October 16, 2015
by Jim Britell
Today’s forest protection advocates are the sixth generation of wilderness activists. What follows is an attempt to abstract the rules, lessons and insights from successful and unsuccessful wilderness campaigns of the past, particularly, the Adirondack wilderness campaigns of the 1930s through 1950s, which were waged with a fire seldom seen since. If we are to return to a world where the preservation of roadless, motorless wilderness has the enthusiastic, informed support of a majority of the population, these rules will guide us there:
General rules
- Never try to lead a campaign to save any place you haven’t hiked over, camped on and photographed.
- Wilderness preservation is human rights advocacy. The same kind of people, money and thought processes created the Adirondack Park, The Wilderness Society, the ACLU (and helped create Israel).
- Every wilderness campaign is a political campaign and has clear winners and losers; it is more win–lose than win–win.
- A major wilderness campaign is a complex project. So you need people with experience in public relations, management, media and organizing.
- You can conduct a major, successful, decade–long wilderness campaign without foundation grants.
- If you need money to save wilderness, get it directly from rich people. The best source of money for a multi–decade campaign is a rich Republican. (Bob Marshall’s father’s law practice paid for American wilderness activism for six decades.)
- Promulgating elaborate wilderness plans or imposing wilderness designations without simultaneous coordinated grassroots organizing and media merely gathers fuel for anti–wilderness organizers.
Politics and politicians
- Politicians, environmental groups and laws don’t protect wilderness; voters do.
- If the voters of the political entity with jurisdiction over the wilderness area are educated to personally understand the wilderness values involved, then and only then, will their representatives support wilderness proposals.
- Neither Democrats nor Republicans are intrinsically pro–wilderness or anti–wilderness.
- The citizens and legislators who happen to live near a wilderness area should have no more say about it than the neighbors of the Statue of Liberty would have a special voice on what happens to it.
- Most legislators, public and civic officials and people near a wilderness tend to favor its commercialization, commodification and development.
- Once you identify the legislators to target, you know the voters you must educate: the voters who elect the politicians who sit on or chair the legislative committees with jurisdiction over your issue. For example, a wilderness desert in Utah may be under the jurisdiction of a committee chaired by a congressman from Florida or a senator from West Virginia. If so, the voters to be persuaded are in Florida, etc.
- Administrative agencies do what their political overseers tell them, so focus your lobbying on their political leaders.
- Campaigns for wilderness in rural counties are won in urban areas. Most of the energy, concern and money in a campaign come from large cities. The focus of any campaign should be where the population of the controlling political entity is, not where the resource happens to be located.
- Mapping the political ecology of your campaign is as important as mapping its physical ecology because in wilderness campaigns you must master both the political and physical ecosystems.
- A legislator who thinks his constituents are pro–wilderness will support wilderness.
- Never assume that because successful wilderness campaigning occurred in a legislator’s district that the legislator necessarily heard about it. Verify that your message was actually seen by its intended target.
- Don’t assume you know why a particular vote was cast no matter how obvious it may appear. If you fail in a vote, immediately go to the legislators who voted against you and ask them why they voted as they did and exactly what you did wrong.
- Serious wilderness advocacy usually means passing legislation and working to remove bad legislators at election time. So don’t rely entirely on non–profits.
- To save the mountains in the headwaters of a watershed, understand the politics, politicians and people in its floodplain.
Media and message
- This is the message urban voters understand: wilderness solitude and its silence are the average citizen’s (and his children’s) most valuable, personal, deeded asset; ease of access to wilderness obliterates its awe and destroys it; roads and motors will steal their wilderness from them; and wilderness preservation is important for its intrinsic sake.
- At the outset of every campaign, create “The Basic Media Piece.” Find an experienced media professional to write or help write a powerful narrative that is easy for the average person to grasp. Cover the issue from all angles—ethical, legal, political, economic, historical, natural and ecological. If the area is beautiful, say so and show it in pictures. Persuade readers to feel as you do about the place you seek to protect.
- Place appropriate versions of your media piece in every daily, weekly and monthly publication in the state many times in diverse iterations. Put your basic pamphlet into every citizen’s hand.
- The key words to proudly and loudly use in every wilderness fight are “preserve” and “preservation.”
- Development is not necessarily good; it can be tragic and horrible. Say so.
- Every big issue needs a movie about it. Show it everywhere through a barnstorming speakers’ bureau which holds community meetings. A campaign without a professionally created video or movie is not serious.
