The sideshow is not the main act
Heated Forest Use Meeting Results in Investigation Into Threat
The real story isn't the supposed threat made at the meeting. It's the larger story of our public lands dying of neglect and divisiveness fueled by infighting between stakeholders (GO and NGO) who choose not to be civil to each other.
Can't we all just get along here in the Bitterroot? There's a common-sense solution out there somewhere. We all live here. We all own these public lands. We share this planet's resources. We share a responsibility to be good stewards of the land. Blaming anyone or their beliefs for the problems and issues we face is little more than a lightning rod for the weak minded.
We have real problems in search of real solutions.
Let's talk about that.
Link to NewWest article.
The real story isn't the supposed threat made at the meeting. It's the larger story of our public lands dying of neglect and divisiveness fueled by infighting between stakeholders (GO and NGO) who choose not to be civil to each other.
Can't we all just get along here in the Bitterroot? There's a common-sense solution out there somewhere. We all live here. We all own these public lands. We share this planet's resources. We share a responsibility to be good stewards of the land. Blaming anyone or their beliefs for the problems and issues we face is little more than a lightning rod for the weak minded.
We have real problems in search of real solutions.
Let's talk about that.
Link to NewWest article.
posted by Jay at
1/14/2008 12:16:00 PM
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4 Comments:
I'm not sure how you can justify calling this incident a "sideshow." Fact is, at this public meeting someone said a bullet should be put in the head of a woman from the Bitterroot Valley who was speaking in support of conservation and wilderness. That's on top of all the other threats and intimidation and f-bombs that were dropped at the meeting. By all accounts, all this behavior was coming exclusively from the motorized use crowd.
This incident may be a "sideshow" in your minds, but to many of us in the conservation community this was just the latest in a long line of very real and very serious threats of violence and outright intimidation and bullying. If, as you claim, the BS Coalition wants to work with conservationists to find solutions, it would be worth keeping this in mind.
Thank you.
P.S. Below is an account of the meeting from the Missoula Independent.
Missoula Independent
http://www.missoulanews.com
01/17/2008
The scene at last week's Forest Service travel plan meeting in Darby gave conservationists a lot to think about this week, as they saw an unruly mob effectively shut down a public discussion.
A 50-person meeting hall crammed with over 200 people forced participants to stand along the sides and back of the room. The meeting became heated quickly, many raised their hands to speak, and comments continued for some two hours until one local woman was finally recognized and given the floor.
There was no podium, so she stood up while surrounded by some of the room's most aggressive advocates for off-road vehicle use. Despite seeing numerous speakers ridiculed and taunted, she ventured to talk without preparing any notes, and spoke in favor of public lands and conservation. Though mild mannered and calm, she stumbled at times as a constant barrage of laughter, heckling, and spontaneous shouting threw her off.
She occasionally wrung her hands to shake off the nerves, but moved forward with her statement. Ginny Tribe, the professional facilitator contracted to moderate the meeting tried unsuccessfully to quiet the heckling.
But the mob at the back of the room wouldn't back off at all. The speaker was just going on too long for some.
"Put a bullet in her head," said a younger man seated among a thick crowd.
"Did you just say, 'Put a bullet in her head'?" asked Gary Milner, a bystander.
"Yeah…You're all just a bunch of fucking liberals," the man replied.
"Did you hear this? Can you write this down?" Milner asked a nearby Forest Service official.
"What is your name, sir?" one of them asked.
"Will Blocker," the man replied, as the official jotted down the notes.
Over 20 bystanders overheard the exchange, and the meeting continued-with the heckling unabated.
In the following days, environmental groups, blogs, and newspapers reacted to the event.
Dan Thompson of the Ravalli County Off-Road Users Association told the Associated Press he regretted "the inappropriate behavior of a few people."
Area environmentalists, however, saw things much differently. Jim Miller, president of Friends of the Bitterroot, said, "It was not a few bad apples. It was several bushels."
Nobody of sound mind would endorse what happened at the Darby meeting, much less the polarity of people who do nothing more than hiss at each other mainly because neither side controls all the marbles.
