Cage Match

The Development in question:


◼ JN Cage Match
By Hank Sims The Town Dandy
◼ http://www.northcoastjournal.com/issues/2009/12/10/cage-match/

As Journal reporter Ryan Burns writes elsewhere in this paper, the California Coastal Commission is set to hear an appeal connected with the proposed Marina Center development today (Thursday, Dec. 10). The hearing will kick off the true beginning of the fight over the proposed big box-anchored development on the old railyard on the Eureka waterfront, which has been kicking around for almost four years now. Opponents of the project didn't bother putting up any serious effort when the City of Eureka approved the environmental impact report and a project permit last month -- figuring, probably correctly, that the vote was already in the bag. The Coastal Commission is the body that's going to make -- or, more likely, break -- the thing.

For honesty's sake, let's admit a couple of things at the outset. For one, California law pertaining to this and many other matters is Byzantine beyond belief, to the extent that it can sometimes actively stifle the very thing it was written to accomplish. The Balloon Track could sit there as is for another 100 years, leaching its ugly self into the Bay, and the Coastal Commission would never say boo. For another, much of the opposition to the project has little to do with environmental remediation per se. For various historical, cultural and economic reasons, some people -- some powerful people -- don't like the fact that the proposed Marina Center is anchored by a Home Depot. And there are a few powerful opponents whose passions are chiefly aroused by the opportunity to give financier/developer Rob Arkley and his supporters in Eureka City Hall a poke in the eye. If Arkley were to put forth plans to turn the site into a sustainable organic cooperative farm, there are people who would sue him for not devoting enough space to the hemp crop.

But it's almost as if Arkley and City Hall wished these antagonists into existence, and then provided them with cudgels. Believe it or not, there are developers in other parts of the state, and even locally, who invite the opposition into the tent before a project ever gets underway. Arkley, instead, has delivered the middle finger to his opposition, consistent with the strange, ideology-driven approach he takes to nearly all his Humboldt County projects. (Leaving aside some of the charitable ones.) What does he want more: To get the job done, or to destroy his enemies -- people who harbor wrongheaded notions about the rights of capital and the role of government regulation?

You can't look at the history of Marina Center long without concluding that the former is secondary, the latter supreme. More than anything, he itches for a fight. And this time, he'll have a whole bunch of his psychic irritants in the ring: Humboldt County Supervisor and Coastal Commission Chair Bonnie Neely, left-leaning hardware king Bill Pierson, enviros like Pete Nichols and Scott Greacen and others, state bureaucrats like Humboldt County Planning Commissioner and longtime Coastal Commission bureaucrat Ralph Faust. This -- the broad scope of the upcoming score-settling -- is what gives the current conflagration its end-of-days feel.

Whether it ultimately happens in today's hearing or not is open to question -- there'll certainly be plenty of others to follow -- but the Coastal Commission shows itself perfectly willing to whittle Marina Center down to nothing. The staff report in the case recommends reversing the city's permit to allow Arkley's CUE VI company to begin work on the site, and that's probably what will happen. If so, what will be most frustrating is the already audible whining from inside City Hall and Arkley's Security National that it is all so unfair. The Coastal Commission has been a brick wall growing steadily larger for four years now, and neither the company nor the city has done anything to alter course. The Coastal Commission wrote an objection to the city's draft environmental impact report containing the precise objections which are now on appeal; the city staff waved the commission off, then urged the City Council to approve the 1,000-page-plus report, complete with this objection and others, in a matter of days. Which the City Council did. So now the city is getting what it paid for, and no one should be shocked.

Anyway, come join us on the North Coast Journal Blogthing today (Thursday). We'll be live-blogging the Coastal Commission hearing when it gets underway, complete with a background sense of how underhanded and silly it has all been.

^^^^^

The North Coast Journal is proud to be fielding a team of reporters in Copenhagen for the duration of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which may actually come up with some sensible strategies for limiting humankind's assault on the planet. In the coming weeks, we'll be printing regular dispatches from Manila's Dan Ihara, an economist who has specialized in climate change, and Petrolia playwrights/activists/raconteurs Jane Lapiner and David Simpson. The first of their reports, which takes the pulse of the summiteers as the conference gets underway, appears this week.

comments
1. Thirdeye: Yesterday, 1:14 p.m.
"The staff report in the case recommends reversing the city's permit to allow Arkley's CUE VI company to begin work..."
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG
The staff report did not recommend reversing the permit. The staff report recommended hearing the objections. What's a little fact twisting in the name of the chosen narrative, right Hank?
The whole speculation about ideology driving the Marina Center project is just silly. If there's any ideological motivation it's on the part of assorted groovy people (mostly from outside of Eureka) who can't get over their knee-jerk reaction to Home Depot. And how does the expansion of the wetland element in response to public input constitute some sort of middle finger?
I suppose we'll next be hearing about how timber companies harvest trees to teach hippies a lesson.

2. Hank Sims: Yesterday, 1:27 p.m.
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG
Eh?
Paragraph one: "Staff recommends that the Commission determine that a substantial issue exists with respect to the grounds on which Appeal No. A-1-EUR-09-049 has been filed and that the Commission hold a de novo hearing."
The Commission holds the new hearing. Not the city. See? Reversing -- or superceding, if you like -- the city's permit.
If there's any ideological motivation it's on the part of assorted groovy people (mostly from outside of Eureka) who can't get over their knee-jerk reaction to Home Depot.
I'm not denying that, as you can read above. But if you're saying that Arkley's intentions have been snow-pure throughout, you live on a different plane of existence.
And how does the expansion of the wetland element in response to public input constitute some sort of middle finger?
Erm, you mean the wetland element absolutely required by law if other wetlands on the site are going to be filled? The one leaned on throughout the present EIR? That was "in response to public input," somehow?

3. Dork: Yesterday, 2:10 p.m.
Hank, you're either higher than usual or just proving again that facts are no match for your biases. Opposition to Arkley's Marina Center plan was well under way before there was a Marina Center plan--before the big box, before the big middle finger, before know-it-alls like you were rewriting history like this. The opposition began the day the word "Arkley" became associated with a blighted shithole that mattered not at all to anyone until the day he bought it.

4. Hank Sims: Yesterday, 2:24 p.m.
The opposition began the day the word "Arkley" became associated with a blighted shithole that mattered not at all to anyone until the day he bought it.
What? You ever heard of Wal-Mart? The stillborn Headwaters Fund study? Who's rewriting history?!?

5. Thirdeye: Yesterday, 2:39 p.m.
Hank:
Now that you've cut and pasted the relevant passage, I suggest you read it again and try to understand it this time. You're a literate guy. I think you can do it. A recommendation to hear the appeals is not the same as a recommendation to reverse the City of Eureka's approval of the permit. It is a review process. Comprende?

Whatever Arkley's innermost thoughts are (and of which you claim some special knowledge), we know one thing: he sees an opportunity to make some bucks. Maybe the thought of Home Depot gives him a wet dream and maybe it doesn't, I don't know. Did his deal with North Coast Co-op mean he fell in love with Co-op people? Probably not. He saw an opportunity to make some bucks.

Yes, the wetland element was expanded during the scoping phase of the project, in response to public input. I take it you didn't know that before you wrote with such authority. Given that virtually the entire site is fill, the project is a net gain for wetland. Puddles on top of fill do not wetlands make, unless you share the delusions of Baykeeper.

6. Hank Sims: Yesterday, 2:46 p.m.
You've heard the words "de novo" before?
Come on over, Thirdeye! -- http://www.northcoastjournal.com/blogthing/

7. Thirdeye: Yesterday, 2:54 p.m.
Who's rewriting history? You are, Hank, you are. Marina Center is not Wal-Mart part II. And your argument that the proposed Headwaters-funded study was somehow necessary for a public process to occur has been refuted many times over. You should know better than to keep invoking it.

8. Hank Sims: Yesterday, 3:03 p.m.
Jeez, dude, I'm going to have to spend some time with you here. Word-by-word-style.
"Dork" wrote:
...a blighted shithole that mattered not at all to anyone until the day he bought it.
Whereupon I wrote that the shithole did, in fact, matter to people before he bought it, and gave two citations.
And your argument that the proposed Headwaters-funded study was somehow necessary for a public process to occur has been refuted many times over.

I never said any such thing. Of course a public process is possible without it. The public process is happening without it. Just moments ago, for example.

9. Thirdeye: Yesterday, 3:30 p.m.
http://www.lectlaw.com/def/d010.htm
DE NOVO - Anew. afresh. Considering the matter anew, the same as if it had not been heard before and as if no decision previously had been rendered. Ness v. Commissioner, 954 F.2d 1495, 1497 (9th Cir. 1992). Such review is 'independent.' Premier v. Fuentes, 880 F.2d 1096, 1102 (9th Cir. 1989).

The staff's (approved) recommendation to review the permit De Novo is essentially a recommendation to invoke full authority. It is not a final judgment on the merits of the issues under appeal, despite what Hank and other spinmeisters may claim.

10. Hank Sims: Yesterday, 3:39 p.m.
"Anew. afresh. Considering the matter anew, the same as if it had not been heard before and as if no decision previously had been rendered."

Right? And that's not the same as reversing the City Council's decision?

But this is getting stupid. I think we agree -- now the Coastal Commission gets to decide whether to grant the permit, and the city does not.

11. Thirdeye: Yesterday, 4:44 p.m.
No, that's not the same as reversing the City Council's decision. Just as in the case of an appeals court agreeing to hear a case, that is not the same as reversing the lower court's decision.

Now, onto the issue of your position on the Headwaters-funded study and public participation:
http://www.northcoastjournal.com/092806/shortstories0928.html

"An hour or so later, Marina Center spokesman Brian Morrissey took the stage to deliver a presentation on the Marina Center, which he referred to as a 'smart growth' project.' I'm a smart growth guy,' Morrissey said. The characterization drew immediate objections from Andrew Whitney of the Humboldt County Planning Department, who said that community involvement in development was a cornerstone of the smart growth movement. (He didn't mention that Arkley had the Eureka City Council kill a public study on the Balloon Track, specifically to limit public participation in the planning."

(Hank Sims)

Of course, there was a large amount of public input in the scoping phase of the project that resulted in, among other things, expansion of the wetland element. But you chose to ignore that.

12. JJ: Yesterday, 7:16 p.m.
It's fairly obvious that Security National could care less about the existing wetlands, characterizing them as nothing more than "tire tracks" in their commercials

Eerily similar to the "Eureka Coalition for Jobs" campaign smearing Chris Kerrigan

13. Anon: Yesterday, 9:12 p.m.
Hank, you are rewriting history in pretending this is about a location instead of about a man. Let's just test your theory: Name a location in the city where Rob Arkley could put in a building supply store and the progs wouldn't climb up his butt.
Anything coming to mind?

