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TODAY Friday 1 August 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Wise Use, Smart Use

Across a couple of desks five stories above a furniture store on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, a couple of part-timers at the Environmental Working Group run a nimble and entertaining project called CLEAR. CLEAR's job is to keep an eye on the Wise Use movement, that self-described aggregation of property-rights firebrands, anti-environmentalists, and enthusiastic off-road vehicle owners. CLEAR reports that Wise Use has seen better days.

The latest issue of A CLEAR View covers the annual "Fly-In for Freedom" of the Alliance for America, an umbrella group for more than 600 Wise Use organizations. Just like environmentalists, they organized a conference in June that featured dull speeches by congressional partisans, panel discussions where no one disagreed with anyone else, and scores of smaller break-out sessions that emphasized preachifying more than nuts-and-bolts. The human condition. What distinguished this year's conference, say the CLEAR reporters, was evidence of a lack of strategic direction and tactical savvy. They found a drop in morale reflective of a drop in influence.

"Whither Wise Use?" asks CLEAR. "Wise Use is down but not out, in our view... {T]he anti-environmental movement has not developed the political maturity needed to capitalize on its political strength in legislative bodies around the country. Nor has Wise Use found the hot button issue or message it needs to begin building the broader grassroots constituency it needs to advance its political agenda...Without the growing audience, the disciplined activist base, the focused message and the strategy that emerging political movements need, Wise Use continues to be most threatening as a gadfly to environmentalists, buzzing around the issues and stinging the environmental movement by scoring the occasional defensive victory."

Every influential political movement needs its zealots so that its centrists can appear moderate. The Environmental Defense Fund derives force from having Greenpeace out on its flanks. For anti-environmentalism, the Wise Users complement more respectable, more important forces representing, or made possible by, fossil fuel companies. No one is asking "Whither Big Oil?".

Yesterday's New York Times provides a good example of this smarter, richer, more influential force. The Mobil Corporation purchased one quarter of the Op Ed page to run an ad entitled "The Senate Speaks." It's a well-written, judicious piece that features as its centerpiece the text of Senate Resolution 98, the so-called Byrd Resolution. The non-binding but politically crucial language tells President Clinton that "the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol" that obliges industrialized nations to specific scheduled limits on greenhouse gas emissions without obliging developing countries. Moreover, any protocol should be "accompanied by an analysis of the detailed financial costs and other impacts on the economy of the United States." The protocol in question is the expected climate control treaty produced at the Kyoto conference in December.

The Administration "welcomes" the Byrd Resolution (Undersecretary of State Tim Wirth plausibly argues that he can use it as evidence of domestic US realities when negotiating with wary Chinese and Indians and Indonesians) but you can bet that the language on "detailed financial costs" will come back and haunt the White House during Senate debate on treaty ratification in 1998. Score one for the oil and coal lobbies: cloaked in the mantle of reasonableness, they have set the terms for a political decision that dwarfs the agenda of the more colorful Wise Users.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

Tom Turner, who co-edits our Media Watch feature, also has contributed a very useful High Five review of the best websites for information from and about the Wise Use people.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

7/31: DC Blues
7/30: Atlanta and Salina
7/29: Herons and Frogs
7/28: Golf
7/25: Climate Chess: Arkansan Opening
7/24: Top and Bottom
7/23: Smart Exxon
7/22: Climate Chess
7/21: Don't Know Much About Conservation
7/18: All Aboard

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.