned, and I pursued it for sixteen years, following the usual publish-or-perish route, until burnout set in. In 1985, I bailed out of academia and turned to writing… first a series of college Spanish textbooks, then an 800-page novel that turned out to be good enough to land me a New York agent, but not good enough to find a publisher. And frankly, that rejection didn’t bother me much. I was happy enjoying the freedom to write for fun and photograph birds and take an occasional afternoon nap on the back porch… things I’d never had time to do during those 16 years in the classroom and the library.
But it turned out that life had a different plan in the works for me. Back in 1989, while I was working on that novel, I just happened to get involved in a local land-use fight. Now, I have to confess… it wasn’t a threat to some pristine forest or wetland or roadless area that got my dander up. It was (of all things, since I don’t golf) a golf course. But it was one heck of a beautiful golf course, with a couple dozen big stands of old burr oaks and shagbark hickories, a natural stream meandering through and sweeping meadows of prairie wildflowers. You see, the golf course designers had gone to great pains a few decades earlier to save the natural resources they found in that woodland, and the course was widely regarded as one of the most beautiful in the Midwest. It was in unincorporated Lake County, the last 150 acres of unprotected open space left near our home. Unfortunately, the two elderly sisters who owned the land had retired to Colorado and sold it to a developer.
Well, if I were superstitious, I could almost believe that there was a force leading me to get involved in the fight to save the Thorngate Golf Course. Before that, I had been a dues-paying member of several state and national conservation groups, the kind who contributes the money to hire the people to do the hands-on work. I used to laugh that I was on the "Sucker List," but never had I taken on an activist role myself. But there was no way I could stay out of that fight, given the implications of the proposed development on our community, and the threat to those magnificent trees. We eventually lost our three-year battle to stop that development, but along the way something new emerged: a highly energized and politicized Martha Marks.
Now, please don’t despair! I really am going to talk about NREPA and the Rendezvous’ theme of connecting people with wild places and wild things… but I can’t just drop this story here, because there’s more to it, and it’s relevant.
In the late 1980s, my Lake County was governed by a bipartisan coalition of open-space advocates who aggressively bought up land for our Lake County Forest Preserve District. Their goal was noble: to save as much natural land as possible before it fell to the developers. They argued, quite correctly, that it was cheaper to buy the land and preserve it than to build all the roads, sewers, water mains, schools, libraries and fire stations that development would bring. Their goal was good, but their technique was awful. They would wait until a parcel of land was already platted for development; then they’d swoop in and condemn it. They stopped a lot of development and acquired a lot of land that way, but their heavy-handed techniques created a backlash in the development industry and among many ordinary property owners as well.
And so, in the election of 1990, the Home Builders’ PAC, the Realtors' PAC, the Lake County Farm Bureau and the Lake County Republican establishment pooled their resources and came up with $100,000 to get rid of the "Open Spacers." That money bought a lot of professional mailings and TV ads in races that in the past had always been won by shoe leather and cheap printed handouts. Those ads and mailings painted the incumbents as nutcakes who put a higher priority on environmental protection than on jobs and economic growth. The guy who led that pro-development push was a bullying Boss-Tweed type widely known as "Bulldozer Bob." Even his developer buddies called him Bulldozer Bob! Well… Bulldozer Bob and his buddies swept virtually all the pro-conservation incumbents out of office in 1990, and Bulldozer Bob subsequently spent six years as the all-powerful county chairman.
Now I have to tell you the saddest part of all… Bulldozer Bob and his buddies were voted into office on the very same November ‘90 election day that the 900 families in our little village voted to raise our taxes so we could give the county $ 5 million, which the open-space incumbents had promised would provide enough incentive for them buy the land. We voted ourselves that tax increase on the very day those open-space incumbents were kicked out of office. Talk about lousy timing!
Just a few months later, in a last-ditch effort to get the county to buy the land, our little band of "Save Thorngate" activists started looking for a candidate to run in the 1992 County Board election. All during the summer of 1991, fingers went around the circle…
"You!"
"No, I can’t. I’ve got little kids."
"You!"
"No, I can’t. I’ve got a job."
"You!"
"No, I can’t. My husband’s about to retire and we want to travel."
Well, eventually all those fingers converged on me, and I had absolutely no excuse. No little kids. No job. My husband wasn’t ready to retire and travel. So I said, OK, I’ll do it.
I had no clue what I was getting into. Had never run for anything before. Didn’t know the local party honchos. Didn’t even know what a precinct was. But I was mad and motivated!