14. wrong jj: Yesterday, 9:13 p.m.
JJ, those farking supposed wetlands ARE tire tracks. That's not an opinion that is a fact. It's been documented.
To try and taint this with the Kerrigan hit piece, who many believe was a Salzman move to garner sympathy for Chris is lame.

15. Anony2: Yesterday, 9:16 p.m.
Dayum, HanQ,
Thirdeye OWNS you. In each and every conversation here and on the mainsite and on the blogthing you have been spanked and spanked hard. I do wish you'd try for some actual reporting instead of trying sprinkle the news with your personal bias, hell we get enough of that on fox and msnbc.

16. Hank Sims: Yesterday, 11:05 p.m.
Jesus Christ. You lovable freaks.

Let's just test your theory: Name a location in the city where Rob Arkley could put in a building supply store and the progs wouldn't climb up his butt.

I can't. Which is why I stated EXACTLY THAT in the second goddamn paragraph of this column!!! Whose theory are you testing, now?

Just as in the case of an appeals court agreeing to hear a case, that is not the same as reversing the lower court's decision.
Kinda. Kinda not. Because the appeals court reverses the lower court on matters of law, not facts established at trial. Whereas in this case, the hearing is de novo -- the matter will essentially be retried, with the Coastal Commission as jury rather than the City Council.

Again, you're getting tediously hung up on semantics here. You are wrong, but you are also boringly wrong. Who cares? Call it anything you want. Call it a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, if you like. I'm beyond caring.

The fact is that the city's permit is, as of today, stayed -- i.e., the company does not get to act upon it. Now the Coastal Commission decides whether or not the company will get to perform the work envisioned in the permit. Agreed?

Of course, there was a large amount of public input in the scoping phase of the project that resulted in, among other things, expansion of the wetland element.

That's PR hype, plain and simple. The wetland element had to be included, BY LAW. Read the EIR. One of the matters currently on appeal is whether there's ENOUGH wetland to mitigate for the wetlands taken.

To simplify matters somewhat. Hypothetically, let's say Security National first publicly unveiled blueprints of the project consisted entirely of detonating a 500 megaton nuclear weapon underneath the old Union Pacific roundhouse. And so there was hue and cry from the damned environmentalists. And so, instead, out of the kindness of its heart, the company modified the project, scrapping the nuke and instead proposing a Home Depot and some office space. And you're jumping up and down saying they did this in response to public concerns?

The project can't be built with out the wetlands, and it wouldn't have gotten even this far if they weren't in the EIR.

17. Hank Sims: Yesterday, 11:06 p.m.
Now, onto the issue of your position on the Headwaters-funded study and public participation:
I'm seriously having to take it down to dictionary level with you, here. You see, in that passage you quote, that I write that the company killed the public study to "limit" public participation?

You know that "limit" and "eliminate" have different meanings, right?

You don't think that Arkley had the public study killed to limit public participation in the planning for that site? Arkley himself begged to differ, at the time:

"I'm not willing to sit at the table with anybody until I decide what to do with the land," he said. "If they think that taxpayer money is well spent doing that, they should think again."

Good night, sweet princes!

18. Thirdeye: Today, 1:16 a.m.
Hank:
Yes, details do get boring. But they matter. And understanding the significance of boring technical and legal details is what is required for a journalist to perform adequately in a situation such as this one.

Your analogy between the CC's DeNovo hearing and a retrial is not correct. Recirculating the EIR and re-doing responses to comments would be like a retrial. The DeNovo hearing is driven by specific issues that are being appealed.

You just repeated your contention on the wetlands issue from post #2. My response is in post #5. The appeal on the wetlands issue is based on calling puddles on polluted fill "wetlands" and "sensitive habitat" per the propaganda of armchair "scientists" from Baykeeper. Baykeeper propaganda aside, there is very little existing, functional wetland on the site. Sneer if you want, Hank, and throw in some silly nuke analogy, but the fact remains that the proposed restoration of Clark Slough goes beyond what is strictly required by law, and that occurred in response to the public input that you, either by default or deliberately, remained unaware of. Sorry if the public input wasn't in the format you wanted, but it was incorporated into the project.

Here's a little gem of journalistic fellatio performed by Hank on Paul Gallegos and Tim Stoen after the Freeborn ruling in the Palco case:
http://www.northcoastjournal.com/070705/cover0707.html

There's no effort to find any opinion on the ruling from other than from Gallegos and Stoen. It's obvious that Hank never even read the ruling. But that didn't stop him from venturing this pearl of wisdom:

"If Stoen had stuck with [Judge] Wilson, the case would almost certainly have gone to trial."

The appeals court and the Supreme Court didn't see it that way, did they?

For all its factual recklessness, insubstantial opinions, and sucking up, it's quite a hilarious read looking back. Recommended.

19. Anon: Today, 8:40 a.m.
So there is no location in the city where Arkley could put up a building supply store without prog interference, but opposition to the Marina Center is somehow related to Wal-Mart? Please, Hank. Pick a storyline and stick to it. Maybe instead of rewriting history you should rewrite your article so it makes some fucking sense.

20. Hank Sims: Today, 8:47 a.m.
Ach, you are hopeless.

21. JJ: Today, 9:02 a.m.

Love it when these fools pat themselves on the back for a job well done, all the while digging themselves an even deeper grave of nonsense

Thanks for the laugh this morning anony2!
*************

RELATED:
◼ LIVE webcast
◼ JN Cleanup Mess
◼ TS California Coastal Commission to hear appeal on Marina Center interim cleanup
...comments
◼ http://documents.coastal.ca.gov/reports/2009/12/Th14c-12-2009-a3.pdf
◼ TS Groups asks court to stop Marina Center project
◼ TS Groups ask court to scrap Marina Center analysis
◼ Appellants prepare for Coastal Commission hearing on Marina Center (some interesting revelations in this report actually)

Local blog posts...RELATED:
◼ Meanwhile, back at the North Coast Journal… The Mirror
◼ Coastal Commission gives Eureka the smack down Heraldo/a
◼ Another city stunt in support of the Marina Center Heraldo/a
◼ Eureka City Council to Certify Marina Center EIR Tonight Tom Sebourn

Really - there is a ton of material on this topic, and it isn't one I have been following all that closely - this link is to Google "Marina Center, Eureka"

Paykeeper Pete BS

Sneaky Paykeeper Pete's My Word: ◼ Clearing the air
And the response ◼ Humboldt Baykeeper should come clean about the Marina Center

It is time to clear the air of the confusion around the environmental community's apparent lack of desire to see Eureka's Balloon Track property cleaned up. Let me be clear, Humboldt Baykeeper, and other environmental groups, want nothing more than to have the Balloon Track cleaned up to the fullest extent for the health of our bay and community. Period. In fact, Humboldt Baykeeper has worked longer and put more time into getting that property truly cleaned up than anyone else.

At the heart of the issue is the Supplemental Remedial Action Plan (SIRAP) put forth by Security National (CUE VI) -- a plan which will not accomplish the goal of clean-up of the Balloon Track. Security National is attempting to slip through a sham cleanup for the Balloon Track, skirting applicable environmental laws, such as the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the California Coastal Act, and the city of Eureka appears to be assisting them in this attempt. It is highly unlikely that these actions will pass muster with the California Coastal Commission, which will be the next governmental body to weigh in on this matter.

The city of Eureka has had many opportunities over the past 20 years to take on Union Pacific over the contamination at the Balloon Track, but the city never had the intestinal fortitude to follow through with any action. Nearly four years ago, Humboldt Baykeeper alone stood-up and took on Union Pacific with a lawsuit, enforcing federal environmental laws, to force them to clean-up the Balloon Track so it could be redeveloped and utilized by the community as it is zoned, for “public use.”

Security National has since purchased the property, inheriting the lawsuit along with it, and now has essentially legally and financially shielded Union Pacific from any liability for clean-up. It is important to note that the decision to purchase this property was made knowing full well that the property is contaminated, and Security National is now a responsible party for the cleanup. Humboldt Baykeeper has every intention of holding Security National, as well as Union Pacific, responsible for a full characterization and clean-up of the property.

It has always been the contention of Humboldt Baykeeper that Security National can build whatever they like on the Balloon Track site as long it is fully characterized and cleaned up, and as long as they comply with all provisions of the law. What Security National cannot do is sidestep the law and public process to ram through piecemeal actions on their way to an inadequate cleanup in an effort to achieve their end goal.

The greenwashing of their project with pleas to “just let us get started” to cleanup the property is a transparent tactic. Humboldt Baykeeper has been asking Security National to do just that for years and we would step aside tomorrow if Security National would really do the right thing for the environment: fully characterize and cleanup the Balloon Track. It is truly that easy.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a cloud of influence that hangs darkly over the city of Eureka. I find it disturbing that the city has agreed to a generous “indemnification” agreement with Security National for any legal liability regarding the Marina Center project. This essentially hands the keys to the city of Eureka over to Security National regarding all things Marina Center.

This is unfortunate. The city of Eureka as lead agency for this project is charged by state law with requiring that environmental review of the project meets all of the requirements of CEQA. If Councilman Leonard, and others, truly believes that the FEIR they certified to under CEQA is one of the best he has ever seen, then why not be bold enough to defend it? Isn't that why they are elected in the first place?

Instead, Mr. Leonard and the council voted to certify what they know is an inadequate FEIR and then pleaded with environmental groups to “cease fire” on lawsuits for six months. If Mr. Leonard had as much of a grasp on CEQA as he proclaims, he would know that an individual or organization has only 30 days to legally challenge a project under CEQA.

If the City Council truly wanted a 6-month cease fire, they should have recirculated the FEIR and repaired the major flaws in the document as was repeatedly recommended by Baykeeper and others. The city had plenty of time to consider the ramifications of their action and will most certainly be informed by the courts that their environmental review of the Marina Center is woefully inadequate and incomplete.

Humboldt Baykeeper will continue to demand full characterization and cleanup of the Balloon Track. We have every intention of completing what we started four years ago for the health of the bay and the community. I am more than happy to talk with anyone about our actions and Humboldt Baykeeper's work to cleanup the property. I can be reached at 268-0664.
Pete Nichols is the executive director of Baykeeper.

ARIZONA STAR - Rancher wins $600K in suit against enviros

Jim Chilton

Rancher wins $600K in suit against enviros
The lawyer giveth, the lawyer taketh away

The Center for Biological Diversity has built a national reputation - and made a living - by suing the federal government on behalf of endangered species.

In 2003, it got reimbursed for $992,354 in expenses after winning in court - about double what its 10,000 members donated that year.

