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The Beliefs, Structure, and Impact of the Wise Use Movement
The wise use movement emerged from a 1988 conference convened by the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. The center is the vehicle for the work of its two key employees: Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb. Arnold is the intellectual leader of the wise use movement.5 He comes to it as a former Sierra Club member, knowledgeable about the values and strategies of mainstream environmentalism. In the 1970s, a decade before the anti-environmental movement took formal shape, Arnold wrote a series of articles in corporate forestry magazines in which he pointed out the need for an alternative activist movement to counter the political power of environmentalism (O'Callaghan 1992).
The tangible result of the 1988 conference was production of The Wise Use Agenda (Gottlieb 1989). The notion of "wise use" came into being as a conscious attempt to echo the early, turn-of-the-century debates within the environmental movement between John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, and Gifford Pinchot, founder of the national forest service. Muir championed the sanctity of nature and the necessity for preserving natural areas; Pinchot pioneered utilitarian, multiple/wise use resource management (Fox 1985). Through this century their conflict has defined a major axis within the U.S. environmental movement. Reverberating with Pinchot's rhetoric, the preface to the Agenda states that humans "must find ways to use the earth wisely and find ways to understand that the earth can be used wisely" (Gottlieb 1989, p. xvii; emphasis in original).
The Agenda delineates a series of goals, which are tied together by the perspective that public lands are to be used actively for economic development and in economic production, and public actions that impact private property rights must be compensated. Among the top goals of the Agenda are opening all public lands to commercial mineral and energy production, allowing commercial clear-cutting of old growth forests on national forest lands, rewriting the Endangered Species Act so as to substantially weaken it as a tool for environmental protection, allowing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, promoting commercial development within the national parks, and establishing private property rights in lease-based grazing arrangements on public lands (ibid.).
The wise use movement itself is a coalition of local and regional groups
5. There are other prominent and significant activists and organizations in the wise use/property rights movement. I focus on Ron Arnold and the wise use movement because they serve as a useful lens with which to focus the discussion of the larger movement's intent and structure.
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