Wise Use Movement

The Wise Use movement was a coalition of broadly antienvironmental and antifederal organizations and political movements active in the United States from roughly the late 1980s through the late 1990s. The term wise use was strategically borrowed from Progressive-era conservationists, for whom it functioned very much like sustainable development, in both its ambiguity [Page 3120]and its emphasis. The Wise Use movement had three wings. The first, based in the rural West, centered on efforts by rural commodity producers to maintain their historical, privileged access to many public lands in the region for production. The second, the property rights movement, argued that governmental regulations affecting private property constituted a legal “taking” of a portion of that property, for which owners should be compensated. The third, centered in Washington, D.C., was a coordinated effort by regulated industries to repeal, weaken, or prevent many major national and international environmental laws and treaties. Each of these wings existed before and after the Wise Use movement per se; what distinguished the movement was their temporary alliance and commitment to a united agenda.

Wise Use was strongest in the rural West, where it was in part a cultural and political response to regional restructuring. Since 1980 or so, the rural West had seen dramatic declines in primary production industries and the concurrent growth of a service economy, rapidly increasing environmental priorities on public lands, and major demographic and political shifts. In reaction, Wise Use claimed to be a grassroots social movement, rooted in a regional culture, responding to overly intrusive outsiders. It defined itself mainly in opposition to the environmental movement and federal agencies governing land uses, which it portrayed as outsiders infringing on local rights to livelihoods and self-determination. Wise Use had a surprising amount in common with many social movements in the global South centered on resource access and control, examined in the literature of political ecology: For example, it emphasized cultural identity, local knowledge as an alternative to expert science, reinventions of community and tradition, and defenses of local claims against state authority. It was also part of a broader trend toward the neoliberalization of environmental governance.

The Wise Use movement lost cohesion in the late 1990s for three reasons. First, its three wings diverged as it became clear that pursuing their respective goals demanded different sorts of actions in different arenas. Second, groups focused on public lands realized that confrontational approaches were proving counterproductive, and many began to seek the same ends via participation in collaborative management instead. Third, the two presidential administrations of George W. Bush (2001–2009) were highly sympathetic to Wise Use's goals, and indeed were staffed in part by individuals with connections to it, removing participants’ motivations for an antifederal stance.