But now that same legal system has hit the Tucson-based group with a $600,000 judgment - one-quarter of the center's net assets at the end of 2003, according to the most recent annual report posted on its Web site.

Policy Director Kieran Suckling said the group he helped start in 1989 won't back down in the wake of Friday's verdict.

"The center has been here a long time, and we'll be here a long time in the future," he said.

"In our history we've lost some battles, which meant forests got cut down and endangered species got hurt. That's the darkest day. What happens to us as a group, as individuals, is nothing compared to the suffering of plants and animals," he said.

Calling itself "nature's legal eagles," the center claims credit for safeguarding 335 species - about one-quarter of the 1,264 plants and animals now protected by the federal government.

Using a provision in the Endangered Species Act that allows for citizen petitions, the center has forced the government to list creatures at risk of extinction and map millions of acres of "critical habitat" that can face stricter regulation.

Jim Chilton's suit also named three of the center's current and former workers: Martin Taylor, Shane Jimerfield and A.J. Schneller. But they won't be held financially liable for the libel, Suckling said.

Although the center has insurance, Suckling said he wasn't sure how much of the jury award it will cover. He also noted the legal fees the center earns are reimbursed expenses.

"That's not a pot of money sitting around unused," he said.

The fees won in 2003 were unusually high, he said, with the typical amount around $300,000 per year.


By Mitch Tobin
ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Tucson's Center for Biological Diversity must pay rancher and banker Jim Chilton $600,000 because the environmental group defamed him with a press release and photos posted on its Web site, a jury decided Friday.

In a 9-1 verdict, jurors in Pima County Superior Court awarded Chilton $100,000 for the harm done to his reputation and Arivaca cattle company. The jury tacked on an additional $500,000 in punitive damages meant to punish the center and deter others from committing libel.

Chilton, whose wife, Sue, is chairwoman of the Arizona Game and Fish Commission, sued the center over material that alleged he mismanaged his 21,500-acre Forest Service allotment, northwest of Nogales.

Many of the center's 21 photos depicted barren patches that captions described as "denuded" by cows. But Chilton's lawyer showed jurors wide-angle photos taken at the same locations that revealed the surroundings as worthy of a postcard, with oaks and mesquites dotting lush, rolling hills.

The center countered that the material it published in July 2002 couldn't be libelous because it was honest opinion. The photos weren't doctored, the center said, and they were public records that were part of its failed bid to block renewal of Chilton's grazing permit.

The center, which is typically the plaintiff in court, will probably appeal the decision, and its insurance should pay for at least some of the damages, if they're upheld, said policy director Kieran Suckling.

"We did things with the best of intentions. If there were some mistakes, they were honest mistakes," he said.

Suckling said he was most worried about the verdict's "chilling effect" on advocacy groups.

"We really feel victimized by a wealthy banker who can afford to hire a large legal team to nitpick you to death," he said.

Chilton, donning a white cowboy hat outside the courtroom, said he doubted he'll be able to collect all the money from the center, which he described as "schoolyard bullies."

"It does not matter if I ever collect a dime. We were in it because it's a righteous, just cause. People have taken too much abuse for too long in this community," he said. "I'm glad our system has a watchdog, and that's the jury system."

Chilton said he'll use the award to pay his lawyers, reimburse himself for costs, then donate what's left over to the Arizona Cattle Growers' Association legal fund so it can "fight for justice."

Chilton, a fifth-generation rancher, said he wants to start a more collaborative relationship with the center and will invite the defendants to visit his ranch to discuss its biodiversity.

Suckling dismissed that invitation as "cynical media spin."

"The only contact Mr. Chilton has ever had with the center is threatening letters from his lawyers going back seven years," he said.

The two-week trial, with 21 witnesses and more than 100 exhibits, featured odes to the ranching lifestyle, plus dry testimony on the labyrinth of public-lands policymaking.

To prove the material was defamatory, Chilton not only had to show it was false and hurt him, but also demonstrate the activists knew they had lied or shown "reckless disregard" for the truth. Such evidence of malice had to be "clear and convincing."

The bar would have been lower had Chilton not been ruled a public figure by Judge Richard Fields. An ordinary citizen would only have to show the center was negligent through a preponderance of the evidence.

Kraig Marton, Chilton's attorney, told jurors in closing arguments Thursday that he'd proved at least four photos weren't even on Chilton's allotment and that the center willfully ignored scientific studies praising Chilton's grazing practices.

"They were out to do harm, out to stop grazing and out to do whatever they can to prevent the Chiltons and others like them from letting cows on public land," Marton said.

Quoting the Bible, Shakespeare, Ben Franklin and Warren Buffett, Marton told jurors "our reputation is everything."

"What other people think of you makes you who you are," he said.

Sue Chilton - whose 2001 appointment to the Game and Fish Commission was bitterly opposed by the center and other "green" groups - testified her husband became withdrawn and plagued by insomnia and stomach pain because of the press release. A paid witness for Chilton said the center's scrutiny had cut $200,000 from the value of the allotment he bought for $797,000 in 1991.

Chilton testified that if he were to resell the permit, he'd have to disclose the center's attacks.

"It would be like trying to sell a house that has been subject to systematic terrorist activities by local gangs and not indicating to a potential purchaser that gang hits had been made on your house," he said.

But because the First Amendment guarantees the right of free speech, Judge Fields instructed jurors they couldn't consider the center's statements libelous if they viewed them as opinions, rather than facts.

"We must enforce the people's right to express their opinion and have public debate over issues," Robert Royal, the center's attorney, told jurors. "That is what makes this country great."

Royal, who called only one witness, told jurors they shouldn't even consider the photos. They were part of the center's written appeal of the grazing permit, and such legislative matters can't be libelous, he said.

The photos didn't show the entire allotment, he said, because the center, like the Forest Service, wanted to focus on problem areas, or "hot spots."

"How can we take a photo to show 21,000 acres?" he said.

As for the release, he said, "we went through every one of those issues and described how those statements were correct."

The juror who didn't vote to award damages said after the trial that the panel's 2 1/2-hour deliberations were cordial.

"I just felt that the center had a right to have their own opinions," said Sam Moore, 55, a pressman for a printer.

To win punitive damages, Chilton had to prove the center acted with an "evil mind," meaning it intended to cause harm, was motivated by "spite or ill will" or acted to serve its "own interest."

The center may have accidentally taken photos of the wrong places, Royal said, but that can't be considered "reckless" if Chilton's own registered surveyor made a similar mistake in creating a map for the trial.

But Marton told jurors they only had to look at the center's anti-grazing agenda and refusal to apologize in court for proof of its contempt toward Chilton and his way of life.

"If you're gonna lie," Marton said, "you have to pay the consequences."

Contact reporter Mitch Tobin at 573-4185 or mtobin at azstarnet.com

ARIZONA DAILY STAR - Rancher's suit puts enviros on defense

ARIZONA DAILY STAR: Weds., Jan. 12, 2005
Rancher's suit puts enviros on defense
By Mitch Tobin

Tucson's Center for Biological Diversity is no stranger to lawsuits related to grazing. But in a turning of the tables, the litigious group now finds itself as the defendant in a Pima County courtroom.

Arivaca rancher Jim Chilton is suing the environmentalists, alleging they defamed him in a two-page press release and 21 photographs posted on the center's Web site in July 2002.

Chilton's libel suit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages, argues that the news advisory and photo captions contain "false, unfair, libelous and defamatory statements" about Chilton's management of his 21,500-acre Montana Allotment, northwest of Nogales.

"These are lies masquerading as facts," Kraig Marton, Chilton's attorney, said in an interview. "This case also shows how photographs can lie."

Chilton's wife, Sue, was appointed to the Arizona Game and Fish Commission in 2001 over the strenuous objections of environmentalists. The center's advisory says she "tried to suppress" Game and Fish recommendations about the allotment on the Coronado National Forest and that the Chiltons "have an agenda hostile to wildlife and endangered species."

The Center, which has built a national reputation for aggressive litigation and media work on behalf of endangered species, says its actions weren't libelous because they were opinions.

"The news advisory and the pictures are not false information - they're the truth," said Robert Royal, the center's attorney. The Center also says documents on the Web site can't be libelous because they were public records that were part of its unsuccessful effort to block renewal of Chilton's grazing permit.

"The Chiltons are really trying to create a chill effect to scare people away from commenting on public lands and the actions of public agencies," said Kieran Suckling, the Center's policy director.

Judge Richard Fields has already ruled the Chiltons are public figures, which raises the bar for proving libel. The jury of six women and four men is expected to get the case next week.

Marton said he'll reveal in his closing statement how much money his client is seeking.

"The primary focus of the case is to prove the center made false statements," he said.

The suit names not only the Center, but three of its current and former employees: Martin Taylor, author of the release; Shane Jimerfield, the Web site designer who posted it; and A.J. Schneller, who was responsible for some photos and captions.

The suit alleges the Center hurt Chilton's ranching business and caused him "to suffer great mental anguish, humiliation, public hatred, contempt, ridicule" and damage to his "integrity and reputation."

"I'm outraged," Chilton said after Tuesday's hearing before a nearly empty courtroom. "For five generations we've ranched in Arizona as stewards of the land and all evidence indicates we're doing a wonderful job."

Larry Medlock, a now-retired Forest Service official who concluded grazing on the allotment didn't have a negative environmental impact, testified Tuesday that the press release had several false statements.

Medlock, who visited the allotment some 20 times, disputed the Center's claim that part of the allotment was "grazed to bare dirt." He said it was true cattle had broken into a preserve for Sonora chub, a threatened fish, but the cows had come up from Mexico and weren't Chilton's.

Chilton's lawyer asked if the photos showing denuded areas were an accurate representation of the allotment.
"It doesn't give a true picture of what the Montana Allotment looks like," Medlock said, adding the ground could have been laid bare by activities other than grazing.

Taylor, author of the release, then took the stand for nearly two hours of sharp questioning from Chilton's lawyer. Taylor said he wrote the release in an hour, faxed it to the news media, then called some reporters in a failed bid to drum up coverage of the controversy.

"I wasn't biased against the Chiltons," said Taylor, an entomologist who left the Center in 2003. He flew in from his native Australia for the trial.

Marton sought to prove Taylor had an anti-grazing agenda and an ax to grind when he went out to inspect the allotment. The lawyer said Taylor willfully ignored scientific studies showing positive effects of grazing and said he took photos that focused on bare sections rather than areas around them covered by vegetation.

"I wanted to document the problem areas," Taylor said. "I wasn't attempting or pretending to do good science."

"Did you ever call the Chiltons before you wrote the news advisory to get their side of the story?" Marton asked.

