Environmentalists Organizations Exposed
Congressional Record: May 8, 2001 (House)]
[Page H2012-H2019]
from eco-logic - http://eco.freedom.org/el/20010601/hansen.shtml
The SPEAKER
pro tempore (Mr. Flake). Under the Speaker's announced policy
of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Hansen) is
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority
leader.
Mr. HANSEN. Mr. Speaker, many years ago when I was a
student at the University of Utah, I recall working at
different jobs after class at night and weekends in order to
make ends meet and pay my tuition. Money was tight. I was
newly married. I had a wife and child to support, but I still
remember sending $25 to the Sierra Club in response to their
advertisements because I felt strongly about protecting our
air and water and preserving our forests. But I was moved to
donate to that particular organization by what they had to
say, and during the 1960s and 1970s, I believed that our
Nation urgently needed a wake-up call to action to stop the
dumping of raw sewage and industrial waste into the Nation's
waterways, and to find ways to try to save endangered species
like the bald eagle and the grizzly bear.
I saw some of those problems firsthand, and I felt strongly
about that, and contrary to what groups are saying, I still
do. I believe some advocacy groups like the Sierra Club played
a constructive and valuable part in helping to focus public
attention on these problems.
In those days I recall the Sierra Club actually funding
some restoration projects which were laudable. They were doing
more than just sounding
[[Page H2013]]
the alarm. They were out on the ground, physically doing
something constructive by themselves, cleaning up a lake or
making a trail, for example, in partnership with local or
State organizations.
I felt good about supporting that because I had always been
taught that it was not sufficient to just point out faults or
problems of others; what we need to do is put our money where
our mouth is and pitch in and do something ourselves. It is
ironic, given what some vocal environmentalist groups today
have to say about me, that as a member of the Utah legislature
and Speaker of the Utah House that I was labeled by some of my
colleagues as being too green because I often sponsored or
supported environmental legislation.
What is more ironic is that my personal philosophy for
protecting the environment has not changed one iota. I still
believe in the principles of conservation and environmental
protection, like Teddy Roosevelt, our first conservation
President. I believe man has been given the responsibility to
be wise stewards of our natural resources, that we can find
environmentally responsible ways to obtain the energy and raw
materials that we need as a Nation and as families and as
individuals to sustain life; and that as human beings we need
to not apologize for having been born, and that we are part of
the Earth's ecosystem.
Unfortunately, it has been the environmental movement which
has changed. As too often the case, what begins as a good idea
and needed catalyst has in many respects been corrupted by
money and by power.
I have witnessed over the years how environmental groups
have changed from actually doing constructive work into
self-interest business organizations whose main goals seems to
be marketing, self-perpetuating power and growth, and to
achieve those ends by any means. They become masters at
slashing and burning the character and reputation of those
elected officials or reporters who dare to challenge them or
who dare to take different points of view on specific
environmental issues.
Mr. Speaker, I have witnessed over the years how
increasingly strident and nasty many of them become in our
civil discourse, and how increasingly radical many of their
proposals have become.
Finally, what I have noticed as well is that these groups
by and large are now all about big business, and that is their
bottom line. When looking at the Sierra Club, the Southern
Utah Wilderness Alliance, the Natural Resources Defense
Council, the League of Conservation Voters, or several other
environmental groups, what begins as a small, bare-bones
organization with issues motivating people, soon blossoms into
larger and larger organizations which must rent offices, hire
workers and meet their payroll.
These are not grassroot organizations operating out of some
guy's basement we are talking about. They are slick,
well-organized companies, employing rafts of accountants,
marketers, and attorneys. There is none better. In order to
feed that beast or make the payroll, they have to raise money.
How do they do this? They do it very well. They are masters at
it. If they were public corporations listed with the stock
exchange, they would be listed by analysts in the ``buy''
category. They pour massive amounts of tax-exempt and
tax-deductible contributions into emotion-based media and
marketing. They are spending millions on direct marketing
campaigns in order to generate more and more contributors and
donor lists. They hire impressionable young college students,
normally at a minimum wage, to go door to door to sign up new
members, and hire still others to attend public hearings to
applaud or to boo as directed, in a cynical, purchased attempt
to influence public opinion.
What is truly shocking is the amount of money these groups
are raising and spending, and they are beginning to hit the
big-time contributions, millions of dollars at a time,
disappointingly, from such previously venerable entities as
the Pew Charitable Trust. This is how they can pay for
millions of dollars in slick brochures, calendars, videos,
radio and television advertisements, all designed to shock and
stimulate individuals to reach into their pocketbooks.
Like any other pitchmen hawking their wares, they use
sensational pictures and distortion of facts in order to grab
attention, as some unscrupulous marketers are prone to do.
They take advantage of many hard-working Americans who are too
busy earning a living and paying taxes and raising their
families, who do not have the time to investigate the claims
themselves. These groups take advantage of people's natural
goodwill and desire to protect green spaces and clean water by
asserting that their tax-deductible $10, $20, $50, or $100
donated to them, for example, will keep those blankety-blank,
nasty Republicans or other Congresspersons from raping and
pillaging the environment.
As it was for me as a young college student to be
influenced by their solicitation, so it remains today with
many of us. Only there is so much more media influence by
those groups than in the 1960s. They have a very loud and a
very strident voice.
