By David Helvarg
The rightwing Heritage Foundation has written “Project 2025,” a plan for what it hopes will be a second Trump administration. The plan calls for rapidly expanding fossil fuel emissions and includes a chapter on opening up the Department of Interior’s lands to mineral mining and oil drilling written by Wise Use veteran, William Perry Pendley.
30 years ago, I wrote a widely-read book, ‘The War Against the Greens – The ‘Wise Use’ movement, the New Right and Anti-Environmental Violence,’ describing how a “populist” backlash against environmental laws and violence against grassroots activists was ginned up by western public lands corporations seeking to defend their federal subsidies in mining, logging and cattle grazing. They aligned with gun rights and off-road vehicle groups and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and in doing so created a template for today’s anti-environmentalism.
In its first update in 1997 I wrote a warning that has become a reality. “To envision the next environmental backlash supported not by U.S. public lands industries but by the global energy sector, the most powerful industrial combine in human history, is not a calming thought. In a worst-case scenario, this backlash will be even more violent, sophisticated and stealthy.” Although, not always stealthy.
“There’s a continuum from Wise Use to the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 [2021]. The value of writing a book like this is that it’s evergreen. It keeps bouncing back to the same crowd and the same motivations,” explains Kert Davies, director of special projects at the Center for Climate Integrity, who’s helping a number of State Attorney Generals in their lawsuits against major oil companies.
In just the last decade 1,700 environmentalists and land-defenders including many indigenous leaders around the world have been murdered according to a recent report put out by the investigative group Global Witness.
In the U.S. one of the nation’s two major political parties has effectively merged with the fossil fuel industry and made climate denial a litmus test of loyalty. Donald Trump says if re-elected he’ll be a dictator on day one in order to, “close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill.”
In the late 1980s and early ‘90s Exxon, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and other members of the fossil fuel cartel participated in numerous Wise Use conferences and events where leading climate deniers of the time, Fred Singer, Robert Balling and others, were among the keynote speakers.
The oil and coal companies absorbed and expanded on lessons from Wise Use’s playbook of intimidation and propaganda. Following the timber companies’ example, they organized rallies at which their employees were given paid days off and bussed to state capitols to protest laws on corporate taxation and environmental regulation. They also formed their own Wise Use type green-sounding front groups such as the Greening Earth Society (that argued increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would accelerate plant growth and expand forests) and ICE, the “Information Council on the Environment” designed to sow uncertainty on the climate science that Exxon and other oil companies had been researching (but not making public) since the 1970s.
Plus, they spent hundreds of millions more extending that uncertainty through PR campaigns and funding of think tanks including the Competitive Enterprise Institute whose chief climate denier, Myron Ebell, had previously worked for Wise Use’s chief field organizer Chuck Cushman (known to his followers as “Rent-a-Riot”). Ebell also led the Trump transition team for the EPA.
According to a 2014 study in the journal Social Science Research, Republicans started turning anti-environmental in the early 1990s, which marked both the high point of the Wise Use movement and the end of the Cold War that saw many U.S. conservative groups scrambling for a new enemy to fundraise around including environmentalists who they described as “watermelons – green on the outside, red on the inside.”
Throughout the 1990s, the oil industry continued to split its campaign donations between the two major U.S. parties lacking complete hegemony over either the democrats or the republicans. At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for example, an attempt by George H.W. Bush’s EPA Administrator William Reilly to get the United States to commit to a climate initiative was undermined by White House Chief of Staff, John Sununu. Sununu had also intervened on the side of a Wise Use campaign (backed by a Canadian mining company) to stop expanded protection for Yellowstone National Park’s ecosystem.
In 2004 I again updated ‘The War Against the Greens,’ with a new chapter ‘Wise Use in the White House’ highlighting how the George W. Bush – Dick Cheney administration (2001-2009) hired many Wise Use veterans to help advance their fossil fuel agenda.
Among them was Secretary of Interior Gale Norton, who began her career at the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF) when it billed itself as the "litigation arm of Wise Use." Mountain States was the brainchild of Reagan's Secretary of Interior James Watt who, after being forced to resign, told a group of Wyoming ranchers that "if the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used." Norton directed the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to find ways to expedite coal, oil, and gas development on 250 million acres of public lands. Later, during the Trump administration, former MSLF director William Perry Pendley would become acting head of the BLM.
“I wish we could take credit for that, but we can’t,” said Wise Use’s founding ideologue the late Ron Arnold of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. “Dick Chaney sits on my board of directors, but we’re not pen pals. Sometimes you just put something out there long enough and it gets picked up.”
And sometimes it gets recycled. In 2014 and 2016 for example, the Bundy family, ranchers who refused to pay even minimal public lands grazing fees, led armed militia standoffs with BLM rangers and the FBI in Nevada and Oregon leading to one death and many arrests. Except for the sympathetic wall-to-wall coverage on Fox News, their confrontations closely mirrored similar armed standoffs organized by Wise Use 20 years earlier.
But by the 2010s the mining, timber and beef cattle industries were no longer leading the anti-environmental backlash as the U.S. became the world’s largest oil producer with 80 percent of oil and gas donations now going to Republicans who had adapted the once radical language of Wise Use. This included condemnation of the “Climate Hoax,” a term I’d first heard at a Wise Use conference put on by the Environmental Conservation Organization (a land developers front group) in Reno Nevada in 1992. By the 2010s, the Republicans had also purged most of their environmental moderates such as Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine and Rep. Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland.
The 2010 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United that gave corporations the “free speech” right to spend unlimited campaign monies also helped solidify the fossil fuel cartel’s influence over politicians and policies.
Still, after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 election his administration went on to pass the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (with no Republican votes), the first significant climate legislation in U.S. history.
How quickly society is able to implement climate solutions however will be largely determined by the next major battle in the environmental wars - the 2024 election. An early volley has been fired by the API which launched a multi-million-dollar election year ad campaign in January 2024 pushing the idea that fossil fuels will remain “vital” to U.S. global security for the foreseeable future.
But 2023, the hottest year in recorded history, was also the first time that global temperatures remained at 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That’s the point at which scientists have long warned of catastrophic and unpredictable consequences for life on earth, which might also be considered a vital global security issue.
This debate will play out in the contest between reluctant climate champion Joe Biden and pro-oil climate denier Donald Trump, the outcome of which will have consequences for the world’s common future as the war against the greens is really a war against us all.
