‘Rural cleansing’ gets media attention

When the Wall Street Journal lines up hammer and nail to drive home a point, a hard bang or two usually follows. Earlier this summer, the prestigious newspaper hit the nail on the head when it reported on the tactics used by some environmental groups to evict humans from wilderness and rural areas. Small communities and resource industries have complained about these “re-wilding” schemes for years, but to little avail, until WSJ’s Kimberley Strassel examined the plight of more than 1,000 embattled farmers in Oregon’s and California’s Klamath Basin.

Strassel’s column, titled “Rural Cleansing,” delved behind the federal government’s decision, in April of this year, to cut off irrigation water to 1,500 farms in the Klamath region. Environmental groups sought the cutoff as part of an effort to preserve two species of sucker fish listed as endangered in 1998. But several months later, the same environmentalists submitted a polished proposal calling for the government to buy-out the farmers and move them off their land. “This is what’s really happening in Klamath,” Strassel wrote, “call it rural cleansing — and it’s repeating itself in environmental battles across the country.” She went on to state that the goal of many environmental groups is no longer to protect nature, “it’s to expunge humans from the countryside.”

The tool of choice in the Klamath Basin (as in most other western areas) is the Endangered Species Act, though other preservation laws also provide useful ammunition for land-use battles. After the fish species were identified as endangered, federal agencies tried to balance the needs of fish and farmers by initiating programs to promote water conservation and manage water flows. The programs worked well enough until 1991, when a drought complicated conservation efforts. The Oregon Natural Resources Council (ONRC) — dubbed “the pit bull of Oregon’s environmental groups” — then sued the Bureau of Reclamation for failure to protect the fish. The first lawsuit failed, as did the second, in part because the farmers had legal water rights dating back to the early 1900s. But eventually the environmentalists found a sympathetic judge willing to cut water supplies to local farms. The value of an acre of farmland plunged to about US$35 from US$2,500, devastating not just the farmers but local businesses and the entire community.

A few months later, the ONRC unveiled a generous buyout offer of about US$4,000 per acre, though it has no intention of picking up the tab. It wants the government (read: taxpayers) to buy the land, and then it wants the government to declare the land off-limits to people, including those who have lived in the region for decades. After all, the ONRC argues, farmers should never have settled in such a dry area in the first place.

Strassel counters that if these farmers should be moved, why not the residents of San Diego and Los Angeles, not to mention most of the American Southwest? “All of these communities survive because of irrigation . . . water that could conceivably go to some other ‘environmental’ use,” she wrote.

Farther north, in the Yukon, a coalition of seven groups is calling for a halt to the territory’s “Protected Areas Strategy,” at least until land claims there are concluded. These groups withdrew from discussions after environmental groups convinced the government to set aside vast tracts of land through a secret, backdoor process tied to land-claims. Some of this land was rated as having the highest mineral potential in the territory.

Yukon citizens say they are overwhelmed by activist groups funded largely by 160 charitable foundations in the U.S. Collectively, these foundations dole out US$2.5 billion annually to an estimated 12,000 anti-development groups across North America. Most of these smaller groups are listed as charities, which ostensibly means that the funds they raise cannot be used for political activities, such as lobbying governments to set aside wilderness areas. Such rules are routinely and brazenly ignored.

For much of the past decade, British Columbia also was overwhelmed by anti-development groups that successfully lobbied the government to set aside as much as 25% of the province as parks, wilderness preserves and special management zones. The province’s economy — or at least the non-marijuana-growing portion of it — was almost destroyed in the process.

And farther afield, governments of developing nations are being overwhelmed by well-heeled environmental groups seeking to stop resource development or any other sort of foreign investment in their economies. As the minister of one South American nation said: “I have a serious question to the people who are making the donations [to these anti-development groups]: You are making a donation that is stopping the economic growth of my country; do you know what you are doing? What gives you the right to stop the economic growth of my country? Think hard before you make a donation to these groups.”

Strassel concluded her column with a similar question. “Do the people who give money to environmental groups realize that the end game is to evict people from their land? I doubt it.”

These questions show that more needs to be done to make the public aware of the high price of land withdrawals — and not just the economic price, but the human toll as well.