When I hear the completely overblown rhetoric they put out
about many of my colleagues who are working hard, honestly
motivated by wanting to do the right thing by the environment
and by finding a balanced approach, it can be very
disheartening. Some days it is tempting to ask why do we keep
trying?
Despite years of trying to reach out to these groups, to
enter into a constructive dialogue to come up with legislative
solutions to vexing environmental problems, all I have
received is the hammer to the head. At least to this point
they have not shown an interest in doing what Isaiah counseled
in the Old Testament, ``Come now, let us reason together.'' I
am still waiting for the phrase to be uttered, ``Mr. Chairman,
we would like to work with you on that proposal.'' I have been
here 21 years and still have not heard it. Indeed, all we get
is the fire hose approach of heated and hostile rhetoric.
I still believe that a majority of Americans when presented
with all the facts will support the right environmental
policies. They will recognize the need to achieve balance
between obtaining resources and preservation. The key becomes
getting all the facts out on the table. At the present time
those of us who are often cast by these groups as being on the
wrong side of their issues are outgunned in terms of money and
media access. With their vast sums of tax-exempt money pouring
in, they buy huge media influence, which they do not call
lobbying, but rather public education. This is an abuse of our
tax laws and lobbying disclosure statutes.
These groups have also shown a propensity to try to
intimidate Members of Congress mainly from urban, eastern
districts into supporting radical proposals affecting many
large western States like Utah, Idaho and Colorado. These
groups advocate locking up huge areas into formal wilderness
designations even though most people do not understand what
those designations mean, or draining Lake Powell. After all,
most of the Members from eastern States have not even been to
those areas in the West that the legislation would affect, so
maybe it is just a throwaway vote for them. However, if they
do not sign as a cosponsor to their radical legislation such
as H.R. 1613, locking up nearly 10 million acres of Utah
lands, these groups will openly attack them in their States
and districts by vocally and visibly labeling them an enemy to
the environment. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In my opinion, it is shameful that tactics such as these
are sometimes employed by these organizations. Those tactics
ought not to be rewarded by Members, and I urge Members who
feel they are threatened politically to show these men and
women to the door.
Raising all this money would be okay if the money was being
used mostly to go toward preservation and conservation
projects. I would applaud it. However, what we are seeing is
the abuse of the IRS guidelines by many of these groups who
disguise their extensive lobbying activity and very often very
partisan lobbying activities under the guise of public
education. If the true costs of lobbying were to be
ascertained, I believe that some of these groups would be in
jeopardy of
[[Page H2014]]
losing their 501(c)3 tax-exempt charitable status, as well
they should if they are violating the law.
That is something, Mr. Speaker, that Congress ought not to
be shy about looking into. While some on the Hill and
elsewhere seem fixated on campaign finance reform aimed at
cleaning up perceived corruption of the American political
process by money, I wonder who is actually watching these
self-appointed and self-ordained watchdogs and special
interest groups who are shoveling in money by the truckload.
Where is their accountability? Where are the news cameras
following them as they drive to the bank to make these big
deposits? While liberals and extreme environmentalists lambast
their contrived bogeyman big oil and those nasty extractive
industries, I can tell you that big oil such as it exists
cannot hold a candlestick to the money and influence these
environmental groups assert these days in this city of
Washington, DC.
How long will they get away with these distortions and
character assassinations unchallenged and unchecked? Is their
abuse of our Nation's tax laws and lobbying disclosure
requirements not worthy of examination?
This abuse is the untold story that too many people are
afraid to explore, and it is something that Congress ought to
look into. This is the purpose for me and my colleagues coming
to the floor tonight to raise awareness of how many of these
groups are exploiting the public for their own selfish
reasons.
I have often wondered where the national press has been on
looking critically upon these groups. Are they too cowered by
political correctness or afraid of offending their liberal
constituencies, or are they card-carrying members of these
groups themselves? How long will the press releases and
bald-faced assertions issued hourly by these groups remain
unchallenged by the media?
While Members of Congress are scrutinized up one side and
down the other for every word we utter and every vote we take,
these groups are somehow coated with Teflon. It must always be
accepted by the media as unrebuttable truth. Must they always
be given the last word?
At least one reporter has recently had the nerve and the
courage and professionalism to explore and investigate these
groups, their fund- raising and their tactics. I commend the
members to a five-part series of articles which appeared
recently in the Sacramento Bee newspaper by Mr. Tom Knudson,
and all these are posted on the Committee on Resources Web
site. Mr. Knudson has come under fire in the last few days by
the very groups he scrutinized by having published his series,
which unfortunately is to be expected these days.
I am afraid that the truth must hit a little close to home.
Therefore, the natural self-preservation response has been to
simply attack the reporter personally and professionally.
Having been a chairman for a long time of a subcommittee and
chairman of another committee, I am always amazed how when you
cannot beat them with issues and fact, you always go to
personal assassination. I found Mr. Knudsen's series to be
balanced and confirms many of the concerns that I have had
myself for some time. I wish that more reporters would follow
his lead and look to what he has uncovered.
Now, I would like to point out on this chart that I have
here, executive salaries. According to the information
compiled by Mr. Knudson, a good share of the money raised by
these groups goes to pay salaries for their top officials.
They are easily within the top 1 percent of all wage earners
in the country. For example, this chart shows that the
executive directors of the Nation's top environmental
organizations are paid very well.