When my husband, Bernie, found out what I’d agreed to do, and that I’d be running against a well-connected establishment-type Republican from a neighboring village, who had already won several elections and would have all the pro-development money and endorsements behind him, Bernie’s first reaction was: "Poor fellow! He’s not gonna know what hit him!"
And he didn’t. The poor fellow still hasn’t figured it out, to this day. You see, that well-connected, pro-development candidate got 28% of the vote in our ‘92 Republican primary, while I (running as an avowed environmentalist, a "slow-growther" and an "open-spacer") pulled in 72%. In the Republican primary! Now… I’ve been re-elected twice since then, fending off both Republican and Democrat opponents, and no matter who they’ve thrown up against me, this Republican "enviro-wacko" consistently wins 70% of the votes.
The local GOP establishment was surprised when I won in ‘92. They were stunned in ‘94 when two other "Green Republicans" like me booted two more Bulldozer Buddies out of office. And in ‘96, they almost imploded when three more Bulldozer Buddies lost their seats, including Bulldozer Bob himself. Well, in 1998, the pro-development Republicans finally had their chance to get us "Greenies" out… yet all eight of us survived, each with 60-70% of the vote… in our Republican primaries! Not only that, but we picked up a couple more allies as well, at the cost of a couple more of those Buddies.
And so it came to pass that last winter… eight years to the day after Bulldozer Bob and his buddies first seized control of our county, we "Green Republicans" took control of our government. We don’t intend to make the same heavy-handed mistakes that the previous bunch of "Open Spacers" made a decade ago. The voters have given us a clear mandate to do our best to preserve their environment and quality of life while maintaining our county’s strong economic base. We don’t intend to let them down!
And Bulldozer Bob? Well… he’s now running a car wash in Gurnee, so I guess he did eventually get the message that the people of Lake County were sick of the sprawl and environmental destruction that he gave them. We, of course, are left to deal with his legacy of jammed-up roads and schools, sky-high taxes, and yearly flooding problems. That’s not a legacy that’s easily cleaned up.
So… here you have before you a certified "Green Republican," overwhelmingly elected three times by the Republican voters in her district, repeatedly endorsed by the Illinois Sierra Club, co-founder in 1993 of the Lake County Conservation Alliance and in 1995 of Republicans for Environmental Protection. How did such an odd creature come to be?
Briefly… I always enjoyed nature as a child, although I never gave it much thought. As an Army Brat in the ‘50s, I would ride in the back seat of our old Ford for endless days across Pre-Interstate America, en route from one military base to another. The thing that saved my sanity on those trips was that my dad would take me out for a long walk in the woods whenever we came to a National Park or Forest. He was a career military man and as die-hard a conservative Republican as you could ever meet, but he had grown up in the Louisiana backwoods, and he knew a thing or two about trees and plants and woodland creatures. He was a Republican and a naturalist, and to me that seemed the most normal thing in the world. And so, without making a big deal of it, he passed his love of nature on to me.
Okay, that brings me back to the first of those three odd things I mentioned at the beginning… the question of why a Republican should be here tonight, speaking up for wild places and wild creatures.
Once upon a time, as my father proved, it didn’t seem at all odd to be both a Republican and a lover of nature. Of course, that was before Ronald Reagan declared trees a major source of pollution and appointed James Watt as chief steward of our national treasures. And it was before Newt Gingrich engineered a "revolution" that put those same treasures into the gentle hands of Don Young and Frank Murkowski.
But once upon a time… Republicans proudly took the lead in preserving wild places and protecting wild creatures. Everybody knows about Teddy Roosevelt, who has become such an iconic figure in this country that even the most anti-environmental congressmen and senators (like Don Young and Frank Murkowski) sometimes try to wrap themselves in Teddy’s great green mantle.
Well, while Teddy Roosevelt certainly is a towering figure in American conservation history, he’s not alone among Republicans. Roosevelt picked his friend, Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot, to start the U.S. Forest Service… back in the days when it was a genuine effort to conserve our national forests, not a taxpayer-subsidized doormat for the logging industry. Remember what Teddy said almost a hundred years ago? "The only problem with the effort to protect our forests is that it didn’t start soon enough and it hasn’t gone far enough!" Can you imagine what Teddy would have to say about today’s Forest Service?