"That's for journalists to do," Taylor said. "Not us."

? Contact reporter Mitch Tobin at 573-4185 or mtobin at azstarnet.com.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

SB - Seeds of Change (5/5)

Seeds of Change

Solutions sprouting from grass-roots efforts
(Fifth of five parts)

By Tom Knudson
Bee Staff Writer
(Published April 26, 2001)

Change is knocking on the door of America's environmental movement. Change is remodeling it from within.

From the outside, the pressure is coming from ranchers, corporate executives, small-town merchants, educators, schoolkids and other ordinary people embracing a home-grown style of environmentalism that is quietly saving species, restoring forests and grasslands, and preserving open space.

From the inside, it is coming from a broad spectrum of environmentalists -- chief executive officers, fund-raising specialists, state directors, program officers, lawyers and others -- struggling to bring more science, entrepreneurial skill, accountability, teamwork and results to a movement they say has grown self-righteous, inefficient, chaotic and shrill.

"Haphazard conservation is worse than haphazard development. We've had haphazard conservation for 30 years," said Patrick Noonan, chairman of The Conservation Fund, a Virginia group that provides financial and technical support to small environmental organizations.

Yet this new brand of stewardship remains more seed than storm, lacking the clamor and conflict that often accompany environmental news. Its disciples do not view the world darkly. Their habitat is one of hope, not hype.

"We've effectively sold the idea that the world is screwed up," said Dan Taylor, executive director of the National Audubon Society's California chapter. "What people are looking for now are some durable solutions on how to make it better."

Just as consumer taste shapes the corporate landscape, so, too, is hunger for a new kind of environmentalism changing the conservation world. The number of environmental groups is booming -- up from a few hundred in 1970 to more than 8,000 today. And most are sprouting not in traditional power centers -- such as Washington, D.C., or San Francisco -- but in other cities, small towns and rural areas.

The grass-roots nature of the change can be read in the names of the organizations themselves: the Malpai Borderlands Group in Douglas, Ariz.; the Henry's Fork Foundation in Ashton, Idaho; the Great Valley Center in Modesto; the Applegate Partnership in Oregon.

"People now realize they can organize themselves," said Noonan. "They can band together in their community to save that river, field, mountain or whatever. It's America at its best."

Behavioral patterns are shifting, too. No longer is influencing public policy so lofty a goal. Today, some groups focus on a more tangible prize: buying, protecting and restoring land. And no longer do all groups simply say no to economic development; today, a few are learning how to make commerce and conservation walk side by side.

Change is leafing out at the national level, as well, where five of the country's 10 largest groups focus not on advocacy but buying and protecting land -- up from just one 30 years ago. Those groups -- The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, Ducks Unlimited, the Trust for Public Land and the Conservation Fund -- have another common denominator: They are among the fastest-growing environmental groups in America.

Two of the 10 biggest groups, and many smaller ones, prosper without junk mail or telemarketing. Five are wealthy enough to compete with corporations for land. Two have their own scientific research institutes. At least two take in significant sums of money -- $4 million a year or more -- from corporations, including oil, timber and mining companies.

Like experimentation on the dot-com frontier, such activity is bringing a burst of creativity to the conservation community, spawning start-ups and spinoffs that bear little resemblance to conventional environmental groups.

Look closely at this landscape and you see organizations with no members, no lawyers, even no payrolls. You also see conservation efforts sprouting in unlikely places -- including an Appalachian farm supply store, a commercial fishing fleet in Mexico, a fast-growing Florida suburb and cattle ranches in California and Arizona.

"You have to manage with people in mind nowadays ... You can't turn the land back to what it was in 1840," said Warner Glenn, a southeast Arizona rancher. Glenn is working with The Nature Conservancy, university scientists and others to keep grasslands healthy for rural families and for wildlife.

Priorities are beginning to change, too. No longer is the designation of parks and wilderness areas as dominant a theme. Today, some are focusing on the restoration of worked-over land, public and private alike, an approach many scientists say can produce greater benefit for the natural world. Some are taking conservation to the inner city, creating parks and cleaning up toxic sites in neighborhoods overlooked by mainstream groups.

And no longer is it enough simply to point out problems. Today, people inside the environmental movement and outside are picking up shovels, planting trees, healing wetlands, tearing out parking lots, working with government and industry -- and solving problems themselves.

This new environmental frontier has no road map, no catalog of places saved or species protected. But plenty of people know it well. One is Bill Kittrell, director of the Clinch Valley program for The Nature Conservancy in the Appalachian Mountains of southwest Virginia.

Closer to Nashville than Washington, southwest Virginia seems an odd place for a branch office of the nation's largest environmental group. The countryside -- thickly forested with hickory, walnut and other hardwoods -- is picturesque. But, speckled with small towns and abandoned coal mines, it is no pristine wilderness. Eighty-nine percent of the area is private land.

Yet for the Conservancy, which focuses on protecting rare and endangered species, this quiet corner of Appalachia is more important than a national park. One morning not long ago, Kittrell was waist-deep in the Clinch River, trying to illustrate why.

He sloshed this way and that, using a large viewing scope to peer into the water. Five minutes passed. Ten minutes. A few moments later, one of his colleagues -- biologist Braven Beaty -- reached into the river and scooped what looked like a small yellow-brown stone off the bottom.

"Here we go!" Beaty said. "This is a fine-rayed pigtoe mussel. This is a federally endangered species."

Held in the sun, the mussel gleamed. And Kittrell beamed. "This is what we call a G-1 species," he said. "That means there are fewer than five population groups worldwide. The loss of any one population is a threat to the entire species."

All told, southwest Virginia's rivers and creeks are home to 48 rare and endangered mussels and fish, the highest number of imperiled species in any ecosystem in the United States, outside Hawaii. That concentration of rarity -- and a determination to remedy it -- was what drew the Conservancy to southwest Virginia.

"Most environmentalists, they always want more," the Conservancy's former President John Sawhill told The Bee before his death last year. "We wanted to know, 'How much is enough? What do we really need to do to conserve biological diversity in the U.S.? How will we measure success?' "

"So we came up with the idea of creating what we call a conservation blueprint: a map showing all the sites nationwide that need to be protected in order to accomplish our mission," Sawhill said. On that map, a handful of areas glow red and orange -- color codes for extreme biological danger. They are southwest Virginia, Hawaii and parts of California, Nevada and Florida.

"Now we know where we're headed and what we're trying to accomplish," Sawhill said.

The Conservancy also works closely with local residents, including Buddy Thomas, owner of the Castlewood Farm Supply & Garden Center and president of the chamber of commerce in Russell County, Va.

"I've heard it so many times from these farmers: 'What importance are these little mussels?' " Thomas said. "When I tell them those mussels are God's little filters to clean the water, they look at it a whole different way."

"I got a 2-year-old girl," Thomas continued. "You know what my favorite thing in the world is to do? It is to get my fishing rod and my kid and play in that creek. Everybody loves the creek. I can't find many people who want to see it hurt."

Thomas even formed his own conservation start-up -- the all-volunteer Copper Creek Watershed Citizens' Awareness Group -- to bring farmers, environmentalists and others together to solve problems.

"We'll get a lot further doing things together than by butting heads, making threats and telling people they can't do things," he said. "You tell people around here they can't do something, they'll do it or die."

A similar approach is unfolding outside the United States, where Conservation International, the youngest of the nation's major environmental groups, concentrates on a handful of the planet's richest biological zones, from the Congo Basin in Africa to Mexico's Gulf of California.

On turquoise water under a sweltering sun, Conservation International scientist Juan Garcia is putting a new strategy to work to save a wide variety of marine life in the gulf. He is working with the very people who are exploiting the gulf, also known as the Sea of Cortez.

Garcia labors alongside fishermen, trying to make shrimp trawling, one of the world's most wasteful fishing technologies, less destructive. Dragged behind large boats, trawl nets snare everything in their path, including sea horses, marine turtles and silvery schools of fish too small to eat.

In the Sea of Cortez, trawl nets capture up to 9 pounds of unwanted species for every pound of shrimp, one of the highest ratios anywhere.

"We are working with six or seven vessels," Garcia said. "They are very enthusiastic about trying to find a solution."

Such community-driven conservation efforts are the brainchild of Conservation International's founder and chairman, Peter Seligmann, who believes the secret to environmental success in other countries is to "make sure everybody understands conservation is in their self-interest."

Seligmann is applying conservation to internal matters, too. A few years back, he abandoned junk-mail fund raising in favor of personal solicitations to major donors. The result: more accountability for donor dollars.

"If you have a million people giving you $25, nobody has the leverage to say -- 'OK, how did you spend my money?' -- because they don't care. It's just 25 bucks," he said. "But when somebody gives you $1,000, they have the right to know, and you have the obligation to inform them, how you spend their money.

"The other problem with direct mail is it requires exaggeration," Seligmann said. "You don't build effective long-term conservation programs based on exaggeration."

Even some groups that continue to raise money though the mail are doing it differently: They refuse to cry wolf.

"We very rarely say, 'The world is coming to an end, send $25,' " said Taylor, the Audubon Society leader. "What we do say is, 'Send us money so we can buy this area, restore that area.' That approach has performed nicely."

In Tucson, the Sonoran Institute takes matters a step further -- it doesn't have a membership at all.

"A membership is very expensive," said Luther Propst, executive director of the organization, which protects open space across the western United States, Canada and Mexico. Instead, it raises money from foundations.

A membership "will also influence your decision-making, often in ways that take you away from science and what your field people tell you. You are tempted to oversimplify. We find that foundation officers appreciate it when you are honest."

Frustrated with junk mail, even Greenpeace is trying alternatives, including something called "direct dialogue" in which volunteers stand on street corners and ask for donations.

But instead of seeking a one-time contribution of cash, the Greenpeace volunteers are asking for a monthly credit-card or checking-account deposit, thus eliminating junk mail and cutting fund-raising costs. That approach is popular in Europe but relatively new in the United States.

"Our argument to donors is, 'This (direct deposit) is how you can really help us,' " said John Passacantando, Greenpeace's executive director. "We're spending too much money to get your money."

Some environmentalists are even taking a fresh look at the movement's most potent weapon: the law. "The law prohibits bad things; it doesn't encourage good things," said Michael Bean, a senior attorney with Environmental Defense, a major national group.

Bean, one of the nation's most seasoned endangered species lawyers, has sued to get the California desert tortoise on the endangered species list and compel American shrimp fishermen to reduce the accidental catch of sea turtles in their nets.

Now he's found a new niche: saving wildlife without litigation.

"The preconceived notion is that the best way to get results is always to tighten the screws," Bean said. "But there are some circumstances in which you get better results by creatively loosening the screws."