The salary of the National Wildlife Federation top
executive, Mr. Mark Van Putten, was nearly a quarter of a
million dollars last year. This represents a 17 percent raise
over his salary the year before. Think about that the next
time you contemplate your 3 percent cost of living adjustment.
If you were among those who sent in a $25 contribution to
this group, do you realize it took over 10,000 of you
contributing in order just to pay his salary?
The salary of the World Wildlife Fund president, Kathryn
Fuller, was $241,000. The salary of the National Audubon
Society president, John Flicker, was $240,000. The salary of
the Natural Resources Defense Council director, John Adams,
was $239,000. The salary of the Wilderness Society president
was $204,000. The salary of the Defenders of Wildlife
president and CEO was $201,000. Earth Justice Legal Defense
Fund president, Buck Parker, was $157,000. And the Sierra
Club's Carl Pope's salary was $138,000 in 1998 and listed as
$199,577 in 1999, nearly a 50 percent raise. The list goes on.
Now, folks, think about it. How many of those $25
contributions does it take you as you did like I did as a
young college student, send a few bucks there because you
believe in what they are doing just to pay these salaries?
Where are these missionary zealots who had a great idea back
in the 1960s and thought we were going too far? Where are
these people that were in there doing the thing because it had
the burning in their heart to do it, not because it was a big
business? Unfortunately, you can see new environmentalism has
grown into a big growth industry.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Idaho.
Mr. SIMPSON. I thank the chairman of the committee for
yielding the time and for setting aside this hour to talk a
little bit about what is happening in the environmental
community. As the gentleman from Utah has suggested, I think
all of us are environmentalists. In fact as he once said that
in college he gave his money and dues to the Sierra Club, I
believe it was, I gave money to the Idaho Conservation League
because I believed in what they were doing and in fact in many
things that they are still doing, I think they are doing a
good job but like most environmental groups or groups that
call themselves environmental groups, they have stepped over
the edge. They have gone beyond simple environmental issues
and trying to save our environment.
Before I get into that for just a minute, I want to talk
for a second about another environmental issue that was just
talked about previously by the minority party here in their
hour that they reserved and that was the energy policy which
deals with the environment as much as these issues that we
will be talking about here today. I was glad to hear that the
Members suggested that we need a bipartisan effort in energy,
a solution to the energy problem that we have in this country.
They were, it seemed, very critical of the Bush
administration and some of the stances that he takes, but I
will tell you that when the report comes out and in our
conversations with Vice President Cheney, conservation will be
a part of the report, renewable, sun and wind power will be a
part of the report, new sources of energy, discovering new
sources of oil and coal and natural gas will be a part of the
report, nuclear energy will be a part of the report. New
technologies such as fuel cells will be a part of the report.
They suggested geothermal power. Geothermal is a power that is
used in some areas.
But if we look at some of the things that the Democratic
Party has done just recently on TV, I saw the chairman of the
Democratic National Committee on TV slamming Bush for his
energy policy and holding up a picture of Yellowstone National
Park with an oil well over it and said, this is Bush's policy.
Then next was one of the Grand Canyon with an oil derrick over
the top of it saying this is what Bush wanted, drilling in our
national parks. Nobody has suggested drilling in Yellowstone.
Nobody has suggested drilling in any of our national parks.
They have said that we ought to look in our national monuments
which we do drilling in now and look at the reserves we have
there such as the ANWR and other places. And then the DNC put
on a commercial which suggested a young lady holding up a
glass of water and saying, ``Mommy, could I have more arsenic
in my water?'' And then there was a child with a hamburger
saying, ``Could I have more salmonella in my hamburger?'' It
seems to me that the DNC has taken on the same characteristic
that the extreme environmental movement has taken on where
raising money has become more important than the truth. They
will say anything to try to discredit this President and the
policies that he sets forward.
[[Page H2015]]
That is exactly what the extreme environmental movement has
done. They have stolen the true grass-roots environmental
movement. This series of articles that was written in the
Sacramento Bee newspaper, and I would commend them to anyone
who wants to look at how these groups are funded and some of
the things that they are doing, I would like to go through
some of the provisions of these articles and some of the
things that they are doing because I think it is important for
the American people to know where that $15 that they are
contributing or that $25 or $100 or $10,000 that they are
contributing to some of these groups is going and what they
are going for. One of the concerns is that, as I said earlier,
the extreme environmental movement has taken over the
grass-roots environmental movement. It is no longer about
saving the environment; it is about raising money. They spend
an awful lot of their funds raising money.
One of the letters written by the Defenders of Wildlife
says:
"Dear Friend, I need your help to stop an impending
slaughter. Otherwise, Yellowstone National Park, an American
wildlife treasure, could soon become a bloody killing field.
And the victims will be hundreds of wolves and defenseless
wolf pups."
So begins a fund-raising letter from one of America's
fastest-growing wildlife groups, Defenders of Wildlife.
Using the popular North American gray wolf as the hub of an
ambitious campaign, Defenders has assembled a financial track
record that would impress Wall Street. In 1999, donations
jumped 28 percent to a record $17.5 million. The group's net
assets, a measure of financial stability, grew to $14.5
million, another record. And according to its 1999 annual
report, Defenders spent donors' money wisely, keeping
fund-raising and management costs to a lean 19 percent of
expenses.
But there is another side to Defenders' dramatic growth.