- If you justify wilderness on economic or commercial arguments like tourism promotion, you legitimize and invite jobs–based counter arguments. It is always easier to quantify the advantages of development than preservation. There are often compelling cost–benefit arguments in favor of preserving wilderness but they should be secondary.
- A wilderness or a wild thing is never merely a “resource,” so don’t refer to it or think of it as one. A mountain or desert is not a “resource” to be protected—it is a mountain or a desert to be protected. The language of utility or commod-ification implicitly reduces sacred places to an input or variable in an equation. Nothing important like your children or your honor would ever be described or trivialized by calling it a “resource.”
- If an environmental disaster occurs due to industry overreach or non–regulation, and you have a massive event like a landslide from excessive logging or the failure of a huge manure lagoon, you have media attention and public interest that would cost millions in paid advertising to create. Use these opportunities to relentlessly place blame on the real cause. Appropriate the public concern and focus it on your solutions.
- The capability of writing inspirational wilderness paeans is a critically useful skill but it is never a substitute or alternative to organizing. It is not “doing politics.” Media alone seldom creates action; it supplements organizing.
Grassroots organizing
- Splits and conflict during campaigns are normal and probably desirable for the same reason you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. (Compared to civil rights or women’s suffrage, wilderness advocacy has been fairly conflict–free internally.)
- People who use an area—like hunters, paddlers and hikers—are the easiest to organize to save an area and have enormous veracity. If organized hunters and fishers enthusiastically support a wilderness proposal, it will have a far better chance.
- A wilderness grassroots organizer’s job consists of continuous, exhausting barnstorming. A person who is not constantly traveling and dealing with different groups of people may be doing useful things but he is probably not a grassroots organizer.
- In wilderness campaigns all environmental groups must work together, but a new campaign usually needs a new organization devoted specifically to it.
- The most motivated people in any campaign are the volunteers. Paid professionals are hired help; volunteers are the genius, spirit and heart of a wilderness campaign.
- Successful business people— Rotary and Chamber of Commerce members—and average soccer moms make effective, reliable and aggressive wilderness activists.
- An ally in a campaign is anyone who might share your short–term strategies. Don’t expect all your allies to share your ultimate goals or even sympathize with them.
- It is possible to win a campaign with a very small group of organizers who agree on goals, but not with a large group who doesn’t.
- Some people are excellent mentors and developers of organizers and activists but are poor grassroots organizers themselves. Both Bob Marshall and David Brower had failed wilderness campaigns for this reason.
- If you soundly win a campaign primarily with grassroots organizing, you may not have to fight it again for a long time—if ever.
- Wilderness campaigns can often take ten years or longer.
Negotiation
- Be careful when your adversary “gives up;” they may be getting ready to try something worse with the public support of one of your current allies.
- Sometimes campaigns end in a deal that displaces development to places where there is less resistance. If, in fact, you have created the “less resistance” by promising to keep quiet, then you are not doing grassroots activism. You are merely assisting developers with their planning, by identifying places they can ruin with impunity. Don’t “hold the chainsaw.”
- Sacrificing one jewel to save another is not win–win or smart tactics; it’s just an indication of poor organizing.
Strategy
- The biggest obstacles to wilderness preservation are often other wilderness activists who think you can’t succeed because they couldn’t.
- When faced with a threat to develop a road or wilderness, defeat it, and then use your momentum to push your opponent back behind the line of scrimmage and secure more protection than you had when you began. Do this once or twice and developers don’t come back.
- Adirondack Wilderness protection was sustained by the votes from the large cities created from the close bonds of preservationists in the mountains, engineers and managers from research laboratories and factories across the state, and workers in “sister” or large cities.
- Don’t make a wilderness fight personal. Call out your supporters by name for praise, but not your adversaries.
- In a campaign you should organize sufficiently that you can fill a hall with wilderness supporters in every city in the political jurisdiction involved. State campaigns should generate a thousand organizational endorsements, and tens or hundreds of thousands of letters; federal campaigns, proportionately more.
- Wilderness activists are not bound to forego opposition to a bad project by the promises, commitments or the presumed ethical constraints or “honor” of other activists.
- A small organization with a handful of “stand up” people is more effective than a huge one with none. A very small core of campaign strategists is better than a large one.
Sierran Jim Britell, who lives in Malone, is a retired federal manager and has been an organizer on behalf of wilderness in 30 states. He is the author of a handbook on grassroots organizing, Organize to Win. He maintains a web site for grassroots organizers at Britell.com.