Divine Destruction

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

—Genesis 1:28

Defile not therefore the land which ye shall inhabit.

—Numbers 35:34

I. THE PERVERSION OF 'WISE USE'

The godfather of the modern Wise Use movement, Ron Arnold (Kevin P. Casey)

In 1845, New York journalist John O'Sullivan editorialized that "it was the nation's manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given." With this, O'Sullivan coined the phrase "Manifest Destiny," an expression that would remain shorthand during the late 19th century for the belief that Americans had an obligation to settle the Western territories. Indeed, the phrase "Manifest Destiny" implied that America's expansion was predetermined, undeniable, and—most importantly—inspired by God.

The ideas that precipitated talk about and belief in Manifest Destiny, however, were not necessarily the most important cause for America's population expansion in the West. Rather, throughout the late 1840s, Manifest Destiny was taken up and used as a rallying cry by those in government who had already wanted the entirety of the North American continent settled. A religious rationale that echoed this aim was a convenient and useful way to ask Americans to go West. Quite simply, arguments about Manifest Destiny provided only the rationale for westward expansion, not its impetus.

Today, large, well-organized, and powerful groups of anti- environmental activists are using similar tactics. The anti-environmental philosophy known as "Wise Use" has gained a large audience, and many of its advocates and thinkers hold a menacing influence over government. A frightening fact in its own right, the widespread acceptance of anti-environmental thinking in the guise of Wise Use is made more troubling in that there are increasingly close ties between those who subscribe to the ideas of Wise Use and members of fundamentalist Christian churches and organizations. The Wise Use movement's influence over religious conservatives thus mirrors the traditional relationship between religious and political conservatives in that Wise Use advocates are increasingly adapting their own agenda to include the concerns of religious voters. In so doing, they have gained an army of God to promote their own agenda.

Although many credit the modern-day right-wing activist (and timber industry consultant) Ron Arnold of Bellevue with having coined the term "Wise Use," the phrase actually originated a century before with the man appointed head of the U.S. Forest Service by Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot. He used the term in his 1903 book, A Primer of Forestry, partly in response to intense pressure from railroad companies to use Forest Service lands. Pinchot believed that a balance should be struck between caring for the forests and man's interests.

But Pinchot also formulated the term in response to the views of famous naturalist John Muir, another Roosevelt associate, who advocated that public lands remain completely untouched. Thus, Pinchot's position was that of a somewhat enlightened government official needing to find a compromise between business interests, the concerns of naturalists, and the still ongoing expansion of the population into the Western territories. He was trying, in short, to find a way to protect the emerging concept of public land from what Roosevelt called the "land grabbers." Wise Use, as it was originally conceived, allowed the Western territories to prosper, and continue doing so, while preserving many forests and other natural environments for future generations.

While Ron Arnold did not coin the term Wise Use—he maintains, however, that he has coined other terms such as "ecoterrorist" and "rural cleansing"— he has come a long way in redefining the concept from the way it was initially used by Gifford Pinchot. Indeed, Arnold is generally considered the "father" of the modern-day incarnation of Wise Use, and he is particularly well-known for a series of sophisticated writings about the environment in which he has, since the mid-1980s, conceptualized a combative critique of the environmental movement that is deeply ideological. He is currently executive vice president of a Bellevue-based think tank that, although a nonprofit, unironically calls itself the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise (CDFE), and which, according to its Web site, monitors "threats to free markets, property rights and limited government." It also serves as a key center for anti-environmental activism.

In a recent attempt to clearly define his positions, Arnold critiqued the central tenets of the environmental movement, claiming that concealed below its talk of conservation was a radical political agenda, one that he believed aimed to "hamper property rights" and "dislodge the market system with public ownership of all resources and production." Arnold argues that since the 1980s, the environmental movement has moved into the mainstream and become "the Establishment"; he describes his own Wise Use movement as a "competing paradigm" to the environmental movement as he understands it. Arnold proclaims that the solutions to the world's environmental problems, whatever they may be, will be found by leaders in technology, industry, and trade—not by the environmental movement, as he believes is widely assumed. In short, Arnold declares that we need natural resources to survive and prosper and can survive any side effects of their use. "Our limitless imaginations can break through natural limits to make earthly goods and carrying capacity virtually infinite," he writes.