Pick up copies of its Federal tax returns and you will find
that its five highest paid business partners are not firms
that specialize in wildlife conservation. They are national
direct mail and telemarketing companies. You will also find
that in calculating its fund-raising expenses, Defenders
borrows a trick from the business world. It dances with
digits, finds opportunity in obfuscation.
Using an accounting loophole, it classifies millions of
dollars spent on direct mail and telemarketing not as
fund-raising but as public education and environmental
activism. Take away that loophole and Defenders' 19 percent
fund-raising and management tab leaps above 50 percent,
meaning more than half of every dollar donated to save wolf
pups helped nourish the organization instead.
That was high enough to earn Defenders a D rating from the
American Institute of Philanthropy, an independent, nonprofit
watchdog that scrutinizes nearly 400 charitable groups.
It is interesting when one looks down the list of some of
the groups, some of the environmental groups did very well.
The Nature Conservancy was an A minus; Environmental Defense
was a B; Greenpeace was a D; Defenders of Wildlife was a D.
That is based on the amount of money they actually give to the
cause for which they are raising the funds; how much of it
goes into their organization to support fund-raising.
So many of the dollars that people are giving, because they
read these articles in the newspaper that support protecting
wolves and other types of things, people send in their $15 or
so. Much of that money, over half of it in many cases, does
not go to saving wolves; it goes to raising more money or to
the organization or, as the chairman suggested, to the
salaries of some of these individuals in these organizations.
One of the other things that sort of concerns me, well it
concerns me a lot, is the massive waste in this fund-raising.
The Wilderness Society mailed 6.2 million membership
solicitations; an average of 16,986 pieces of mail a day. This
is mail fatigue.
The letters that come with the mailers are seldom dull.
They are steeped in outrage. They tell of a planet in
perpetual environmental shock, a world victimized by
profit-hungry corporations, and they do so not with precise
scientific prose but with boastful and often inaccurate
sentences that scream and shout. Some of the examples were
given in the Sacramento Bee. From the New York-based Rain
Forest Alliance, "By this time tomorrow, nearly 100
species of wildlife will tumble into extinction."
The fact is, no one knows how rapidly species are going
extinct. The Alliance figures an extreme estimate that counts
tropical beetles and other insects, including ones not yet
known to science, in its definition of wildlife.
Another example from the Wilderness Society: We will fight
to stop reckless clear-cutting on national forests in
California and the Pacific Northwest that threatens to destroy
the last of America's unprotected ancient forests in as little
as 20 years.
Fact: The national forest logging has dropped dramatically
in recent years. In California, clear-cutting on national
forests dipped to 1,395 acres in 1998, down 89 percent from
1990.
From the Defenders of Wildlife again, "Will you not
please adopt a furry little pup like Hope?" Hope is a
cuddly brown wolf. Hope was triumphantly born in Yellowstone.
Fact: There never was a pup named Hope. Says John Valerie,
Chief of Research at Yellowstone National Park, "We do
not name wolves. We number them."
Since wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone in 1995,
their numbers have increased from 14 to about 160. The program
has been so successful that Yellowstone officials now favor
removing animals from the Federal endangered species list.
One of my favorites that I want to talk for just a minute
about again comes from the Defenders of Wildlife, and I wish I
had some blow-ups of it, but it is a poison alert. ``Wolves in
Danger,'' one of the sections that runs in the newspaper or
letter that goes out to individuals, a fund-raising letter.
Another one that says, ``a special gift when you join our
pack,'' and it has pictures of these cuddly wolves.
More than 160 million environmental fund-raising pitches
swirled through the U.S. mail last year. Some used the power
of cute animals to attract donors. The problem is that in many
cases those campaigns were less than honest. And this was the
pitch, and this is the one that caught my attention, in
Salmon, Idaho, which is in my district. In Salmon, Idaho,
antiwolf extremists committed a horrible crime; they killed
two Yellowstone wolves with lethal poison, compound 1080.
"Please do not allow antiwolf extremists to kill our wild
wolves. These wolf families do not deserve to die. Please, we
need your help now." And then, of course, they solicit a
contribution.
The fact is, the two wolves were not Yellowstone wolves but
wolves reintroduced by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service into
central Idaho, against the objections of the State of Idaho to
reintroduction of those wolves.
Some wolves were killed illegally, but the population of
wolves continues to increase at a pace faster than Federal
wolf recovery officials had anticipated. The government
expects to remove wolves from the Federal endangered species
list in 3 to 4 years. In fact, in Idaho we have already met
our commitment of 10 mating pairs. The problem is that they
take Montana and Wyoming together and say we have to have 30
breeding pairs within the entire region.
Wolves are overpopulating Idaho better than anyone had
anticipated, and they are using these instances, this group,
Defenders of Wildlife, to raise money to try to save wolves.
Unfortunately, much of the pleading that they do with the
American public at best can be called dishonest.
I, like the chairman, want to save the environment. We want
to make sure that what we do is compatible with the species
and protecting species. But we also think that human beings
play a role in this environment and in our world, and that
human beings ought to be considered in this whole equation.
Look at what the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden) is
going through right now, where they have taken 170,000 acres
of 200,000 acres of irrigated land that will not have water
this year because a judge has ruled that the sucker fish that
they are trying to protect is more important than those
people.
