Wise Use Movement

The term wise use does not describe an organization or a formal alliance but, rather, is an umbrella term for a worldview more or less shared by hundreds of grassroots and business organizations and think tanks. Despite appealing to a broad base of rural landowners and other sincere adherents, the wise use movement has faced criticism and suspicion from environmentalists, who counter that its populist positions are little more than a cynical front for the resource extraction industries that fund them.

Hostile equally to environmental regulations and environmentalists themselves, the wise use movement has since the late 1980s sought to curtail or roll back conservation measures by changing the terms of debate over the environment from protecting wilderness to protecting private property rights. Offering as its foundation a questionable interpretation of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protecting private property, the movement has challenged regulations aimed at preserving wilderness from [Page 439]resource extraction. Philosophically, the movement counters the “limits to growth” consensus on the part of environmentalists with a cornucopian outlook that posits nature's ability to provide for humanity's needs far into the future, granting our ability to exercise our ingenuity and freedom.

The rhetoric of wise use makes clear not so much that it represents an alternate viewpoint from that of mainstream green politics but, rather, that it is the enemy of environmentalism, which is viewed as irrational, pagan, antihumanist, socialist, and contrary to American values.

The fundamental philosophy of wise use can be seen to have emerged from Enlightenment classical liberal values. Most notably we can see its origins in the writings of John Locke, who argued for rights of the individual, the right to property, the right to use unclaimed nature for one's private benefit, and the limitations of governments to alienate such property from its owners without just compensation.

The term itself derives from its use by Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, who in 1910 called for the “wise use” of national forests and minerals. Unlike his contemporary and Sierra Club founder John Muir, who sought to preserve nature for its own sake, Pinchot believed in setting a framework for fee-based resource extraction by private interests that sought to moderate between economic and ecological priorities.

However, there is nothing moderate about its present meaning. In response to decades of surging interest in environmental protection and success in implementing corresponding governmental regulations, the movement's founder Ron Arnold sought to fire a broadside at all environmental organizations, employing the rhetoric of “war” and with the often-stated intention of essentially destroying them.

The political foundation for wise use was laid in the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion in the late 1970s, in which a coalition of cattle farmers, miners, loggers, and developers lobbied against federal control over public lands, which constitute some 60 percent of the western states. They argued that federal control and regulations—in particular the Federal Land Policy and Management Act—were adversely affecting their livelihoods and violated the principle of states' rights. This movement was successful to the extent that its language and values were adopted by the administration of President Ronald Reagan, who declared himself their ally and who appointed James Watt as Interior Secretary, following Watt's tenure as director of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which was sympathetic to the rebellion.

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