Nevada: Nature's Guardians Still Face Disrespect
12/22/99
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Title: Nature's Guardians Still Face Disrespect
Source: The New York Times, commentary
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: December 22, 1999
Byline: Jeff Ruch
Elko County, Nevada, is the United States Forest Service's Middle
East. Contentious and entrenched in its resentments, it is a danger
zone where officials say violence can break out at any time.
Elko County is inside the largest national forest in the lower 48
states, the Humboldt-Toiyabe, and conflicts over grazing, logging and
mining dominate the local politics.
Five years ago, after fire bombs destroyed a Humboldt-Toiyabe
district ranger's office near Carson City (and, a week later, the van
in his home driveway), the Forest Service moved him out of Nevada,
saying it could no longer protect him from the backlash against his
attempts to enforce the law restricting cattle grazing on public
lands.
In 1996, Elko County turned its legal apparatus against federal
officials trying to protect public lands, convening a grand jury to
seek indictments of Humboldt-Toiyabe employees. Federal civil
servants were accused of violating edicts that the county
commissioners had passed, trying to override federal laws and make
itself the governing power in its part of the forest. The effort to
indict failed, but the battle merely moved to new fronts.
This year, a Nevada state assemblyman, cheered on by the lieutenant
governor, organized a mob to bulldoze open a federal road the Forest
Service had closed because washouts were polluting a stream inhabited
by the endangered bull trout. And in October, the supervisor of the
Humboldt-Toiyabe resigned, stating that "fed-bashing" was "a state-
sanctioned sport" in Nevada.
Though the flamboyant challenges to the federal government of the
mid-1990's abated after the shock of the Oklahoma City bombing in
1995, the number of reported death threats, discoveries of pipe
bombs, arsons of outbuildings and other incidents against the Forest
Service and its sister agency, the Bureau of Land Management, keeps
rising. Reports to law enforcers of threats or attacks against Forest
Service employees and facilities nearly doubled from 1995 through
1998, the last year for which statistics are available. Similar
reports from the Bureau of Land Management increased more than
fivefold from 1995 to 1999.
In her resignation letter, the Nevada forest supervisor, Gloria
Flora, called attention not only to the threats, but also to more
subtle forms of harassment and discrimination, like refusal to serve
Forest Service employees at local restaurants and motels. She decried
the poisonous political and social climate -- a problem compounded by
the lack of cooperation from federal prosecutors, particularly the
United States attorney in Nevada, in acting on complaints about many
kinds of crimes.
A memo this year from a Humboldt-Toiyabe law-enforcement agent
summarized 21 felonies and 52 misdemeanors that had been referred to
the Justice Department since 1990 without result. The cases ranged
from physical intimidation of federal employees to thefts of
artifacts and illegal grazing.
The heart of the Forest Service's work in the Humboldt-Toiyabe is to
manage the use of the land -- controlling grazing and logging, for
example, in a way that prevents the land's resources from being
overtaxed. When a federal environmental law is violated, as when a
rancher runs his cattle on federal land without permission, the
Forest Service has no alternative but to ask for federal prosecution.
Failure of the local United States attorney to follow through
encourages others to defy environmental restrictions and plays into
feelings of contempt for Forest Service employees.
Despite the Clinton administration's oratory about its commitment to
the environment, from 1996 through 1998, there were 27 percent fewer
prosecutions and 38 percent fewer convictions for environmental
crimes of all kinds than in 1989 through 1991, in the Bush
administration. The reason is not a lack of incidents to pursue.
There has also been a 26 percent rise in Justice Department
"declinations," or refusals to prosecute environmental crimes.
After Ms. Flora's resignation, the Forest Service and the Justice
Department set up a joint committee to study the severity of problems
in the Humboldt-Toiyabe. This overdue effort should not be confined
to Nevada. Even in less contentious areas than Elko County, federal
wildlife agents, land managers and agency lawyers, frustrated by a
lack of support from federal law enforcement agencies, are quietly
resigning, taking early retirement or transferring to less stressful
assignments.
The stakes in the conflicts transcend the latest attempt to reopen a
road or graze more cattle. The intensity of competing demands on our
public lands will only deepen with each passing year, making the job
of protecting our natural resources ever more difficult and,
unfortunately, dangerous. We should heed the warning flare in Elko
County.
Jeff Ruch is executive director of Public Employees for Environmental
Responsibility.