[[Page H2016]]
Mr. HANSEN. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman from
Idaho (Mr. Simpson) for his very interesting comments.
Mr. Speaker, let me point out, we both got into the idea of
how much money these folks bring in. I have a chart here that
points out some of the money that is brought in. Look at the
amount of money that came in in one year to these
organizations. And then the question comes up, well, what do
they spend it for?
When we first got into this thing, we were arguing the
idea, are these the people that have the fire in their bosom
to go out and take care of the public land? Well, no, as we
both discussed in the last while, it is not that. It is more
of an idea of raising more money and more money and more
money. And where is it spent?
I would like to give a little example, if I could, about an
environmental group in the State of Utah, and I would hasten
to say that if that is what the public wants, fine. If the
public wants this money to just go into paying lawyers, paying
marketers, paying advertising, K Street-type of thing, Madison
Avenue, fine. But I thought that most of us who got involved
in this thing did not want that. I thought we wanted to
restore the forests and the clean water and the wildlife, and
do it in a way that is environmentally sound and at the same
time to take good care of the energy.
Let me just refer to this one group. They are called the
Southern Utah Wilderness Society. Nice people are there, and
some of them, I think, are a little misled, but they probably
think the same thing about me. This group raises more than $2
million each year in donations from hard-working people who
care about protecting our environment. The money is raised
under the idea of protecting Utah wilderness lands. Send this
group some money and you will help wilderness in the Colorado
plateau, you are told.
So they send out these beautiful calendars saying, this is
what you will protect. However, some of it is in national
parks. Only one was in that area, but it was a pretty calendar
anyway.
However, when you look at their tax reports, you find that
not one dime of this money is actually spent on the
environment. Not a penny goes to plant a tree, restore a
streambed, or protect an acre of ground in Utah or anywhere
else; not a dollar to create a habitat to take care of an
animal.
What this group does is, they lobby for the passage of a
wilderness legislation. In fact, they lobby to pass virtually
the same old, tired, worn-out legislation every year, but they
keep raising the ante.
I find it interesting that that group went with me and we
have said, now, look, no one from Utah really wants this. They
said, oh, go back to the time that Congressman Owens was here;
he wanted it and he introduced it.
In those days, what they do not realize is Congressman
Owens was then a member of the majority party, which was then
the Democratic Party. The President was a Democrat. The House
and the Senate were Democrat, and I was the ranking member of
the committee and they never, ever asked for a hearing. So I
wonder how serious they were about it in those days.
As a recent Associated Press story noted, the only impact
this bill has in the last decade are the trees that were
killed to provide for the paper on which the bill is printed
year after year. They are fierce lobbyists. They have a staff
of 20 attorneys, lobbyists, and strategists who operate
offices in four cities, including Washington, D.C.
They spent only $11,000 in 1999 in grassroot efforts to
reach out to the public, though they claim their primary
reason for existence is to educate the public about the
environment; but they spent nearly $1 million in the last 4
years to lobby to get their wilderness legislation passed.
I privately believe that the last thing in the world this
group wants is to pass that bill. That is why they keep moving
the goal posts. That is why the numbers keep going up. Above
all, this organization is a self-perpetuating consumer of
resource and energy. They deal in volumes of paper and
plastic. They issue their own credit cards, the Affinity
credit card. That is what our environment needs, more credit
cards.
They do a rich business in the sale of videos, T-shirts,
hats, books, posters. Most of these products are made from
nondegradable materials like plastic, or require the cutting
down of trees and the use of paper. They send out more than
100,000 newsletters, fliers and bulletins each year. That is a
lot of trees, and that does not even include their reports,
press releases, and lawsuits. They are aggressive users of
electricity. Four offices. All these things they talk about.
Now I would like to just say something about the lawsuits.
If I could move this one chart here, look at the number of
lawsuits that the environmental community has done between
1992 and 2000; 435 environmental lawsuits. Now I thought we
were out here taking care of the environment. I did not know
we were just in this thing of litigating. It is the most
litigious society we have ever had, but let us litigate again.
This is how much they have made, $36.1 million in legal
fees paid by the U.S. Government, whether they won or lost.
That is your taxpayer money, $31 million right there. If they
win or lose, they get that money. One case netted $3.5 million
for the Sierra Club, and it was questionable whether it was
even endangered.
The average award is in excess of $70,000 and they risk
nothing. So why go out and get you to give them money to plant
a tree, to pick up the garbage, to be aware of these things,
to take good care of the environment, when you can get in
court and make that kind of money?
Let us be smart about this thing. This thing is not in
there to protect the environment.
That reminds me of when I was back here as a freshman in
1981. The Secretary of Interior was Jim Watt. He was supposed
to come in and see me with Senator Garn over in Indian School.
That morning I received in the mail something from a group who
was going to save the Chesapeake Bay that was all ruined. It
said, "Mr. Hansen, if you will send us $10, $20, $30,
$40, $50, we will do our best to meet with the Interior
Committee and Secretary Watt who is ruining the Chesapeake
Bay."
So that afternoon, the Secretary walked in. I said,
"Jim, I want to show you this." He laughed, and he
said, "What do you mean? I put $285 million into
protecting the Chesapeake Bay." And he said, "That
is just poppycock."
