Al Gore and the Re-Greening of the West

Red State Rebel diaried last night's sold-out appearance by Al Gore in Boise, keynoting this year's Frank Church Conference on Public Affairs on Global Warming. Orginally scheduled for a 1,000 seat venue, tickets for the speech disappeared in 10 minutes. The speech was then moved to the BSU basketball stadium, where 10,000 tickets sold out in less than five hours (quicker than tickets for Elton John, Bethine Church was quick to point out). Local news showed lines of a couple of hundred people showing up hours before the event, hoping for a chance at a ticket.

It's established that Boise is now blue (reflecting that famous, Fiesta-Bowl winning turf, perhaps?), but does this kind of response to Al Gore and his message mean that Idaho, and maybe the West, are reconsidering environmental issues?

Back in the early 90s, when Helen Chenoweth famously said that she couldn't see how people could argue that salmon were endangered when she saw all the cans of the fish on the shelf at the supermarket, she was reflecting the thinking of a lot of people in the mountain west. Ridiculous as her argument was, it summed up the sense of a lot of people that they were being robbed of their way of life for the sake of a handful of animals that just weren't all that important. Hostility against the feds was high and Western voters blamed the environmentalists for many of their economic woes. And hand in hand with the environmentalists were the Democrats. Larry LaRocco's 1994 loss to Helen Chenoweth in Idaho's first district is one example of the backlash unleashed on Western Democrats as a result of the proactive environmental policies of the Clinton administration--expansion of wilderness areas, endangered species listings, creation of roadless areas, and stricter environmental regulations on industry.

Environmentalists were a convenient enemy for the GOP to exploit. Of course the situation was more complicated--timber jobs were already being lost, particularly for old growth timber, for a variety of reasons, including over-harvesting. The industry was at a point of needing to change, to reengineer because of outside economic factors, depletion of the resource, Canadian imports, and changes in building practices. But when the last of the old growth trees had to be saved for the spotted owl and marbled murlet, well that was a much easier target for to blame.

So Republicans took power--in some places like Idaho, nearly a monopoly. Industry has gotten most of its wishlist in the offing. Which has brought some Westerners full circle to distrusting the federal government and its policies again. But this time it's the Bush administration and its energy policy. Now that those public lands that were expanded back in the Clinton years have been public for a while, people have come to feel rather proprietary toward them, and to resent the efforts of the Bush administration to open them up to oil and gas drilling.

This is well demonstrated in an article from The Washington Post from a few weeks ago, describing the public fight the National Rifle Association, representing hunters and anglers, was picking with the administration.

The new emphasis on the issue of access to public lands, which Schmeits said is at the "discussion" level among the NRA's directors, would represent a strategic shift for the NRA, whose leadership in Washington has long maintained that its 4 million members were not complaining or even asking questions about access to public lands.

But, during the past six years, an increasing number of the country's 46 million hunters and anglers, including Republican-leaning shooting organizations such as the Boone and Crockett Club, have been grumbling about the Bush's administration fast-tracking of oil and gas drilling leases on public lands.

Those oil and gas drilling leases are causing a larger problem in the interior West--air pollution clogging up our Big Skies, to go with the scarring of the land and the ground water pollution it's causing.  Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana have all had to take action in recent years to try to curb emissions from industry, and New Mexico has just formed a task force to study air quality in the Four Corners area. As I left Boise this afternoon, the local news was announcing yet another burn ban because of poor air quality, a regular occurence in Idaho's Treasure Valley.

But beyond the obvious problems of air and water quality, of public lands being opened up to industry and closed off to recreation--issues which are particularly salient to many of the region's new immigrants from other parts of the country--the generations of people who have lived in the West recognize when there's a problem. Last night, Gore asked if there were any farmers in the audience. There was a smattering of applause, and much louder applause when Gore made the connection between the obvious--global warming is extending the drought cycle that has intensified over the last two decades; drought that has hit Western farmers and ranchers particularly hard. It's apparent that something is out of whack. When you combine drought and extremely high energy costs, you have a double whammy that is making some of the ag community in the West increasingly hostile to the Bush administration and its giveaways to industry.

Land use issues, water issues, and energy policy are all paramount in the West. They all coalesced last night with Al Gore's appearance, making the event transcend the political (though it was a great night for Idaho Dems--any time you can get that many of them in a room at the same time, it feels pretty damn good). But any regional or national candidate who hopes to find their success in the interior West would do well to understand these dynamics, and maybe even take a gander at Gore's slide show.

(And speaking of Inconvenient Truths, I just received notice that Progressive Majority is organizing an e-mail campaign to the Federal Way, WA School Board. The School Board has banned An Inconvenient Truth because one parent complained about it being shown. The School Board is meeting in a few hours to discuss whether to extend the ban. Send them an e-mail, particularly if you live in Western Washington.)