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A decade ago, New Environmentalism was broadly denounced as being a thinly disguised effort by corporate America, working through free-market think tanks and ideologues such as Gale Norton, to weaken environmental laws so as to more efficiently transfer our shared commons to the control of special interest. A decade ago, only the most market-oriented of conservation organizations dared to openly affiliate themselves with those New Environmentalists who were clearly seen as leading the public lands privatization agenda.
A decade ago, the Battle for the Wilderness and the efforts of nature lovers to protect and preserve that which they loved, had nothing to do with New Environmentalism. A decade ago, the defense of fundamental principles, the exercise of raw idealism and the expenditure of effort in order to create tools that would facilitate attainment of a better future, were as important as successfully waged battles and well-deserved victories.
Today much has changed.
Pasted below is an Op-Ed published today in the Idaho Statesman. It is about the Central Idaho Economic Development and Recreation Act. Some see CIEDRA as the "Perfect Compromise". I believe the author of this piece looks upon CIEDRA as "Privatization Perfected" -- and I agree with that assessment.
CIEDRA is also about the abandonment of principles by those within the conservation community who are supporting this legislation. It is about the exercise of raw unvarnished pragmatism and the ill-advised expenditure of a great deal of conservation capital in order to create tools that will result in a worse future -- and one largely devoid of genuine victories. It is about the abandonment of love for nature, and accepting the consequences that come from love lost.
Similarly stated, New Environmentalism is about the abandonment of Environmentalism and accepting the consequences.
Scott
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Rep. Mike Simpson has wasted time, taxpayer dollars on CIEDRA
By John Rember - Idaho Statesman
Edition Date: 12/10/07
This fall, along with other residents of Custer County, I received a
slick, taxpayer-funded brochure from Mike Simpson's office. It named 15
trails in the Boulder-White Clouds that would be forever motorized by
Simpson's CIEDRA legislation. It named four areas in the BWC forever
open to snowmobiles, and named the federal lands that would be given to
Custer County for its general fund and for affordable housing.
It's safe to say that Simpson will not send the same brochure to the
rest of Idaho. A wilderness dissected by motorized corridors is not a
wilderness, it's a marketing device for trophy-home developers. Gifts
of federal land to Custer County and its cities transform a public
trust into congressional pork.
Simpson says CIEDRA is "a perfect compromise." True, but only if you
exclude from the discussion the many thinking Idahoans who see it as a
perfect start to the privatization of Idaho's federal lands.
Simpson has said the bill doesn't establish precedents, ignoring the
fact that precedents are always discovered by lawyers going over a bill
after it's been passed. He has said that the land being given away is
mostly sagebrush, which is true. Similar sagebrush, with worse views
and more zoning restrictions, goes for more than $2 million per acre in
the Wood River Valley.
I am not a free-market true believer like Simpson, but even I know that
artificially devaluing trophy home lots for "affordable housing"
creates backroom deals that end up denying that same housing to working
Idahoans.
In the seven years since the Idaho Conservation League and Simpson
cooked up CIEDRA at a Redfish Lake retreat, the world has changed. We
are about to run out of cheap energy. Our country has gone deeply into
debt. Human costs aside, the Simpson-supported war in Iraq will cost
the future Custer County - and the future Idaho - far more money than
CIEDRA could ever bring it.
These national issues directly affect Idaho's environment and its
recreation industries. The electricity-generating Columbia Basin dams
will never be breached once oil hits $200/bbl. Neither will "locked-in"
recreational gasoline survive the rationing that $200 oil will bring.
Saddling the Forest Service with CIEDRA's unfunded mandates in a time
of war will promote greater control of federal lands by pay-to-play
private contractors.
All this time, Simpson has been the congressman with the nation's
premier energy research laboratory in his district. The time and tax
money he's put into CIEDRA could have been far better spent on INL
research into solar, geothermal and wind energy, as well as on
developing safer nuclear power. If time is a natural resource, Simpson
has wasted a lot of it.
The ICL is claiming Frank Church's legacy, but they're promoting a
crippled wilderness at the cost of privatizing SNRA land. The Sawtooths
and Boulder-White Clouds remain wild and untrammeled not because of the
Wilderness Act but because SNRA private-land easements have kept
Sawtooth Valley from becoming another Wood River Valley.
SNRA private-land policy is the reason the banks of the Salmon River
remain public space, and the reason the real estate under the Sawtooths
has not been carved into ever smaller and more expensive bits.
If the ICL truly wants the mantle of Frank Church, they could do worse
than to leave the lands he protected with PL 92-400 alone.
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- Privatization 