So I sent them $10 because I was curious what was going to
happen. Six months later, I got a letter back. It said,
"Mr. Hansen, due to your generous contribution, we have
met with the Interior Committee of the House," which I
sit on or was sitting on in those days also, and they never
walked in. "And we have influenced the Interior
Department to do their very best to take care of this terrible
problem, and we have that. And if you will send us some more
money, another generous contribution, we will be there to help
do these other things." And I thought, what poppycock. It
is just like these people who prey upon the elderly regarding
Social Security when half of those allegations are not true.
Well, I can just tell you, you just rest assured. Members
here on the Committee on Resources, we are not going to drill
in parks as the gentleman from Idaho was mentioning some
people say. That is not going to happen. We are not going to
hurt or rape or pillage the ground. If anything, in a moderate
and reasonable way, we are standing ready to take care of the
ground.
So I guess we can ask ourselves the question, do you want
to pay attorneys? Do we not do enough with the attorneys
retirement bills around here anyway? I do not know why we have
to make it easy for other people to do that. Those folks seem
to do pretty well. American trial attorneys do extremely well.
I do not think we want to do that.
I think your money should go to take care of the public
grounds of America and take good care of it. I would hope that
every American is a good conservationist and a good
environmentalist in the true sense of the word, and that is
what I am hoping would happen.
So if you want to spend your money, put it somewhere where
it does some good. Put it somewhere where we can have access
to the public ground, and while we have access to the public
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ground, let us each one of us take good care of it.
I took my children, we went to the very top of the Uenda
mountains, King's Peak, highest peak in the Uendas. I have
taught my children when we go in an area, and we find all
kinds of things, we found 5 beer cans right on the top of this
beautiful pristine area. Of course, we crushed them and took
them out. Our theory is, is clean up ours and somebody else's,
and take it out when we are backpacking. I wish we would all
do that.
I am happy to yield to the gentleman from California (Mr.
Radanovich) the chairman of the Western Caucus and an
extremely important member of the Committee on Resources.
Mr. RADANOVICH. I want to thank the gentleman for putting
together this special order regarding this topic, which I
think is very important to the American people. As we are
speaking here with an audience of probably over 1 million
people tonight, I really want to kind of pose a question to
the American people.
We were dealing with an issue that is important to you and
important to me with regard to local influence over Federal
Government lands and the management plans of our National
Forests and our Federal lands, and it was said by some critic
about local influences that those people that are closest to
the resources really do not speak in the interests of the
American people on public lands, which are lands for the
American people, and that somehow the national organizations
that send out contribution forms like which the gentleman just
mentioned are somehow speaking for them.
In some ways I wanted to agree that the local perspective
on some of these resources, and keep in mind the Quincy
Library Group, which is a group in California of local people
that work together with Federal forest lands to develop forest
policies that are not only good for the forests, but also good
for the local communities, and it was a better plan than by
far any Washington bureaucrat could put together.
My concern was that while people might understand that a
local person's influence may not represent the best interests
in the American public for public lands, there is another side
to that too, and that is when you have extreme sellouts like
the list that you just mentioned of people that solicit, for
any reason or another, money to keep their influence, it does
not necessarily mean that those groups have the environment as
the best interest in their minds and in their hearts, and that
they pursue public policy that is good for the American people
and good for America's public lands and environment, because
it is not.
What it really boils down to is power and influence and
keeping that. I think you have done that in an excellent way
in demonstrating tonight it is not necessarily about good
environmental policy for Federal lands; it is about power,
keeping power, keeping power and influence. I think that the
Federal policies become secondary to that.
It is proven by some of the foolish notions that have come
up in these last years, like roads moratoriums and the Sierra
Nevada framework, a nightmare for the people in our Sierra
Forest in California, and some issues where people with good
intentions and maybe fears that on the Earth we are becoming
too populated and that we have to reserve and guard these
public lands at all costs, but are basically operating out of
fear and not good common sense when it comes to management of
public lands.
So I just am grateful that the gentleman has pinpointed
even the Sacramento Bee in California did a series of articles
on the environmental community and how they are such a
money-raising operation, whose sole interest I think these
days has become to remain an influence, and secondarily was
the environmental policy that they promoted, that it has
really has become out of control.
I think the American public needs to take a second guess,
because groups like the Sierra Club and NRDC do not corner the
market on good environmental policy in this country. I think
the American people need to realize that. It needs to be
balanced by somebody who is there.
It is like an on-site landlord, rather than somebody who is
never on- site on a piece of rental property. The one who is
on site knows what is going on, knows the detail, knows the
property better than anybody else. It is no different in our
Federal lands with the Sierra Club and the NRDC and groups
like that depend on people that are miles and miles away and
never see the resource. So how do they know one way or the
other if they are being improperly influenced by these groups
or not?
They do not know. They tend to react on the pictures of
Bambi on the TV or mailers that they get, and they give money.
But these people need to know those groups are not necessarily
promoting the best environmental policy for public lands. That
is why I wanted to come down and kind of reinforce it as to
what you were saying, is that people need to really be aware
of these groups, and they need to learn to second guess them
and do not take for granted that what they are doing is good
environmental policy.
I thank the gentleman for holding this special order in
order to bring up points like that, as well as many of the
other points that you brought up.
Mr. HANSEN. I thank the gentleman from California.
I yield to the gentleman from Idaho.
Mr. SIMPSON. I thank the chairman, and I thank the
gentleman from California for his comments. I agree with him
fully.
