Nature Cult's Devious Tactics Exposed

Nature Cult's Devious Tactics Exposed
by Vin Suprynowicz

Nature cultists have been lying for decades about the supposedly "devastating" impacts of ranching, mining, lumbering, and just about any other productive use of the Western lands that you can think of.

One of their favorite tactics is to post misleading photos of "damaged" lands on their Web sites – blithely ignoring the fact that many ecosystems depend on large ungulates (today's cattle partially replacing yesterday's bison, elk or antelope) to trample grass seeds into the ground, fertilize and stir up creeks to promote insect hatches, etc.

Down in Arivaca, Ariz., near the Mexican border, rancher Jim Chilton, 66, went on the Internet and was shocked to find a bunch of green extremists dubbed the Center for Biological Diversity had done the same job on him, posting photos which they claimed showed the harm Joe's 425 cattle were doing to his mountainous 21,500-acre leased allotment of U.S. Forest Service land.

But this time, they'd picked on the wrong cowhand.

True, Jim Chilton is a fifth-generation descendant of frontier settlers who still owns the first saddle he got as a child (it's now used by his 4-year-old grandson), and often spends 12-hour days in the (now presumably larger) saddle.

But Jim Chilton is neither struggling economically, nor unversed in the ways of the world.

Besides ranching, Joe is president of a Los Angeles municipal investment bank he co-founded, and which his oldest son now largely runs, The Wall Street Journal reported in an Aug. 19 feature story.

Mr. Chilton set about taking his own photos of the very areas the nature cultists contended his cattle had destroyed – showing the pro-desert group's photos had been carefully framed to make isolated dirt patches amidst plentiful greenery look like some kind of war zone.

His real coup, though, concerned photo No. 18 – a shot of Joe's cattle resting on a bare stretch of sand.

Joe Chilton filed a defamation lawsuit against the center in January 2004, contending the stretch of sand depicted in photo No. 18 had been the site of a big May Day weekend campout involving several hundred people only two weeks before the center's posted photo had been taken.

And he produced a photo of the campout.

Under oath at the two-week trial, CBD member A.J. Schneller admitted that he had attended the camporee on the Forest Service site, and knew darned well what had trampled down the land.

Mr. Chilton said he would have been happy with the vindication of a $1 damage award.

But the Tucson jury was not so forgiving, awarding $600,000, including $500,000 in punitive damages against the lying anti-human green extremists, whose co-founder now says the jury award could financially devastate the group.

Let's hope so. The real goal of these fruitcakes is to remove all human activity from vast swatches of the rural West (turning most of it back into an untended desert), whereupon they seem to imagine only they and their closest friends will be handed picnic permits.

And the Center for Biological Diversity is actually among the more litigious of these gangs; a third of its $3 million income in 2003 came from court awards and settlements, according to the Journal.

Live by the sword, die by the sword?

Jim Carlton of the Journal reports the Chilton case "if upheld, could spark a legal uprising by ranchers against environmentalists, experts say." The lawsuit "has given hope to a lot of ranching families," agrees C.B "Doc" Lane, executive vice president of the Arizona Cattle Growers' Association.

And about time.

October 29, 2005

Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow.

Copyright © 2005 Vin Suprynowicz