Sure it's a problem when people get ugly and regular folk become fearful. Agreed. But it's still just a tawdry, business-as-usual sideshow that diverts everyone's attention from the real problems at hand. And saying so doesn't make us the bad guys.
Look at Congress. Another sideshow, right? What problems are this august body of profiteers solving?
I have work to do that is important to organizations I serve, this one mostly as a volunteer. Regardless of the issues you and I are involved with at a deeper level than a web site, responding to you isn't as important, and I am commenting again as a professional courtesy.
Keeping it real is one thing. But your penchant for the broadside guilt trip is hardly inspiring feelings of a fraternal or collaborative nature. It's pretty hard to trust a guy in another environmental org who does his best to rip your org a new one with each and every post.
A personal note, I'm in the conservation community too. A telecommuter for over 10 years who drove exactly 413 miles last year. My ATV has never left my property.
The majority of what you post here is in a sense lightweight, but still intrusive, "intimidation and bullying."
Whatever happened to the golden rule? Have you lost all confidence in it?
No wonder the word liberal has become a curse word and environmental activism an increasingly perilous pursuit. It's adversarial crap such as this tit-for-tat that only sets the stage for more melodrama.
It might get you another billable hour, Matthew. But it's still not the main act.
Mr. Jay Toups,
I believe I have been respectful in my posts on your website. I have offered to have you folks meet with WildWest numerous times and the BSC has turned me down every time, despite the fact that publicly you folks have stated you are working with WildWest. I have offered up lots of information that is contained on our website regarding fuel reduction and restoration and community fire protection. I have attempted to do this in a respectful way.
In exchange, most of my posts have resulted in name-calling and insults from you or other unknown folks at the Big Sky Coalition. This is all on your site for people to see.
Finally, for the record, I am paid $15/hour for 20 hours of work per week by the WildWest Institute. Most weeks I work far more than 20 hours meaning my hourly wage falls somewhere under 10 bucks an hour. Your repeated comments about me only wanting another billable hour is pretty funny, yet pretty sad at the same time, considering the truth.
If you want respect, refrain from posting negative asides on this site and elsewhere about this organization.
Nobody at BSC is tagging your site or making daily insinuations about WWI. We have real work to do, let's focus on that.
The material on the WWI site is well worth reading and I've spent lots of time on the site since November. So it isn't necessary to push what is on a public web page.
We have sound minds and we can discern for ourselves what is going on in the forests, the public arena, the timber industry, and in legislative circles, without a hostile embedded interpreter bent on putting this organization into the middle of every story. For example, your comments about the travel management meeting that had zero to do with our organization. Uncalled for.
Given that BSC was founded in October 2007, we've managed to accomplish quite a bit already by focusing on the main act (more responsive forest management) and not the sad (human) sideshow.
This is an org with a single subject matter expert, Sonny LaSalle. He's a busy man, and I'm aware that you two have a history that has been basically one long head butt. I am a volunteer. Tom is a volunteer who funded this effort at the beginning.
Forest management issues around thinning, etc., in the Bitterroot and elsewhere are hot button issues with the general public, and this vox populi is what we are listening to. A welcoming or at least conciliatory gesture or two in a public forum would go a long way in demonstrating that you indeed welcome dialog with a citizen-led organization such as this one.
Our respective organization agendas have overlapping components, i.e., fuel reduction, restoration and community fire protection. What is different in my view is that we seek a much larger treatment scale that is so far anathema to WWI.
Where your org is "can't do" we seek a "can do" solution. You've assumed we are a front for the timber industry, but the fact is that little of what we are advocating is de facto logging.
Selective, science-based thinning per the 13 principles and corresponding slash mitigation via new technologies and methods is hardly the stuff of logging days gone by. We're eager to see it through, and we do realize that we will need to validate every aspect of what we will propose with stakeholder organizations such as the WildWest Institute.
When we have completed the due diligence of how best to accomplish large-scale thinning backed by equivalent scale biomass conversion, we'll be in touch.
In the meantime, let me propose a truce so that we may both focus on more important matters related to our work.
Please accept my apologies for anything you've found offensive or insulting; and to keep the peace, please resist the temptation to read between the lines where this organization is concerned to avoid a similar response in the future.
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