The chairman made a good point that, unfortunately, this
money that is spent on litigation is money that could go, it
is taxpayers' money to start with, and could go to protecting
the environment. When I met with Chief Dombeck a couple of
years ago and talked with him about some of the problems we
were having in Idaho in our natural forest, he said to me one
of the problems they have in the Forest Service is making a
decision, because they know that no matter what decision they
make, they are going to be sued.
Last year in this article from the Sacramento Bee, during
the 1990's, the government paid out $31.6 million in
attorney's fees for 434 environmental cases brought against
Federal agencies. The average award per case was more than
$70,000. One long-running lawsuit in Texas that involved an
endangered salamander netted lawyers for the Sierra Club and
other plaintiffs more than $3.5 in taxpayers' funds, as the
chairman has already pointed out.
That is money that could be used for other environmental
purposes and actually cleaning up the environment and taking
care of the backlog in maintenance we have in our National
Forests and in our National Parks.
Again, it is taxpayer money. One of the main arguments for
the roadless issue was that the Forest Service did not have
the money to maintain the roads that they currently had, and
so if they couldn't maintain those, how could they justify
building more roads, so we might as well make them roadless.
If we are spending all that money on lawsuits, then certainly
we do not have the money to take care of the roads.
One of the things that was interesting in this series of
articles is that the effect of these things are actually
damaging to the environment oftentimes. Let me read a portion
of these articles.
Wildfire today is inflicting nightmarish wounds, injuries
made worse by a failure to heed scientific warnings. For
example, and there are three of them here that they list. In
1994, Wallace Covington, a Professor of Forest Ecology at
Northern Arizona University and a nationally recognized fire
scientist and a colleague warned that the Kendrick Mountain
wilderness area in northern Arizona was so crowded with
vegetation that it was ready to explode. ``Delay will only
perpetuate fuel build-up and increase the potential for
uncontrolled and destructive wildfires,'' they wrote in a
scientific analysis for the Kaibab National Forest. Some
thinning was done, but not enough. Last year, a large fire
swept through the region carving an apocalyptic trail of
destruction.
What happened is much worse ecologically than a clear cut,
much worse, Covington said, and that fire is in the future. It
is happening again and again. We are going to have skeletal
landscapes.
The other example, listening to fire and forest scientists,
Martha Ketelle pleaded in 1996 for permission to log and thin
an incendiary mass of storm-
[[Page H2018]]
killed timber in California's Trinity Alps. ``This is a
true emergency of vast magnitude,'' Ketelle, then supervisor
of the Six Rivers National Forest, wrote to her boss in San
Francisco. ``It is not a matter of if a fire will occur, but
how extensive the damage will be when the fire does occur.''
Because of an environmental appeal, the project bogged
down. Then, in 1999, a fire found its way into the area. It
spewed smoke for hundreds of miles, incinerated Spotted Owl
habitat and triggered soil erosion and key damage in a key
salmon spawning watershed.
These stories are something I hear about daily as I go back
to Idaho from my resource advisory group and my ag advisory
groups and I talk to them. We did more damage last year in
Idaho with the Nation's largest wildfires. We did more damage
to the environment, to salmon habitat, to spawning habitat,
than was done by any logging practices that ever have been
done. And today as the snow melts and the rains come,
hopefully the rains come, that erosion is going to filter down
into those streams and it is going to cover the beds, and
consequently you are going to have a difficult time with
managing salmon habitat.
So, oftentimes these efforts to address these environmental
concerns, the potential for catastrophic wildfire, today the
Forest Service says something like 35 million acres of our
National Forests are at risk of catastrophic wildfires. These
are not just fires, but these are cataclysmic fires that burn
everything, they burn so hot. They burn the micro-organisms,
they sterilize the soil down to as much as 18 inches, and for
years and years those forests never recover, if they ever do
recover.
We still have spots in Idaho from the 1910 fire that
nothing will grow on. We do more damage to the environment by
not proactively managing it. Of course, every time you try to
do that, there is an environmental lawsuit from someone.
Now, they say, well, maybe we can do thinning if it is not
for commercial purposes, as if commercial or business or
profit adds some damage to the environment that thinning just
to thin does not do. Of course, there are the Sierra Club
groups that want no cut.
The fact is we have to proactively manage these forces, and
we can do that. It was managed by fire before. Now we have to
get in and do some management so that we do not have these
catastrophic fires. Unfortunately, at every step of the way,
we are fought by groups who think that man should not touch
the forest, that they should be left as natural as they ever
were before we came.
Mr. HANSEN. I thank the gentleman.
Mr. Speaker, let me just say a word about what the
gentleman from Idaho just talked about. We were having a
hearing not too long ago and, lo and behold, one of the big
clubs was there, and I asked this vice president the question,
why is it that you resist managing the public ground? Why is
it that you resist the idea that we can go in and do some
cleaning, thinning, prescribe fires and take care of it and
keep a wholesome forest, like many of the private
organizations have?
We now have, as the gentleman from Idaho said, fuel load.
What is that? It is dead trees, it is dead fall, it is brush.
So now you have the potential of this summer, as last summer,
is a careless smoker, a fire caused by a campfire that is left
unattended, or a lightning strike, which is one of the bigger
ones, and here we go again, we are going to burn the forest.