And we don’t have to stop with Roosevelt and Pinchot. Throughout this century, in every decade, Republicans have been at the forefront of public and private efforts to save our wild lands. The Rockefellers saved the Grand Tetons from rapacious developers. Pennsylvania Congressman John Saylor picked up the fledging Wilderness Act in the mid-1950s and, with Democratic ally Senator Hubert Humphrey, saw it through to passage and signing in 1964. Republican Senator John Heinz was a leading light of the conservation movement until his death eight years ago. Senator John Chafee is at it still. My new Illinois Senator, Republican Peter Fitzgerald, is showing great promise by co-sponsoring with Democrat Dick Durbin, our other Illinois senator, a bill to protect Utah wilderness. Even a guy like Senator Pete Domenici, which is not a name that comes readily to mind as a leader of the conservation movement, wins praise in New Mexico for his successful efforts to preserve that state’s phenomenal Gila Wilderness.
Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there was far less partisan squabbling over our national efforts to protect the environment and save our wild places and wild creatures. After strong bipartisan support in Congress for the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Protection Act, Richard Nixon signed them all into law. He also started the EPA, which is something we at REP dearly love to point out to today’s GOP leaders. It’s true that Nixon’s environmental star was tarnished by his veto of the Clean Water Act, but the bipartisan congressional coalition that had passed the bill wisely saw fit to override his veto. Republican voters had no special exemption from dirty air and water, and they saw to it that their representatives paid attention to their demands for a healthier environment.
Fortunately, there are still environmental heroes in the Republican-controlled Congress, although not nearly as many as REP would like to see. Nobody can deny the courage that Congressman Sherry Boehlert and his "moderate" Republican colleagues have shown in recent years. I like to compare them to the Little Dutch Boy, who put his finger in a hole in the dike and saved his country from a devastating flood. Sherry Boehlert, Chris Shays, Connie Morella, my own congressman John Porter and a couple dozen others like them have had their fingers in the holes of our Congressional dike, doing their best to hold back a flood of anti-environmental legislation since Newt Gingrich and Company took the reins of power in 1995.
The members of REP America want to see more Republicans like Boehlert, Shays and Porter elected to office… at all levels of government. Our mission is, in essence, to "green up" the Republican Party and make environmental issues a bipartisan concern once again. And frankly, I believe the entire environmental community should want to see more "Green Republicans" elected… because as long as one party ignores the environment and the other party takes the environmental vote for granted, we don’t have much real hope of accomplishing our goals. And since we must accomplish our goals, we must work to restore that sense of bipartisan cooperation for the sake of environmental progress.
You know, it’s fortunate that there is still a Republican Roosevelt around speaking up for wilderness and wildlife. Teddy’s great-grandson, Theodore Roosevelt IV, known as Ted, has emerged as one of this country’s most outspoken conservationists. And that fact gains significance when you consider that he’s also the Managing Director of Lehman Brothers, one of the world’s great investment brokerage houses. Ted Roosevelt has distinguished himself as a board member of The Wilderness Society, and chairman of the board of the League of Conservation Voters. We’re proud to count him as a member of REP America, too, and thrilled that he’s agreed to give the keynote speech at a REP America's first Republican Environmental Summit in Florida in November. The morning after that event, Ted and I are planning a joint visit to Pelican Island… the very first land that his great-grandfather set aside as a National Wildlife Refuge. A passion for conservation seems to run deep in the Republican branch of that family!
So… given our party’s good history on these issues… why do so many of today’s Republicans shy away from leadership on conservation issues? Why do they act as if we environmentalists had leprosy? The answers are too complex to go into here, but I’m sure each of us could come up with a quick-and-dirty list… too many idiotic talk-show entertainers, too much money in politics, too many extractive industries with their hooks in our elected officials, too much concern for the short-term bottom line, too little understanding of the interconnectedness of all life forms, and so on and on.
Yet, it doesn’t have to be that way! That’s REP America’s message, and we’re working hard to bring the Republican Party back to its conservationist roots.
Just think about what the Republican Party says it stands for…
We Republicans say we’re all about conserving America's heritage. Well, wilderness is a vital part of that heritage, just like the Declaration of Independence, the Statue of Liberty and the battlefields of the Revolution.
America would be a poorer place without the protected wild lands of Yosemite, Cabeza Prieta, the River of No Return, the Okefenokee Swamp or Boundary Waters, to name just a few of our special places. Wilderness is a representation of America as it was at our nation's beginning: wild, rugged and powerful. Wilderness is central to the character of the West, but wilderness is not just about the West. Wilderness is about America. It’s about the American people, no matter who they are or where they happen to live.
