National Opinions

To save endangered species, environmentalists need to listen to their fiercest critics

Beda, an assistant professor of history at the University of Oregon, researches and teaches about Pacific Northwest history, environmental history and labor history and is currently at work on a book about Northwest timber workers.

This month, the Trump administration announced changes to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) that would require the government to consider economic effects before listing a species as threatened or endangered. This move sparked stories about all the species pulled from the brink of extinction by the ESA. The law was a massive success, journalists and environmentalists claimed, and these new changes threaten to undo many of the gains in species protection made over the past four decades.

But missing from most of the coverage of the rule changes were the voices of people who had often paid a steep price for those success stories: loggers put out of work by the Spotted Owl's ESA listing in 1990 or ranchers whose herds had been attacked by grey wolves. These men and women who work in resource extraction industries actually care deeply for the land and have a long and proud tradition of fighting to protect nature. Yet they are siding with the Trump Administration over the ESA rule changes. And that's the result of decades of environmentalists ignoring the economic consequences of the ESA on these populations.

Rather than fighting these loggers and miners, environmentalists who care about saving the ESA would be wise to listen to their criticism. As history shows, the environmental movement has been far more effective when it has included rural people and worked to balance their economic concerns with protecting nature.

To see this, it's useful to go back to the 1950s, when environmentalists looked very different than they do today. Most tended to come from rural communities. Some had even spent their formative years in mines or logging camps.

Take Howard Zahniser. Before he became one of the most influential environmentalists of the 20th century, the president of the Wilderness Society and the architect of the 1964 Wilderness Act, he lived alongside coal miners and loggers in his boyhood home of Tinesta, Pennsylvania. While in later years Zahniser became a fierce critic of both logging and mining, he always retained an affinity for these industries' workers. He had fished the creeks of rural Pennsylvania alongside them and understood they loved nature as much as him. And he understood that jobs in those industries provided the only real economic opportunities for struggling rural communities.

Zahniser brought this sensibility to his efforts to pass the Wilderness Act in the 1950s, often fighting just as hard for the economic health of rural communities as he did for the health of the environment. In fact, Zahniser believed you couldn't have one without the other. "Our hope in preserving areas free from lumbering," he wrote in a 1955 policy statement, "is dependent on our ability to achieve a prosperous lumbering based on sound timber management within the forests and woodlots outside the wilderness."

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Because he was just as concerned with good jobs as he was pristine nature, Zahniser found a strong ally in his efforts to pass the Wilderness Act: Northwest timber workers.

Throughout the late-1950s, members of the International Woodworkers of America (IWA), then the largest union in the Northwest, joined with the Wilderness Society in pushing for expanded protections for the nation's forests. The union's leaders lobbied congressional allies, its members packed public hearings and in a few instances it threatened work stoppages and strikes when the timber industry lobbied against the bill.

It worked. In fact, Frank Church, the Idaho senator who sponsored the final bill that passed in 1964, said he believed the support of the woodworkers turned the tide. Every time a timber industry lobbyist or senator opposing the bill claimed the act would cost too many jobs, Church could point to the IWA and say that the woodworkers certainly didn't think so.

Coal miners had similar relationships with environmentalists as they worked together to pass clean air protections. Fisherman were part of the coalition to enact clean water standards. And industrial workers in steel and auto manufacturing helped expand nature preserves.

But sometime in the late-1960s, the environmental movement began to change. Environmentalists started coming less from rural communities and more from cities. Raised in affluence, these new environmentalists saw nature as a place of escape the pollution and crowds of cities, and they saw rural workers less as allies and more as opponents of their efforts to protect nature. These are the people who shaped the ESA. As a result, the legislation protected animals, but ignored, or even overburdened, rural workers.

This could be clearly seen in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s during the effort to get the Spotted Owl ESA-listed. Radical environmentalists spiked trees and destroyed logging equipment, all in an effort to save the owl. More mainstream environmentalists filed court injunctions to block timber sales. They believed by saving the owl they could start to repair the damage done to nature by intensive logging, and that the economic consequences were well worth the cost of more pristine forests.

Most in Northwestern timber working communities, however, disagreed. The timber economy went into freefall as protections for the Spotted Owl expanded. The unemployment rate in some towns topped what it had been in the Great Depression.

Of course, the Spotted Owl wasn't solely to blame for the rural Northwest's economic problems. Workers also faced capital flight and automation. But environmentalists turned a blind eye to these economic problems, breeding division in the environmental movement and even a sense of betrayal. "There are big things to be concerned about," Ellen Tigart, a woman living in an Oregon timber town told an interviewer, "saving the owl isn't one of them. We've got kids starving. We've got kids that are getting into serious trouble. We need work."

This same pattern played out across the late-20th-century West as rural workers and environmentalists fought over grizzlies, wolves, wildflowers, fungi and scores of other flora and fauna. But no matter the place and no matter the species, comments like Tigart's were common among people who felt that environmentalists now seemed to care more about the fate of animals than the lives of people.

Little surprise, then, that workers in these communities started voting for politicians who promised to stand up to the environmental movement and favor the economic lives of people over the fate of animals, no matter how hollow those promises often were.

The result has been a near-complete collapse of the worker-environmentalist partnership that had defined the environmental movement in earlier decades. And this divide has actually undermined the effectiveness of environmental policies like the ESA, despite the law's ostensible successes. Workers can apply pressure on their employers that environmental activists can't. Moreover, because they both live and labor in nature, workers often know the forests, grasslands and rivers better than urban environmentalists and can be the eyes and ears of the movement, documenting when an invasive species threatens a protected species or when a planned timber sale brushes too close to critical habitat.

The consequences of this divide go beyond the ESA as well. There's no denying that the current administration and energy companies are working to dismantle much of the environmental regulation enacted over the past decades, which would be devastating for both the environment and rural workers. But making allies of the rural working class requires that environmentalists reckon with the hardships expressed by someone like Tigart. One way to do that would be to embrace economic calculations when considering species protections.

Originally published by The Washington Post

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