One such case unfolded in North Carolina where landowners, wary of land-use restrictions, were leveling pine forests to ward off an endangered woodpecker.

Bean helped broker a deal in which landowners not only agreed to stop such "panic cutting" but also to manage their forests in ways that would attract the birds -- all in exchange for a guarantee from the federal government that they would suffer no new restrictions on using their land.

Bean said the idea behind such "safe harbor agreements" is simple: People who do good deeds shouldn't be punished for doing them.

Incentives are coming to regulatory matters, too.

"We believe in regulation. But you can only go so far with a regulatory system. Free enterprise is the greatest motivator the world has ever known," said Noonan, the Conservation Fund chairman.

"Developers come to us all the time," Noonan continued. "They don't want to get tied up, fight it out for years. They want certainty. I can jam any developer I want. I may not win, but I can jam them. For two, three, four years. That's power. But it's also frightening power."

When a large investment group recently announced plans to build a new subdivision in fast-growing Palm Beach County, Fla., Noonan worked with the developer to create ribbons of open space that will provide habitat for endangered species, restore surface and groundwater flows, and link neighborhoods with bicycle and pedestrian trails.

"We're not going to stop population growth, at least not in our lifetime," Noonan said. "So I suggest the next big leap is: How do we support good development?"

Increasingly, environmental groups also are using the free market to accomplish something that has proved nearly impossible for local, county and state regulators: stopping sprawl.

They are doing it by buying land, even in some of the most booming real estate markets in America. "We're un-developers," said Will Rogers, president of the Trust for Public Land, which recently saved a choice 534-acre parcel from subdivision in the hills above San Jose, for $1.9 million.

Some of the trust's work takes place an ecosystem overlooked by many conservation groups: the inner city. In Oakland, it is turning urban blight into parks. In Los Angeles, it is converting a toxic Superfund site into a soccer field.

"There is an increased awareness that land can be recycled, that parks can be created often out of brownfields" -- abandoned industrial sites, Rogers said. "It's gnarly stuff, in terms of toxics and liability. But it's a big, exciting category. We've done probably 36 brownfields projects over our history."

Noonan's Conservation Fund recently pulled off one of the biggest conservation transactions of all -- buying from a logging company 300,000 acres in New York, Vermont and New Hampshire for $76.7 million.

"We outbid Wall Street on that one," Noonan said. "That's happening more and more."

Like a brokerage house for the environmental movement, the Conservation Fund brought together other nonprofit groups, foundations and public agencies to complete a transaction none could have completed on its own.

"The big weakness of our movement is we don't collaborate very well," Noonan said. "We're seeing a new set of people come into the movement who can talk the language of business and who are humble enough to know they can't do it alone."

Land also can be protected through strategies such as that adopted by California rancher Scott Stone: Restore it to ecological health. Last year, as bright orange flames raced along a creek at the Yolo Land and Cattle Co. northwest of Winters, Stone stood nearby, watching contentedly.

"You can see what we're trying to get rid of," he said, pointing to vast golden fields of yellow star thistle, medusa head and goat grass -- non-native, ecologically harmful weeds and grasses.

The spread of non-native weeds and other species may seem insignificant, but it is actually one of the nation's most serious ecological problems. Exotic weeds and grasses choke out native plants, increase fire danger and destroy wildlife habitat.

Conventional remedies -- herbicides and hoes -- offer little hope. The problem is simply too large. For many weed species in the West, the only option is fire. And in California, few people know more about the therapeutic power of fire than Central Valley farmer John Anderson, who helped Stone plan and carry out his pastoral pyrotechnics.

"That star thistle is history!" Anderson shouted gleefully as knee-high flames raced along a dirt road.

Sitting on the ground as smoke curled around him, his face streaked with ash, Anderson turned philosophical. "We need to reinstitute a culture of fire in the West," he said. "We've feared it for years, and now nobody knows how to burn."

Anderson took advantage of his fireside chat to call for the creation of a massive new federal program to restore land to ecological health -- "a national land health care system," he called it.

"You really can't nickel-and-dime habitat restoration," said Anderson, a member of the National Audubon Society board. "Most of the money we're getting now (from government agencies) is nickel and dime. We need big bucks ... We need millions and millions of dollars to fight weeds right now."

But there are alternatives to federal money, too. You can, for example, call on school kids, as The Nature Conservancy is doing south of Sacramento at its Cosumnes River Preserve.

"We decided that the way to the heart of the community was through the schoolchildren," said Mike Eaton, director of the preserve. "So we set out to create hands-on opportunities." Today, about 4,000 schoolkids a year plant trees, collect acorns and gather frog, fish and duck stories to take home.

Tapping into community spirit is also an approach used by the Malpai Borderlands Group, a network of ranchers in Arizona and New Mexico. There, free market tools such as conservation easements and cooperative grazing partnerships are put to work to protect ranches and open space critical to wildlife.

"There are very few ranchers in this country that are not pro-wildlife," said Warner Glenn -- a member of the group's board -- relaxing on the porch of his ranch home last year as lightning illuminated Mexico's Sierra Madre range to the south.

In 1996, Glenn became the first person to photograph a wild jaguar in the United States. He wrote a book about it and is donating a portion of the proceeds to jaguar conservation.

When the population of a rare species of leopard frog dropped precariously in a drought a few years back, another Malpai rancher, Matt Magoffin, fashioned a homemade water truck. He and his family hauled 1,000 gallons of water a week to the frogs for 2 1/2 years.

"Environmentalists are fighting with ranchers, but we both want the same goals," Magoffin said. "We want to maintain open space and keep subdivisions from spreading across the landscape."

Corporations have also joined the ranks of nontraditional conservationists. And many environmentalists are distrustful.

"The lack of accountability on the part of America's corporate leadership is back where it was in the 1870s," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. Less than 1 percent of the Sierra Club's budget comes from corporations, and such gifts are run through a rigorous environmental screening process.

But Conservation International President Russell Mittermeier embraces corporate wealth.

"The private sector drives much of what happens in the world," said Mittermeier, who has been likened to Indiana Jones for his intrepid travels through tropical jungles to save endangered primates. "One can either be in an adversarial relationship with it, or one can work with people in the private sector who are really concerned and interested in change."

Ford Motor Co. has donated more than $5 million to Conservation International for habitat protection in Brazil and Mexico. Starbucks is backing efforts to promote the cultivation of shade-tolerant coffee plants in Chiapas, Mexico, saving forests from being logged to make way for coffee plantations.

William Clay Ford Jr. -- the car company's chairman -- has served on the Conservation International board member. So has retired Intel Chairman Gordon Moore, who recently gave the group $35 million to start its own research arm.

Although many environmentalists say corporate support is a public relations ploy, Mittermeier said his own experience indicates otherwise.

"William Ford is as strong on this stuff as anybody in the organization," he said, "Gordon Moore is totally committed. He goes on every field trip, climbs every mountain."

The National Audubon Society welcomes corporate donations, too. "Somebody once had a great phrase when asked, 'Would you accept tainted money?' " said Dan Beard, the society's chief operating officer. "The response was, 'The only thing wrong with tainted money is there t'ain't enough of it.'

"What we ought to be doing is building an environmental ethic in corporate minds," Beard said. "We ought to be converting the world to an environmental ethic. If you just ignore people -- or point fingers at them -- that isn't going to do anybody any good."

SB - Playing with fire (4/5)

Playing with fire

Spin on science puts national treasure at risk
(Fourth of five parts)

By Tom Knudson
Bee Staff Writer
(Published April 25, 2001)

The scientific paper that landed on Tammy Randall-Parker's desk was thick with jargon and data. But to Randall-Parker, a biologist with the Coconino National Forest in Arizona, it was riveting.

Citing an enormous accumulation of vegetation and deadwood in Western forests -- the legacy of years of effective federal firefighting -- the report by a prestigious team of specialists warned that unless such stands were thinned, they were likely to erupt into flame, threatening a rare, falcon-like bird: the northern goshawk.

Randall-Parker felt compelled to act. But when she and others suggested thinning near a goshawk nest, environmentalists protested on the bird's behalf, stopping the proposal dead.

Then came the fire that Randall-Parker feared. "I watched it just explode," she said. The 1996 blaze devoured centuries-old trees as if they were kindling -- including the one that cradled the goshawk nest.

"There was not a green tree left," she said. "What the scientists said could happen -- did happen, right in front of my eyes."

Environmental advocacy has long struggled with scientific fact, despite its very basis in science. But in the battle over the majestic conifer forests that blanket much of the West, advocacy is often shoving science aside -- and forests, wildlife and human communities are suffering the consequences.

Tweaking science to make a point is nothing new for environmental groups. To protect rare species, for example, some groups trot out just those studies -- or snippets of studies -- that support their view. Some will pick and choose facts that serve their interests in campaigns to create wilderness areas.

Misusing forest science is different.

It is playing with fire. Not the natural fires that have nourished forests for centuries, but unusually savage ones that jeopardize homes and human lives and can inflict more serious environmental damage than logging.

"We're not sure if some of these burned areas will ever recover their native biological diversity," said Wallace Covington, a professor of forest ecology at Northern Arizona University and a nationally recognized fire scientist. "Certainly, over evolutionary time, new species will emerge. But these are major devastations."

Science will never settle all conflict over forest and fire management. But during the past two decades, university, government and industry scientists have written a series of papers published in academic journals and elsewhere that point again and again to the rapid and dangerous accumulation of woody debris in Western forests -- and the need for thinning.

"There is strong consensus among credible scientists that 100 years of fire suppression has led to a buildup of fuel in Western forests that makes them very susceptible to destructive, unnatural, ecosystem-destroying wildfire," said Neil Sampson, a visiting fellow at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and former chairman of the 1994 National Commission on Wildfire Disasters.

"Time is not an ally," he said.

Environmental groups aren't convinced. Where science sees a tinderbox, they see timber sales in disguise. And despite a steep drop in the volume of timber sold from federal forests in recent years, they say the U.S. Forest Service cannot be trusted.

"We're dealing with an agency that -- at the district level -- is a rogue agency," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, which is backing a "no commercial logging" campaign in Congress.

"There are some very good people in the Forest Service," Pope said. "But there are some people who really still think their job is to keep the local mill running."

Sampson said it's just not so. "The idea that thinning the forest is a boondoggle for the timber industry is bizarre," he said. "Much of what needs to be removed isn't even economically valuable. They are going to spin the science and lose the forest."

Wildfire today is inflicting nightmarish wounds -- injuries made worse by a failure to heed scientific warnings. For example:

* In 1994, Covington and a colleague warned that the Kendrick Mountain Wilderness Area in northern Arizona was so clotted with vegetation, it was ready to explode. "Delay ... will only perpetuate fuel buildup and increase the potential for uncontrolled and destructive wildfire," they wrote in a scientific analysis for the Kaibab National Forest.