And that brings me back to my second point… that’s why I don’t think it’s at all odd that a woman from an urban corner of a pancake-flat Midwestern state should happen to find herself speaking to you tonight about wilderness.
I firmly believe that a dream of wilderness lingers in the hearts of most Americans, not just those lucky enough to live surrounded by the Rocky Mountains, near a Wild and Scenic River, or alongside a million-acre roadless area. It also lingers in the hearts of those who live in the urban (or suburban) "jungle" and find their wilderness experiences in smaller, but equally precious, places.
All over this country, in this decade, people have been demonstrating a passionate concern for the preservation of wild places and wild critters. In recent years, the American people have voted themselves billions of dollars in tax increases to protect fast-disappearing wildlife habitat and open spaces near their homes. Just last November, New Jersey voters approved a $1 billion sales tax increase to preserve and protect the last natural areas in their state. Similar referenda have succeeded all across the country, and that doesn’t take into account the huge amount of money that ordinary people give to private land conservancies of all sizes. It seems to me that the American people are way ahead of many of our elected officials on this issue. Even city dwellers understand that if you cherish the land and the creatures that live on it, you have to buy it or put a conservation easement on it. Otherwise, there’s no way to save it from the creeping ugliness of suburban sprawl.
And you know… the politicians really are hearing that message from their constituents. Unfortunately, many of them just won’t listen. But in poll after poll after poll, 80% of Americans say they want equal or greater environmental protection. Very few people ever say they want less.
Here’s a small sample of the data that GOP leaders have been getting…
Back in 1995, in the heyday of the Gingrich Revolution, Republican pollster Linda DiVall announced that 55% of the GOP’s own voters did NOT trust their party to take care of the environment, while 75% of Democrats did trust their own party. Ouch!!!
In 1997, another Republican pollster reported that 60% of American adults agreed with the statement that "environmental protection is so important that requirements and standards cannot be too high, and continuing environmental improvements must be made, regardless of cost."
That report totally floored the audience at which it was announced: the 1997 Midwest Republican Leadership Conference, held in Indianapolis. I know it caused a lot of ripples, ‘cause I was there… at the very first session about the environment ever held at a Republican convention, taking advantage of my time at the podium to tell the delegates how the GOP needs to clean up its act and get in tune with the American people.
That pollster proved my point better than anything I could have told them, but GOP leaders apparently didn’t pay any attention to either of us. They continue to use the "it costs too much" argument or the "it will hurt the economy" argument to undercut such things as wetlands protection, forest management reform and the Kyoto Protocol.
Just this past summer came two more revealing polls. A major firm, Zogby International, interviewed likely GOP primary voters in 5 early primary states: California, Iowa, New Hampshire, New York, and South Carolina. We’re talking about big states with lots of voters and those vital early primaries…
Zogby gave the voters a choice between two candidates with identical positions on every issue except the environment. The only difference was: "Candidate A is a strong supporter of government involvement on behalf of the environment" and "Candidate B opposes government involvement on behalf of the environment." Have you heard the results? Well… those likely GOP primary voters backed Candidate A over Candidate B by 64% to 29%.
(As an aside… I couldn’t help noticing that those percentages, 64% to 29%, correspond almost identically with the percentage of victory that we "Green Republicans" in Lake County, get in every single primary we run in. Is that a coincidence? I don’t think so!)
Finally… I want to mention what pollster Frank Luntz announced this summer. Luntz is the conservative insider who concocted the GOP’s 1994 "Contract With America." Well, his latest poll proved what I’ve been saying tonight: an overwhelming majority of Americans want their elected officials to protect land, water and open space, and support funding mechanisms such as the Land & Water Conservation Fund. According to Luntz, 88% of Americans worry that many of the country's special places may be lost unless action is taken now to protect them. According to Luntz, 89% believe in using a conservation trust fund to protect wildlife habitat for native plants and animals.
And here’s the very best part of Luntz’s report: "The poll shows that no issue speaks more directly to Americans’ quality of life than their ability to enjoy open spaces, parks and wilderness areas. Since the conservation of land and water and open space is a strong winnable issue, almost any political leader can run on it and win with it in November 2000."
Given that information, you’d think the GOP presidential wannabes would be falling all over themselves to embrace conservation of wild places, because that’s clearly what the American people are looking for. So why aren’t they? That’s the question that REP is starting to ask our candidates… loudly, persistently and annoyingly. Check out the next two issues of our newsletter, The Green Elephant, to find out what answers they give us.
