Battered Communities

The two-lane highway corkscrewed past spectacular hills bristling with mixed-age ponderosa pines. Here and there rocky notches afforded quick glimpses of cattle-groomed meadows sodden with spring runoff. The late afternoon asphalt roller-coastered higher among the quarried ridges.

Abruptly, I came upon the little mountain-girt town. Its single traffic light blinked a friendly warning as Highway 20 took a hard right: I was on the main street of Republic, Washington, population 1,030. Five hours’ drive from Seattle. Three hours from the nearest airport, in Spokane.

You’re definitely in rural America when you come to Republic, isolated and independent. Not many places can boast Ferry County’s glorious high-country scenery, but Republic’s stores and cafes still have that plain old "somebody-lives-here" feel that gets polished off the city versions. And there’s no such thing as a secret in these parts. Everybody knows everybody else and a stranger might as well be hauling a billboard.

I found the little office of the Ferry County Action League on Main Street (officially it’s Clark Street, but everybody calls it Main Street) and walked in. There, smiling at me, sat Aldena Grumbach, a ranch woman who comes in every day from up the road in Curlew to serve as receptionist and secretary for the non-profit organization.

Dave Keeley, the group’s sturdy executive director, heard us and stepped out of his back office to shake my hand. "Good to put a face to the voice on the phone," he said. "You’re just in time to join us for a bite to eat."

Mike Poulson, a colleague with the Washington Farm Bureau, appeared silently at the door behind me and said, "Hi," briskly ushering me back out onto the sidewalk and introducing half a dozen friends, including a county councilman and some people from the group that had invited me here, the Upper Columbia Resource Council. The two-person office crew had suddenly turned into a swarm, which buzzed across the street to the Hitchin’ Post, where we all ordered the special, a fry-bread taco.

Once we were seated and the pleasantries taken care of, the talk turned serious. "We’re being wiped out," said Commissioner Dennis Snook. "Our economy is being destroyed. It’s the radical environmentalists filing endless appeals on timber sales, mining permits, grazing permits."

Mike Poulson added, "And the big foundations that give them the money."

"Don’t forget the Forest Service employees that belong to some of these extremist outfits," added a voice at the end of the table. "They influence these decisions, too."

My organization, the Bellevue, Washington-based Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, has heard this desperate cry from our rural members everywhere the past few years. The entire nation echoes with the same agony. I had just returned from Bangor, Maine, where the situation was as desperate. The week before that, I visited Orr, Minnesota, and it was no different.

What these rural areas have in common is the same good productive taxpaying people working for a living and the same wrongheaded adversaries trying to destroy them. Blow after blow has killed one goods producing business after another. Little country towns in counties with minuscule budgets are trying to fight a bewildering array of anti-industry enemies from every quarter.

In a period of high urban affluence and low unemployment, America’s rural areas are suffering depression-like disasters. The urban-rural prosperity gap is opening like a bleeding wound. Our land is becoming a nation of battered communities.

The tactics are the same all across America: endless doomsday propaganda, lobbying, lawsuits, administrative appeals, and physical blockades from environmental groups. Only the names are different – and not all of those, with outfits such as Earth First!, the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society and Defenders of Animals breaking out like pustules scabbing over the whole map.

The strategy is the same all across America: claim that the basic natural resource industries that built this nation into the greatest on earth were actually causing the extinction of all life everywhere. And then use laws written by environmentalists to sue in courts that would interpret them favorably, which would shut down the natural resource industries forever. To hell with jobs. To hell with products. To hell with people.

The funding is the same all across America: a core of wealthy private foundations that has become prescriptive rather than responsive are behind virtually every attack on goods producers. They design the strategic programs, select the funding recipients and direct grant-driven projects assigned to their hand-picked environmental group surrogates. Names like W. Alton Jones Foundation, Rockefeller Family Fund, Bullitt Foundation, Pew Chartiable Trusts and the Turner Foundation dominate.

The activist federal employees are the same all across America: Clinton administration appointees who came from environmental group leadership positions like Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt from the presidency of the League of Conservation Voters, a political action committee. Activist employees have infiltrated agency jobs, with all their allegiances sworn in advance to the agenda of groups such as Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE) and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

Between activist federal employees unduly influencing the withdrawal of timber sales and the overt attacks of appeals and lawsuits, timber workers have been bludgeoned and decimated. The unemployment rate in Ferry County, where I was having a taco dinner with friends stood at 12.7 percent. In Seattle’s King County, a world away, it was a scant 2.8 percent.

"What really gets me," said Mike Poulson, "is that these enviros come in and kill off timber, then say it’s a declining industry. Same with mining and cattle. They’re the reason it’s declining."

History bore out Poulson’s frustrated assertion: the case of the northern spotted owl left a record of devastation that cannot be seriously questioned. The Pacific Northwest lost 187 mills closed due to the spotted owl lawsuits brought by the Audubon Society, 114 in Oregon, 49 in Washington, 25 in California. The total job loss due to the spotted owl was 22,654, counting mill and woods jobs, according to the compilations of expert Paul F. Ehinger & Associates.

All over the nation delays in the permitting process of mining operations are outrageous. Our natural resource production is being pushed offshore. Any little group of environmentalists can cost years of anguish and tons of money – at no cost to themselves. There are no bonding requirements to file an appeal.

"That’s what’s so unjust about this," said Dennis Snook. "These environmentalists can destroy the lives of others and nothing happens to them."

"What can we do about it?" asked Dave Keeley.

"Make your case and change the law," I said. "I know that’s easy to say and impossibly difficult to do, but it’s the only way."

"We can’t do that by ourselves," someone protested. "We’re just a little town that doesn’t count."

"You do count. And you’re not alone," I said. "You have to join with others like yourself and tell the nation what’s happening to you and who’s doing it. Then it’s a matter of human decency – if the American public hears and believes you, we can only hope they’ll do the right thing."

"Who do we join with, then?" asked Keeley.

"Well, you know my Center is preparing a white paper that’s going to be called ‘Battered Communities.’"

"Battered Communities," repeated Commissioner Snook grimly. "That’s us, all right."

I went on: "It will document your problems along with those of other rural areas. If we can get someone in Congress to stand up with us, I’ll release it on Capitol Hill. The people I’ve visited in Maine and Minnesota say they’re willing to provide data for the report. They’re the first of your town’s natural allies, I’d guess. If you’re lucky, others will follow."

We were lucky. Word of the forthcoming report got around. A congressional hearing, it turned out, was scheduled to coincide with the 1998 "Fly-In for Freedom." I was able to get on the hearing’s witness list to testify about Battered Communities. The report was placed in the hearing record. Now Congress knows.

What Congress does with its knowledge rests in the hands of good people everywhere. The message is simple: Goods producers are being destroyed by wrongheaded opponents.

Now we have to make the public see it. Congress will act if enough of us insist.

The task is hard. Bear a hand. America needs your help.

While there is still time.