Some thinning was done -- but not enough. Last year, a large fire swept through the region, carving an apocalyptic trail of destruction.

"What happened is much worse, ecologically, than a clear-cut -- much worse," Covington said "And that fire is the future. It's happening again and again. We're going to have skeletal landscapes."

* Listening to fire and forest scientists, Martha Ketelle pleaded in 1996 for permission to log and thin an incendiary mass of storm-killed timber in California's Trinity Alps. "This is a true emergency of vast magnitude," Ketelle, then supervisor of the Six Rivers National Forest, wrote to her boss in San Francisco. "It is not a matter of if a fire will occur, but how extensive the damage will be when the fire does occur."

Because of an environmental appeal, the project bogged down. Then, in 1999, a fire found its way into the area. It spewed smoke for hundreds of miles, incinerated spotted owl habitat and triggered soil erosion and stream damage in a key salmon-spawning watershed.

* Early last year, officials of Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico urged that dense pine stands near Los Alamos be thinned. "The underlying need is to reduce the potential for large, high intensity crown fires that threaten people, property, wildlife (and) watersheds," they stated in a report.

The project was slowed by a lack of funds and by environmental concerns. Last May, the Cerro Grande fire, the largest and most destructive in New Mexico history, erupted in the very area recommended for thinning, damaging or destroying more than 220 structures, including several portable structures at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

"Witnessing the Cerro Grande fire is the closest I'll come to seeing a biblical event in my lifetime," said Bill Armstrong, a forester with the Santa Fe National Forest. "It was unstoppable. Awe-inspiring. Futile. It was not, however, an unpreventable act of God."


Step into the forest outside Flagstaff, Ariz., and you enter a world of living matchsticks. You see dozens, hundreds, thousands of spindly, stunted ponderosa pines, crowded close together in shadowy thickets -- each competing with the others for moisture, soil nutrients and sunlight.

It is a much different setting from the one described by E.F. Beale, an explorer who passed through the area in 1858. "We came to a glorious forest of lofty pines," Beale wrote in a journal. "The forest was perfectly open and unencumbered with brush wood, so that the traveling was excellent."

What made that 19th century forest spacious was fire.

"Frequent surface fires were as important to ... forests as sunshine and rain," Thomas Swetnam, director of the University of Arizona's Tree-Ring Laboratory, told Congress last year. "Indeed, in southwestern ponderosa pine forests, the only natural events more frequent and regular than fire were the changing seasons."

Smokey Bear changed all that. Preventing and putting out fires, though, turned forests into thickets. Covington, the fire scientist, has quantified the change. In the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona, he found an area that sprouted 36 to 81 trees per acre in 1876 had grown shaggy and dense with 692 to 1,801 trees per acre by 1994.

A 1999 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office concluded: "The most extensive and serious problem (for) national forests in the interior West is the overaccumulation of vegetation. According to the Forest Service, 39 million acres are at high risk" of fire.

Not content to lick lightly along the surface of the forest, snapping up grass, brush and small trees, modern-day blazes roar up a staircase of woody debris, leaping high into the forest canopy. Such contemporary "crown fires" burn so hot that they destroy everything from microscopic life in the soil to majestic, old-growth trees that have been nourished by centuries of cooler fires.

"The fires we are experiencing now -- and I've been in this business 27 years -- are unlike anything we have experienced in this country before," said Paul Summerfelt, a fuel management officer with the Flagstaff fire department. "And this is just the beginning."


The buildup of fuels in Western forests was a prominent topic in the 1996 Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project report, a 3,187-page scientific assessment of the California mountain range.

Citing a remarkable accumulation of vegetation and deadwood, the $6.5 million, congressionally funded report warned of a fiery future -- unless overcrowded stands were thinned soon.

"Current quantities of flammable biomass -- primarily small trees and surface fuels -- are unprecedented," the report stated. "Simple physics and common sense dictate that the area burned by high-severity fires will increase. Losses of life, property and resources will escalate accordingly."

One suggested remedy was small-tree logging, followed by prescribed fire. "Logging can serve as a tool to help reduce fire hazard," it stated.

Environmental groups overlooked that part of the report.

Instead, they plucked one sentence from thousands to argue that all logging is bad. Here's how the National Forest Protection Alliance, a consortium of activists, used the report last fall in an action alert, under the heading, "What the Government's Own Scientists Say about Logging and Wildfires":

"Timber harvest, through its effects on forest structure, local microclimate and fuels accumulation has increased fire severity more than any other recent human activity."

Fire scientist Phillip Weatherspoon knows the sentence well. He helped write the Sierra Nevada report. The excerpt, he said, refers to historic logging that left Western forests littered with woody debris -- not modern thinning designed to clean up such debris.

"By itself it is misleading," he said. "This has been really abused."

Informed of Weatherspoon's concern, Jeanette Russell, network coordinator for the forest alliance, said: "This is the most popular fact we have. It is a quote congresspeople have used."

Chad Hanson, executive director of the John Muir Project and prominent foe of commercial logging, maintained there is nothing wrong with using the passage in isolation.

"It's a true statement," Hanson said. "It does not require additional statements to make it true."

The controversy is white-hot, powered by decades of distrust of the Forest Service. As Timothy Ingalsbee, director of the Western Fire Ecology Center in Oregon, explained in a letter:

"The fact that thinning is an abstract concept makes it subject to discretionary abuse .... In every single case of an alleged 'fire hazard reduction/forest ecosystem restoration' project that the agency has proposed the use of commercial thinning, the first thing the agency seeks is removal of the logs."

Not all environmental groups oppose commercial thinning, though. In Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon Trust has joined with Northern Arizona University, the Forest Service and others in an effort to thin dense stands.

The group, though, has hit a snag with no-commercial cut advocates within other environmental groups. "They say we are a tool of the timber industry," said Brad Ack, the Trust's conservation director.

"They say that logging increases the risk of fire," he said. "But that is out-of-context science. A lot of these folks are simply against cutting trees. It's almost spiritual environmentalism."

Hanson remains skeptical.

"This is not about science," he said. "This is the drumbeat of thinning being driven by the (Forest Service) commercial timber program. Science is being victimized."

No pro-thinning effort has drawn more heat than the Quincy Library Group, a coalition of conservationists, loggers and business people in the Sierra Nevada that is a national model for fuel-reduction efforts. What's fueling that heat is sometimes partial truth and hyperbole.

During congressional debate, for example, a coalition of environmental groups -- including the Sierra Club and the Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign -- claimed a Quincy-sponsored bill would "double logging." What the coalition didn't say was that logging volume was already at a 50-year low and that doubling it -- which is not actually what the bill proposed -- would have kept it well below historic levels.

"I still support that statement," said Craig Thomas, conservation director of the forest protection campaign in an e-mail. "It doesn't matter what the logging level was in the clear cut days (of the) 1980s. Those levels had no ecological validity."

The bill, passed by Congress, was meant to end the jobs versus trees gridlock, reduce fire risk and restore forests to health; it calls for thinning 40,000 to 70,000 acres of dense stands a year, while protecting 650,000 environmentally sensitive acres.

"They claim that we're clear-cutting, that we're going to destroy the spotted owl and ruin ancient forests -- and we're not," said Michael Yost, a professor of forestry at Feather River College and a member of the Quincy group.

"My wife and I have belonged for many years to the Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society and other organizations. And we've stopped our memberships," Yost said. "It's not in retaliation. It's just that I can't believe what these people are saying anymore."

In another case, the forest protection campaign distributed a flier to the U.S. Senate featuring a photo of a gigantic stump. "Sierra Old Growth Still Being Logged," it said. "Vote No on the Quincy Logging Bill." But the tree stump had nothing to do with the Quincy effort, or with Quincy itself. The tree was logged in another area.

"There is truly a conviction on the part of environmental groups that they can distort reality to convey impressions they believe are the truth," said Linda Blum, another Quincy member. "The focus is on ideology and politics -- not the environment."

Thomas said Quincy supporters are blowing smoke.

"This is their tactic: to try to demonstrate that we're some evil beast," Thomas said.

And while Thomas said he was not involved with the flier, he defended its use. "Who cares where the tree was cut?" he said. "The important thing was to convey a truthful message that old-growth forests were at risk in the Quincy proposal."

Some environmentalists don't merely manipulate the science. They attack the credibility of the scientists, including Covington, a Regents professor at Northern Arizona University.

For more than two decades, Covington has labored to bring a science-based ecological restoration gospel to pine forests around the West. His work has been published in academic periodicals, including the prestigious British journal Nature. Yet environmentalists consider his research suspect.

"Wally Covington is a darling of timber-industry supporters in Congress," said Hanson. "A lot of his data is open to question. He is a competent guy, but he is guessing."

Covington replied: "The science is solid. This is not a guess. They are attempting to discredit me because my views are different than their views."

"Science is not just the selective citation of studies," Covington said. "Science is built upon an entire body of knowledge. It's not slanted toward proving a particular point of view."

Sorting fact from fiction can sometimes be difficult. Armstrong, the New Mexico forester, recalled attending a meeting last year at the invitation of the Forest Conservation Council, a local environmental group.

The subject: a thinning project proposed by Santa Fe National Forest officials aimed at protecting the forests and streams that make up Santa Fe's watershed. The forest council didn't like the idea.

"The director got up and presented to the audience a long list of scientific authors and citations, all of them refuting what we were proposing to do," Armstrong said.

The list sounded impressive. "But we didn't know what to make of it," Armstrong said. Later, the group forwarded its scientific objections to the national forest in a letter.

"The claim that 'thinning,' whether commercial or not, will decrease the risk of wildfire continues to be conjecture," the group's president, John Talberth, wrote on Feb. 18, 2000.

Then he cited some science. "According to Forest Service researcher Jack Cohen, thinning forests ... does little, if anything to protect nearby homes and towns from losses during wildfire and may, in fact, be inefficient and ineffective," Talberth wrote, footnoting a 1999 report by Cohen.

Cohen's report does say that. But it also says: "This (research) should not imply that wildland vegetation management is not without a purpose and should not occur."

The forest council left that part out.

Cohen said the group is misrepresenting his research, which focuses narrowly on risk to homes and does not assess the ecological impact of thinning. "They're certainly distorting the context," he said.

In an e-mail, Cohen said: "I think it very unfortunate that some environmental groups play the current spin games that have become very much a part of our culture. Intellectual dishonesty has become a norm."