To make my point about how far the American people are willing to go to protect wild places and wild creatures, I’d like to take you back again to the area I call home: Northeastern Illinois. Now I know that sounds deadly dull to you, and totally out of character at this Wild Rockies Rendezvous. But you may be surprised to learn that there’s an organization called "Chicago Wilderness." It sounds like the ultimate oxymoron (maybe even funnier than "Republicans for Environmental Protection"), but "Chicago Wilderness" is for real. And both the organization and the land it protects are wonderful! Here’s why…
The Chicago area is unique in the nation in the huge amount of natural land that has been preserved in such an urban region. At present, in our six-county metro area, there are over 200,000 acres of protected natural areas: forests, savannas, wetlands, prairies and riparian corridors. Now, 200,000 acres may not sound like much to those of you who live in the West, but I bet it’s a far cry from what comes to mind when most people think of Chicago. And you have to realize… those 200,000 protected acres are almost entirely a local achievement. It was local people, decades ago, who first envisioned a "Chicago Wilderness." Then they persuaded the Illinois legislature to empower counties to establish forest preserve districts and dipped repeatedly into their own pockets to save the native landscape before the developers could ruin it all.
Bear in mind… there wasn’t a single National Park or Forest in the northern 4/5 of Illinois until a couple of years ago, when 19,000 acres of the old Joliet Arsenal just outside Chicago were turned over the Fish & Wildlife Service to create the Midewin National Prairie Preserve. Before that, the effort to preserve open space in our metro area was entirely a state and local one, and it was hugely successful. Cook County alone owns 67,000 acres of forest preserves. My own Lake County, which is much smaller, owns over 21,000 acres, and that doesn’t include two state parks and several state and private preserves within our boundaries. (As an aside… I freely confess that the best part of my job as a Lake County commissioner is the opportunity to oversee the restoration of those 21,000 acres and to add to them, as we are aggressively doing right now.) The organization called "Chicago Wilderness" is a coalition of almost 100 private groups and government agencies dedicated to ensuring the successful conservation and restoration of those 200,000 acres and adding more high-quality land to the system.
Ironically, the vast majority of our state’s threatened and endangered plants and animals live within our Chicago Wilderness. Elsewhere in Illinois, for well over a century, farmers systematically drained and filled wetlands, chopped down forests and plowed up prairies. But the randomness of urban development in the metro area left precious pockets of high-quality natural areas that today shelter almost all of Illinois’ threatened and endangered birds, bugs and beasts. Turn-of-the-century Chicago leaders (the same generation that gave us Teddy Roosevelt) kept the city’s Lake Michigan shoreline open and began protecting natural areas at a time when forests were abundant and the prairie never-ending. Now that the forests no longer seem abundant and the prairie is almost gone, a new generation of conservation leaders is keeping the Chicago Wilderness dream alive. Literally thousands of volunteers donate hundreds of thousands of hours each year… ridding the land of alien species, burning the prairies, restoring the native seed bank and teaching their children to love nature, too.
Our Chicago Wilderness areas are much smaller than yours in the West, but they’re every bit as precious to the folks who live near them. That’s why during the last two years, in the five collar counties around Chicago, voters raised their own taxes by over $300 million dollars to allow our unique system of county forest preserves to continue growing. My own Lake County has passed two open-space referenda in this decade. In 1993, 61% of our voters voted to give us $30 million to buy and restore open space. I’m proud to say that we forest preserve commissioners used that money so well that last April 66% of our electorate voted to give us an additional $55 million to continue the program. That’s $85 million in voluntary tax increases in one county in just 6 years! And if there’s anything that proves the American people truly do care about conservation of wild places and wild creatures, it’s when they’re willing to dip into their own pockets to do it. That’s not lip service. That’s for real!
Yes, I know that our special places are disappearing at a frightening rate all around the country. And the number of plant and animal species at risk is skyrocketing. Even those that are supposed to be protected often aren’t. It’s devastating to see the places and things you love destroyed and know that people with the power to do something about it don’t give a damn. In my own county, we’ve seen too many treasured landscapes vanish. Too much wildlife habitat has disappeared under a sea of asphalt, and even more will go before the developers move on to greener fields. You see, in northeastern Illinois, the threat to our remaining natural areas isn’t logging, or grazing or mining, as it is in much of the West. It’s development. Suburban sprawl. And it’s deadly for wildlife and wild places. Fortunately, the voters seem willing to fund additional land acquisitions. Lord love ‘em! I guess they’re just smarter and wiser than most of the politicians we send to Washington and the state houses.