This person from this organization answered me and said,
because it is not nature's way. Nature's way is just let it do
its thing. I do not know if I bought into that. You get down
to the idea of 1905 we started the Forest Service, and if you
read the charter of the Forest Service, it is to maintain and
take care of the forests of America. And that means cleaning
it, thinning it, fighting fires, instead of getting ourselves
in what we had in the year 2000, the heaviest fire year in
record. And I dare say, and I am no prophet, but I think the
fuel load is still there after these 8 years of mismanagement
we have had, and we now have 2001 waiting for another one,
because talk to your local forester and the people, Mr.
Speaker, those who are watching this should talk to their
district rangers, talk to them and ask the question have we
still got that fuel load? The answer is a resounding yes.
Here we go again. We are going to spend taxpayers' money
all over the place, because we have not done what they said in
1905 we should have done, and that is manage the forest.
This new administration luckily has a man of the stature of
Dale Bosworth, now the chief; and I am sure we will see some
management.
I have to ask the question. Does it mean to be a good
environmentalist if we let the forest burn to the ground? Does
that mean being a good environmentalist? If that is so, I hope
there are not too many of them out there. Does it mean the
idea that we drain some of our water resources, like Lake
Powell that services the whole southwest part of America, and
that is the way we live because we have got water, does that
mean being a good one? Yet one of the biggest organizations
around in their book, the Sierra Club, had a whole four or
five pages on let a river run through it and drain Lake
Powell.
Does the gentleman want to comment on that?
Mr. RADANOVICH. Mr. Speaker, I do, and I want to comment on
one specific thing, because I think I have an unusual
perspective on being from California, I say to the gentleman,
and that is because we are going through the California energy
crisis.
Mr. HANSEN. Mr. Speaker, I have to be careful there to the
gentleman.
Mr. RADANOVICH. I know, and I love my State and it is the
best State in the world, and do not mess with California.
But what I am saying is that we have really seen the
overinfluence of environmental zealotism in California and we
are viewing that in our energy policy. We have had the worst
problem with the nimby attitude on the development of energy
generation resources in California, but it has all been backed
by our top environmental groups who have really wanted not the
population of California to grow, so they basically forced
officials to stick their heads in the sand and pretend it was
not happening until we have an energy crisis like now and an
upcoming water shortage.
Unfortunately, California is going to get to the point
where they turn the faucet, they get no water; they flip the
switch, they get no electricity because of the environmental
influence on public policy in the State of California, and it
is not just in California, it is happening all over the world.
This summer, we are going to have to face the fact of we
either force a temporary relaxation of air quality standards
or we are going to have rolling blackouts and people are going
to be dead, and those are the choices that we are facing in
California. People are going to face that choice all over the
country because of the undue influence of the environmental
community in this country right now.
Mr. HANSEN. Mr. Speaker, we are going to see it this
summer, if I may say to the gentleman from California. This
summer is going to be the biggest wakeup call that America has
had for a long time. We have had 8 years of neglect on these
things which is now going to catch up with us.
We are asking, what does it mean to be a good
environmentalist? Does it mean to deny access to the public
grounds of America for Americans? I think not. Does it mean
that we protect the Housefly over children? I do not think so.
In southern Utah we have a desert tortoise and we have spent
$33,000 per turtle and we cannot really say that it is
endangered. Do you want to know what our per pupil unit is to
pay for our kids every year down there? Mr. Speaker, $3,600.
So I guess the turtle is more important in some people's mind.
So it comes down to this: can Americans, who are great and
wonderful and good-thinking people, can we come to some common
sense on this, or have we become way too extreme in this
issue? I think tonight we have tried to make that case that we
feel we have.
I yield the gentleman from Idaho.
Mr. SIMPSON. Mr. Speaker, I think the point has been made
that unfortunately, the environmental movement has become far
too extreme. That does not mean that there are not good
environmentalists out there. There are many housewives and
husbands across the Nation that want to take care of
our land and our country, I being one of those, and I am sure
the gentleman from Utah and the gentleman from California
also. But as I was saying earlier, many of these things do not
really address the environment, they hurt it more than they
address it. They are trying to use environmental issues for
other means, and I will tell my colleagues an example in
Idaho.
We have a sage grouse problem, declining sage grouse
populations, and we are trying to find out why and what we can
do to control it. The Fish and Wildlife Service and the Idaho
Fish and Game have been studying this for 20 years, and they
decided that predators are a main problem with sage grouse
populations. They eat the young chicks. So they proposed a
study to take 2 areas, one where they do some predator control
this year and the other one where they did not do any predator
control and examined the 2 of them and watch the sage grouse
populations. But 2 environmental groups have sued them to stop
the study because they want to protect the sage grouse, they
say, but their real goal is, their argument is to get cattle
off of this land. And if it is shown that sage grouse can be
protected by removing some of the predators, the argument for
removing cattle goes away. So they do not want this study
done.
So is it truly their aim to try to save the sage grouse, or
is it their true aim to try to get cattle off of public land,
regardless of what cattle does to the sage grouse?
When I want to look at a true conservationist, an original
conservationist, I look at the farmers and ranchers of this
country, because it is the land that produces the crop that
produces the grass that the cows eat, that is what they do for
living and they take care of it; overwhelming majorities of
them take care of it. So when I want some true conservation
issues, I generally talk to my farmers and ranchers.
I yield back to the gentleman.
Mr. HANSEN. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for joining
me this evening.
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