Talberth responded with an e-mail, too: "We stand by all that we have said," he wrote. "The truth is that there are two sides to the story and if these researchers cannot stand to acknowledge that, then maybe they should consider careers as politicians and leave science to those with more objective thinking."

Talberth's original letter quoted another study, in the journal Forest Science. That article, too, was cited out of context, said Carl Skinner, a California fire scientist who co-authored it.

Armstrong said the scientific citations show up again and again in other environmental appeals and protests. "We get this pseudoscience and misquoted stuff all the time," he said.

SB - Green machine (2/5)

Green machine

Mission adrift in a frenzy of fund raising
(Second of five parts)

By Tom Knudson
Bee Staff Writer
(Published April 23, 2001)

Dear Friend,
I need your help to stop an impending slaughter.
Otherwise, Yellowstone National Park -- an American wildlife treasure -- could soon become a bloody killing field. And the victims will be hundreds of wolves and defenseless wolf pups!

So begins a fund-raising letter from one of America's fastest-growing environmental groups -- Defenders of Wildlife.

Using the popular North American gray wolf as the hub of an ambitious campaign, Defenders has assembled a financial track record that would impress Wall Street.

In 1999, donations jumped 28 percent to a record $17.5 million. The group's net assets, a measure of financial stability, grew to $14.5 million, another record. And according to its 1999 annual report, Defenders spent donors' money wisely, keeping fund-raising and management costs to a lean 19 percent of expenses.

But there is another side to Defenders' dramatic growth.

Pick up copies of its federal tax returns and you'll find that its five highest-paid business partners are not firms that specialize in wildlife conservation. They are national direct mail and telemarketing companies -- the same ones that raise money through the mail and over the telephone for nonprofit groups, from Mothers Against Drunk Driving to the U.S. Olympic Committee.

You'll also find that in calculating its fund-raising expenses, Defenders borrows a trick from the business world. It dances with digits, finds opportunity in obfuscation. Using an accounting loophole, it classifies millions of dollars spent on direct mail and telemarketing not as fund raising but as public education and environmental activism.

Take away that loophole and Defenders' 19 percent fund-raising and management tab leaps above 50 percent, meaning more than half of every dollar donated to save wolf pups helped nourish the organization instead. That was high enough to earn Defenders a "D" rating from the American Institute of Philanthropy, an independent, nonprofit watchdog that scrutinizes nearly 400 charitable groups.

Pick up copies of IRS returns for major environmental organizations and you'll see that what is happening at Defenders of Wildlife is not unusual. Eighteen of America's 20 most prosperous environmental organizations, and many smaller ones as well, raise money the same way: by soliciting donations from millions of Americans.

But in turning to mass-market fund-raising techniques for financial sustenance, environmental groups have crossed a kind of conservation divide.

No allies of industry, they have become industries themselves, dependent on a style of salesmanship that fills mailboxes across America with a never-ending stream of environmentally unfriendly junk mail, reduces the complex world of nature to simplistic slogans, emotional appeals and counterfeit crises, and employs arcane accounting rules to camouflage fund raising as conservation.

Just as industries run afoul of regulations, so are environmental groups stumbling over standards. Their problem is not government standards, because fund raising by nonprofits is largely protected by the free speech clause of the First Amendment. Their challenge is meeting the generally accepted voluntary standards of independent charity watchdogs.

And there, many fall short.

Six national environmental groups spend so much on fund raising and overhead they don't have enough left to meet the minimum benchmark for environmental spending -- 60 percent of annual expenses -- recommended by charity watchdog organizations. Eleven of the nation's 20 largest include fund-raising bills in their tally of money spent protecting the environment, but don't make that clear to members.

The flow of environmental fund-raising mail is remarkable. Last year, more than 160 million pitches swirled through the U.S. Postal Service, according to figures provided by major organizations. That's enough envelopes, stationery, decals, bumper stickers, calendars and personal address labels to circle the Earth more than two times.

Often, just one or two people in 100 respond.

The proliferation of environmental appeals is beginning to boomerang with the public, as well. "The market is over-saturated. There is mail fatigue," said Ellen McPeake, director of finance and development at Greenpeace, known worldwide for its defense of marine mammals. "Some people are so angry they send back the business reply envelope with the direct mail piece in it."

Even a single fund-raising drive generates massive waste. In 1999, The Wilderness Society mailed 6.2 million membership solicitations -- an average of 16,986 pieces of mail a day. At just under 0.9 ounce each, the weight for the year came to about 348,000 pounds.

Most of the fund-raising letters and envelopes are made from recycled paper. But once delivered, millions are simply thrown away, environmental groups acknowledge. Even when the solicitations make it to a recycling bin, there's a glitch: Personal address labels, bumper stickers and window decals that often accompany them cannot be recycled into paper -- and are carted off to landfills instead.

"For an environmental organization, it's so wrong," said McPeake, who is developing alternatives to junk mail at Greenpeace. "It's not exactly environmentally correct."

The stuff is hard to ignore.

Environmental solicitations -- swept along in colorful envelopes emblazoned with bears, whales and other charismatic creatures -- jump out at you like salmon leaping from a stream.

Open that mail and more unsolicited surprises grab your attention. The Center for Marine Conservation lures new members with a dolphin coloring book and a flier for a "free" dolphin umbrella. The National Wildlife Federation takes a more seasonal approach: a "Free Spring Card Collection & Wildflower Seed Mix!" delivered in February, and 10 square feet of wrapping paper with "matching gift tags" delivered just before Christmas.

The Sierra Club reaches out at holiday time, too, with a bundle of Christmas cards that you can't actually mail to friends and family, because inside they are marred by sales graffiti: "To order, simply call toll-free ... " Defenders of Wildlife tugs at your heart with "wolf adoption papers." American Rivers dangles something shiny in front of your checkbook: a "free deluxe 35 mm camera" for a modest $12 tax-deductible donation.

The letters that come with the mailers are seldom dull. Steeped in outrage, they tell of a planet in perpetual environmental shock, a world victimized by profit-hungry corporations. And they do so not with precise scientific prose but with boastful and often inaccurate sentences that scream and shout:

From New York-based Rainforest Alliance: "By this time tomorrow, nearly 100 species of wildlife will tumble into extinction."

Fact: No one knows how rapidly species are going extinct. The Alliance's figure is an extreme estimate that counts tropical beetles and other insects -- including ones not yet known to science -- in its definition of wildlife.

From The Wilderness Society: "We will fight to stop reckless clear-cutting on national forests in California and the Pacific Northwest that threatens to destroy the last of America's unprotected ancient forests in as little as 20 years."

Fact: National forest logging has dropped dramatically in recent years. In California, clear-cutting on national forests dipped to 1,395 acres in 1998, down 89 percent from 1990.

From Defenders of Wildlife: "Won't you please adopt a furry little pup like 'Hope'? Hope is a cuddly brown wolf ... Hope was triumphantly born in Yellowstone."

Facts: "There was never any pup named Hope," says John Varley, chief of research at Yellowstone National Park. "We don't name wolves. We number them." Since wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone in 1995, their numbers have increased from 14 to about 160; the program has been so successful that Yellowstone officials now favor removing the animals from the federal endangered species list.

Longtime conservationist Peter Brussard has seen enough.

"I've stopped contributing to virtually all major environmental groups," said Brussard, former Society for Conservation Biology president and a University of Nevada, Reno, professor.

"My frustration is the mailbox," he said. "Virtually every day you come home, there are six more things from environmental groups saying that if you don't send them fifty bucks, the gray whales will disappear or the wolf reintroductions in Yellowstone will fail ...You just get super-saturated.

"To me, as a professional biologist, it's not conspicuous what most of these organizations are doing for conservation. I know that some do good, but most leave you with the impression that the only thing they are interested in is raising money for the sake of raising money."

Step off the elevator at Defenders of Wildlife's office in Washington, D.C., and you enter a world of wolves: large photographs of wolves on the walls, a wolf logo on glass conference room doors, and inside the office of Charles Orasin, senior vice president for operations, a wolf logo cup and a toy wolf pup.

Ask Orasin about the secret of Defenders' success, and he points to a message prominently displayed behind his desk: "It's the Wolf, Stupid."

Since Defenders began using the North American timber wolf as the focal point of its fund-raising efforts in the mid-1990s, the organization has not stopped growing. Every year has produced record revenue, more members -- and more emotional, heart-wrenching letters.

Dear Friend of Wildlife:
It probably took them twelve hours to die.
No one found the wolves in the remote, rugged lands of Idaho -- until it was too late.
For hours, they writhed in agony. They suffered convulsions, seizures and hallucinations. And then -- they succumbed to cardiac and respiratory failure.


"People feel very strongly about these animals," said Orasin, architect of Defenders' growth. "In fact, our supporters view them as they would their children. A huge percentage own pets, and they transfer that emotional concern about their own animals to wild animals.

"We're very pleased," he said. "We think we have one of the most successful programs going right now in the country."

Defenders, though, is only the most recent environmental group to find fund-raising fortune in the mail. Greenpeace did it two decades ago with a harp seal campaign now regarded as an environmental fund-raising classic.

The solicitation featured a photo of a baby seal with a white furry face and dark eyes accompanied by a slogan: "Kiss This Baby Good-bye." Inside, the fund-raising letter included a photo of Norwegian sealers clubbing baby seals to death.

People opened their hearts -- and their checkbooks.

"You have very little time to grab people's attention," said Jeffrey Gillenkirk, a veteran free-lance direct mail copywriter in San Francisco who has written for several national environmental groups, including Greenpeace. "It's like television: You front-load things into your first three paragraphs, the things that you're going to hook people with. You can call it dramatic. You can call it hyperbolic. But it works."

The Sierra Club put another advertising gimmick to work in the early 1980s. It found a high-profile enemy: U.S. Secretary of the Interior James Watt, whose pro-development agenda for public lands enraged many.

"When you direct-mailed into that environment, it was like highway robbery," said Bruce Hamilton, the club's conservation director. "You couldn't process the memberships fast enough. We basically added 100,000 members."

But environmental fund raising has its downsides.

It tends to be addictive. The reason is simple: Many people who join environmental groups through the mail lose interest and don't renew -- and must be replaced, year after year.

"Constant membership recruitment is essential just to stay even, never mind get bigger," wrote Christopher Bosso, a political scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, in his paper: "The Color of Money: Environmental Groups and the Pathologies of Fund Raising."

"Dropout rates are high because most members are but passive check writers, with the low cost of participating translating into an equally low sense of commitment," Bosso states. "Holding on to such members almost requires that groups maintain a constant sense of crisis. It does not take a cynic to suggest ... that direct mailers shop for the next eco-crisis to keep the money coming in."