Which brings me back to the value of wilderness to people all over this country, however they define it and wherever they find it. Wilderness is a healthy reality check, a necessary reminder that we, with all our national wealth, military power and computer technology, are but a small part of a much greater realm.
Wilderness is for every American who values the freedom of open space; or seeks escape from a harried world; or rejoices in seeing bison, bears and bighorns… and all the other creatures that are valuable simply because they exist.
And that brings me back to my third issue… That’s the main reason why REP America enthusiastically supports the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act. Whether or not they live in the Northern Rockies, or anywhere else in the Rockies, or anywhere else in the West… REP members are all dedicated conservationists. They carry that dream of wilderness in their hearts, and they want to know that it will still be there, as an intact ecosystem sheltering those bison, bears and bighorns, a hundred years from now, or a thousand years from now. They want to know it will survive, whether they ever get to see it in person or not.
The other reason why REP America enthusiastically supports NREPA is that it makes good fiscal sense. We’re tired of subsidizing the extractive industries. We want to change the focus of our Forest Service from taxpayer-soaking resource extraction to job-producing, life-sustaining, restoration activities. We want to see low-impact tourism take the place of logging and mining as the bulwark of local economies. Most of all, we want to get the big hand of corporate welfare out of our national pockets, and bring back a conservation ethic to our land-management agencies.
We at REP want to make sure that Teddy Roosevelt’s great-great-great-great grandchildren, and their grandchildren and our grandchildren, all have the same opportunity to experience wilderness that their forefathers did. And who has a better chance of doing that than REP? Who better than our small-but-growing band of GOP conservationists to bring more Republican Members of Congress around to a pro-environment philosophy, and make conservation a bi-partisan concern once again… as it was in the days of John Saylor and Hubert Humphrey.
So, as you enjoy this weekend’s workshops, I hope you’ll take heart in the knowledge that you are not alone in this fight. There are millions of Americans in our cities, our suburbs and our rural areas, Republicans and Democrats and non-affiliated voters alike, who value wild places and are doing what they can to save them. We just have to convince our elected officials to listen to us and help us, to not undercut our efforts. And if we can’t convince them, then we just have to find better people to replace them.
I’d be willing to bet that in every one of your communities there’s a Bulldozer Bob… pulling the strings of local government so his developer friends (or his logger friends, or his miner friends) can ride roughshod over the land. So my advice to you is… get out there and find Bulldozer Bob’s weak spot. Identify the things he and his buddies do that infuriate your local voters, whether those infuriating things have anything to do with the environment or not. Organize your environmental allies into a cohesive force, find credible candidates to be your champions, and fight back through the political system. People like us can’t shy away from politics, if we want to change the way the game is played. We have to get involved in it, learn to play it better than the opposition, and beat the Bulldozer Buddies where they can’t fight back… at the ballot box!
If you can get your fellow activists elected to local office and keep them there for a while, then one day you’ll be able to help them rise through the political ranks to your state legislatures, and eventually on to Congress.
And then maybe some day we won’t have to listen to folks like the junior senator from Montana, my fellow Republican Conrad Burns… who said just last Monday, at the start of a semi-coherent rant over the Interior Appropriations Bill: "This morning, as I returned from Montana and I was listening to the local news, I heard a 30-second spot advising folks to call the White House to stand up, to stop this disappearance of the national forest lands. It was paid for by the Heritage Forest... some group. We have not been able to run it down yet. The message went on to say we have to stop this because our forests will be gone forever… It seems we fight these little fights every year because there are those who completely do not, and I say this in all disrespect, know one whit about what is a renewable resource and how we are to manage it."
I’ll spare you the rest of Senator Burns’ speech. Suffice it to say that it’s a real shame Teddy Roosevelt isn’t around to take out after Burns with his big stick!
In closing, I want to say how much I respect and appreciate those of you who have dedicated your lives to protecting wild places and wild creatures. As an activist, I’m a Johnny-come-lately, far behind most of you in wisdom and experience. I expect to learn a lot in tomorrow’s sessions, and I’m looking forward to meeting and talking with you all.
So, thank you, Mike, for inviting me to kick off this year’s Wild Rockies Rendezvous. And thanks to all the rest of you for listening so attentively.
Gee whiz… almost an hour, and I didn’t hear a single hoot or catcall. Imagine that!