That is precisely how Gillenkirk, the copywriter, said the system works. As environmental direct mail took hold in the 1980s, "We discovered you could create programs by creating them in the mail," he said.

"Somebody would put up $25,000 or $30,000, and you would see whether sea otters would sell. You would see whether rain forests would sell. You would try marshlands, wetlands, all kinds of stuff. And if you got a response that would allow you to continue -- a 1 or 2 percent response -- you could create a new program."

Today, the trial-and-error process continues.

The Sierra Club, which scrambles to replace about 150,000 nonrenewing members a year out of 600,000, produces new fund-raising packages more frequently than General Motors produces new car models.

"We are constantly turning around and trying new themes," said Hamilton. "We say, 'OK, well, people like cuddly little animals, they like sequoias.' We try different premiums, where people can get the backpack versus the tote bag versus the calendar. We tried to raise money around the California desert -- and found direct mail deserts don't work."

And though many are critical of such a crisis-of-the-month approach, Hamilton defended it -- sort of.

"I'm somewhat offended by it myself, both intellectually and from an environmental standpoint," he said. "And yet ... it is what works. It is what builds the Sierra Club. Unfortunately the fate of the Earth depends on whether people open that envelope and send in that check."

The vast majority of people don't. Internal Sierra Club documents show that as few as one out of every 100 membership solicitations results in a new member. The average contribution is $18.

"The problem is there is a part of the giving public -- about a third we think -- who as a matter of personal choice gives to a new organization every year," said Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope. "We don't do this because we want to. We do it because the public behaves this way."

Fund-raising consultants "have us all hooked, and none of us can kick the habit," said Dave Foreman, a former Sierra Club board member. "Any group that gives up the direct mail treadmill is going to lose. I'm concerned about how it's done. It's a little shabby."

Another problem is more basic: accuracy. Much of what environmental groups say in fund-raising letters is exaggerated. And sometimes it is wrong.

Consider a recent mailer from the Natural Resources Defense Council, which calls itself "America's hardest-hitting environmental group." The letter, decrying a proposed solar salt evaporation plant at a remote Baja California lagoon where gray whales give birth, makes this statement:

"Giant diesel engines will pump six thousand gallons of water out of the lagoon EVERY SECOND, risking changes to the precious salinity that is so vital to newborn whales."

Clinton Winant, a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who helped prepare an environmental assessment of the project, said the statement is false. "There is not a single iota of scientific evidence that suggests pumping would have any effect on gray whales or their babies," he said.

The mailer also says:

"A mile-long concrete pier will cut directly across the path of migrating whales -- potentially impeding their progress."

Scripps professor Paul Dayton, one of the nation's most prominent marine ecologists, said that statement is wrong, too.

"I've dedicated my career to understanding nature, which is becoming more threatened," he said. "And I've been confronted with the dreadful dishonesty of the Rush Limbaugh crowd. It really hurts to have my side -- the environmental side -- become just as dishonest."

Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo halted the project last year. But as he did, he also criticized environmental groups. "With false arguments and distorted information, they have damaged the legitimate cause of genuine ecologists," Zedillo said at a Mexico City news conference.

A senior Defense Council attorney in Los Angeles, Joel Reynolds, said his organization does not distort the truth.

"We're effective because people believe in us," Reynolds said. "We're not about to sacrifice the credibility we've gained through direct mail which is intentionally inaccurate."

Reynolds said NRDC's position on the salt plant was influenced by a 1995 memo by Bruce Mate, a world-renowned whale specialist. Mate said, though, that his memo was a first draft, not grounded in scientific fact.

"This is a bit of an embarrassment," he said. "This was really one of the first bits of information about the project. It was not meant for public consumption. I was just kind of throwing stuff out there. It's out-of-date, terribly out-of-date."

There is plenty of chest-thumping pride in direct mail, too -- some of it false pride. Consider this from a National Wildlife Federation letter: "We are constantly working in every part of the country to save those species and special places that are in all of our minds."

Yet in many places, the federation is seldom, if ever, seen.

"In 15-plus years in conservation, in Northern California, Nevada, Idaho, Oregon and Washington, I have never met a (federation) person," said David Nolte, who recently resigned as a grass-roots organizer with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Alliance -- a coalition of hunters and fishermen.

"This is not about conservation," he said. "It's marketing."

Overstating achievements is chronic, according to Alfred Runte, an environmental historian and a board member of the National Parks Conservation Association from 1993 to 1997.

"Environmental groups all do this," he said. "They take credit for things that are generated by many, many people. What is a community accomplishment becomes an individual accomplishment -- for the purposes of raising money."

As a board member, Runte finds something else distasteful about fund raising: its cost.

"Oftentimes, we said very cynically that for every dollar you put into fund raising, you only got back a dollar," he recalled. "Unless you hit a big donor, the bureaucracy was spending as much to generate money as it was getting back."

Some groups are far more efficient than others. The Nature Conservancy, for example, spends just 10 percent of donor contributions on fund raising, while the Sierra Club spends 42 percent, according to the American Institute of Philanthropy.

Pope, the Sierra Club director, said it's not a fair comparison. The reason? Donations to the Conservancy and most other environmental groups are tax-deductible -- an important incentive for charitable giving. Contributions to the Sierra Club are not, because it is a political organization, too.

"We're not all charities in the same sense," Pope said. "Our average contribution is much, much smaller."

Determining how much environmental groups spend on fund raising is only slightly less complex than counting votes in Florida. The difficulty is a bookkeeping quagmire called "joint cost accounting."

At its simplest, joint cost accounting allows nonprofit groups to splinter fund-raising expenditures into categories that sound more pleasant to a donor's ear -- public education and environmental action -- shaving millions off what they report as fund raising.

Some groups use joint cost accounting. Others don't. Some groups put it to work liberally, others cautiously. Those who do apply it don't explain it. What one group labels education, another calls fund raising.

"You use the term joint allocation and most people's eyes glaze over," said Greenpeace's McPeake. The most sophisticated donor in the world "would not be able to penetrate this," she said.

Joint cost accounting need not be boring, however.

Look closely and you'll find sweepstakes solicitations, personal return address labels, free tote bag offers and other fund-raising novelties cross-dressing as conservation. You also find that those who monitor such activity are uneasy with it.

David Ormsteadt, an assistant attorney general in Connecticut, states in Advancing Philanthropy, a journal of the National Society of Fundraising Executives: "Instead of reporting fees and expenses as fund-raising costs, which could ... discourage donations, charities may report these costs as having provided a public benefit. The more mailings made -- and the more expense incurred -- the more the 'benefit' to society."

The Wilderness Society, for example, determined in 1999 that 87 percent of the $1.5 million it spent mailing 6.2 million membership solicitation letters wasn't fund raising but "public education." That shaved $1.3 million off its fund-raising tab.

One of America's oldest and most venerable environmental groups, the Wilderness Society didn't just grab its 87 percent figure out of the air. It literally counted the number of lines in its letter and determined that 87 of every 100 were educational.

When you read in the society's letter that "Our staff is a tireless watchdog," that is education. So is the obvious fact that national forests "contain some of the most striking natural beauty on Earth." Even a legal boast -- "If necessary, we will sue to enforce the law" -- is education.

"We're just living within the rules. We're not trying to pull one over on anybody," said Wilderness Society spokesman Ben Beach.

Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, the charity watchdog, said it is acceptable to call 30 percent or less of fund-raising expenses "education." But he deemed that the percentages claimed by the Wilderness Society, Defenders of Wildlife and others were unacceptable.

"These groups should not be allowed to get away with this," Borochoff said. "They are trying to make themselves look as good as they can without out-and-out lying ... . This doesn't help donors. It helps the organization."

At Defenders of Wildlife, Orasin flatly disagreed. The American Institute of Philanthropy "is a peripheral group and we don't agree with their standards," he said. "We don't think they understand how a nonprofit can operate, much less grow."

Even the more mainstream National Charities Information Bureau, which recently merged with the Better Business Bureau's Philanthropic Advisory Service, rates Defenders' fund raising excessive.

"We strongly disagree with (the National Charities Information Bureau)," said Orasin. "They take a very subjective view of what fund raising is. We are educating the public. If you look at the letters that go out from us, they are chock-full of factual information."

But much of what Defenders labels education in its fund raising is not all that educational. Here are a few examples -- provided to The Bee by Defenders from its recent "Tragedy in Yellowstone" membership solicitation letter:

Unless you and I help today, all of the wolf families in Yellowstone and central Idaho will likely be captured and killed.

It's up to you and me to stand up to the wealthy American Farm Bureau ...

For the sake of the wolves ... please take one minute right now to sign and return the enclosed petition.

The American Farm Bureau's reckless statements are nothing but pure bunk.

"That is basically pure fund raising," said Richard Larkin, a certified public accountant with the Lang Group in Bethesda, Md., who helped draft the standards for joint cost accounting. "That group is playing a little loose with the rules."

Defenders also shifts the cost of printing and mailing millions of personalized return address labels into a special "environmental activation" budget category.

Larkin takes a dim view.

"I've heard people try to make the case that by putting out these labels you are somehow educating the public about the importance of the environment," he said. "I would consider it virtually abusive."

Not all environmental groups use joint cost accounting. At the Nature Conservancy, every dollar spent on direct mail and telemarketing is counted as fund raising.

The same is true at the Sierra Club. "We want to be transparent with our members," said Pope, the club's director.

Groups that do use it, though, often do so differently.

The National Parks Conservation Association, for example, counts this line as fund raising: "We helped establish Everglades National Park in the 1940s." Defenders counts this one as education: "Since 1947, Defenders of Wildlife has worked to protect wolves, bears ... and pristine habitat."

"It's a very subjective world," said Monique Valentine, vice president for finance and administration at the national parks association. "It would be much better if we would all work off the same sheet of music."

At the Washington, D.C.-based National Park Trust, which focuses on expanding the park system, even a sweepstakes solicitation passes for education, helping shrink fund-raising costs to 21 percent of expenses, according to its 1999 annual report.

Actual fund-raising costs range as high as 74 percent, according to the American Institute of Philanthropy, which gave the Trust an "F" in its "Charity Rating Guide & Watchdog Report." Borochoff, the Institute's president, called the Trust's reporting "outrageous."

"Dear Friend," says one sweepstakes solicitation, "The $1,000,000 SUPER PRIZE winning number has already been pre-selected by computer and will absolutely be awarded. It would be a very, very BIG MISTAKE to forfeit ONE MILLION DOLLARS to someone else."

Paul Pritchard, the Trust's president, said the group's financial reporting meets non-profit standards. He defended sweepstakes fund raising.

"I personally find it a way of expressing freedom of speech," Pritchard said. "I can ethically justify it. How else are you going to get your message out?"