The Fight For Wild Lands: Part 3

Three decades ago, Phil Knight and his Earth First! colleagues challenged federal government policy with their bodies.

For several summers in the early 1990s, they protested the U.S. Forest Service’s Cove-Mallard timber sale near Dixie, Idaho, roughly where the state’s panhandle meets its frying pan. Their goal was to defend a roadless stand of old-growth trees in a potential wilderness area. Their tactics ranged from civil to chaotic disobedience, from art exhibits to burning bulldozers. The FBI investigated, and tried to infiltrate, Earth First! networks.

The Cove-Mallard action resulted in at least 200 arrests. A Forest Service spokeswoman recalled: “There have been slowdowns in the work when we had to dig people out of the road or grind chains off their necks or remove a bumper from a vehicle or remove their arms from cement. In terms of really obstructing the project, cutting them back, it hasn’t happened.”

Over the next five years, loggers only cut 7 million of the 81 million board feet of authorized timber in Cove-Mallard. Whether that was due to Earth First!’s campaign, “frog-strangling rain” that hindered forest road building, or the Forest Service’s coincidental designation of the logging area as endangered salmon habitat, remains up for debate. Many Earth First! members questioned if it was worth the jail time and bail money to fight the Man in such a back-of-beyond battleground.

This winter, the fate of federal lands, wildlife and resources has resurfaced in abrupt fashion as President Donald Trump’s executive orders put national priority on energy development over ecosystem preservation. Trump’s orders often explicitly repudiate the policies of his predecessor, claiming President Joe Biden “dramatically slowed the growth rate of American energy production and development.”

New White House policies call for disregarding rules laid out in the 1970s heyday of the United States’ environmental movement, when laws such as the Endangered Species Act pledged to protect wildlife from extinction “as a consequence of economic growth and development untampered by adequate concern and conservation.”

And they have sounded an alarm throughout the environmentalist community. They were the focus of a major rally this week in Helena, as conservation, hunting, wilderness and related groups coalesce against proposals to sell or transfer federal public land to state or private ownership. Speakers addressed crowds, lobbyists buttonholed legislators, and interns built mailing lists.

One tactic not under consideration: The kind of direct action Earth First! tried in the 1990s.

“I don’t know how productive it would be at this point,” said Knight, who left behind his “Monkey Wrench Gang” experience and now guides visitors inside Yellowstone National Park. “We’re up against a pretty vicious administration that’s willing to throw the book at anyone who’d try direct action. They threaten and intimidate and bully. It could get real dicey, real quick.”

In many ways, the speed and scope of federal changes has outmaneuvered traditional politics. Much of it was outlined in Project 2025, a proposal drafted by dozens of officials from Trump’s previous administration to advance his agenda through political loyalty. Many of its planks have already become executive orders, including the reassignment of senior executive staff, elimination of job protection for career civil servants, blocking renewable energy project funding, emergency overrides of regulatory review for mining and energy development, and revoking Biden’s 30x30 and America the Beautiful public lands and climate protection initiatives.

“This is always what the public lands community has feared: an architect to break down public lands,” said Whitney Tawney of Montana Conservation Voters. “It’s one of those threats you never think is going to happen, and now we’re seeing it all start to play out. It’s in state legislatures, it’s in Congress, it’s in the judiciary branch — there’s a roadmap there and now it’s happening.”

Trump has also moved hard against judges who’ve ruled against him, tweeting on February 15 that “He who saves his Country does not violate any law.” He has reason to be frustrated: A 2021 study of his first administration’s legal track record found that while federal agencies typically win about 70 percent of their court challenges, Trump’s rate fell to 23 percent.

Long-time environmental activist and author George Wuerthner argues that a repeat of Trump’s shotgun approach could maim itself.

“I think Trump is going to overstep things to such a degree that he will self-destruct,” Wuerthner said. “The way he’s approaching a lot of this stuff is like a bulldozer. It wouldn’t take very many [congressional] representatives to change their allegiance and vote against or for things that he opposes or supports.”

Writing and calling those elected leaders continues to be a viable strategy, Wuerthner said: “I think it’s better than dressing up in animal skins and parading around.”

At the start of Trump’s first term in 2017, the Women’s March on Washington sent about 4.6 million people to the streets in what’s now considered the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. Five years later, the main tactic appears to be hiring more lawyers.

“I have faith in our Constitution and the American people that they’re not going to let the president ignore or disobey the Constitution,” said Michael Garrity of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, one of the most successful groups dedicated to fighting federal agencies in court over violations of environmental laws. “The rules are still in place. We just objected to a project in the Idaho Panhandle National Forest. I’m not losing any sleep over the thought that the courts will be dissolved.”

The Wilderness Society traces its heritage back to the grassroots activists who built support for the Wilderness Act of 1964. It’s now led by Tracy Stone-Manning, who is watching Trump’s nominated Bureau of Land Management Director Kathleen Sgamma attempt to undo the changes Stone-Manning imposed when she held that post under Biden. Sgamma, and Trump’s first BLM chief William Perry Pendley, were both credited contributors to Project 2025.

“For 90 years, we’ve been dedicated to working within the system,” said The Wilderness Society BLM campaign director Michael Carroll. “One of the great things about the American system of government is there’s lots of levers to pull, lots of opportunities to make people’s voices heard, and to push back against bad ideas. For sustained progress and change to occur, you’ve got to be working within the system.”

Public lands advocates throughout the Greater Yellowstone region and the Rocky Mountain West don’t all agree with that — just look at the division between those willing to call themselves environmentalists and those who prefer conservationist. Even the journals of Earth First! were wracked by internal accusations: “The outfit apparently has been taken over by the FBI or Plum Creek [Timber Co.]” and “Why for instance, are bunny-huggers so often more annoying than slob hunters?”

Clint Nagel of the Gallatin Wilderness Association said his colleagues’ push to protect wilderness study areas from development in the Gallatin and Madison ranges south of Bozeman has put them at odds with former allies.

“Over recent times in the last 10 years, there have been too many efforts to compromise a lot of that away,” Nagel said. “Our organization refuses to compromise on the wilderness study area that was designated by Congress. That is our point of no return. And it’s led to a lot of infighting in the environmental community. That’s unfortunate.”

That said, Nagel said the widespread changes proposed for federal public lands had the potential to patch up those disputes. He pointed to recent sit-in protests for mature forests in Oregon and coalitions pushing for wildlife migration corridor protection in Wyoming as examples.

“You take public lands away, or access to it, and people get upset,” Nagel said. “It may not be as wide or popular an occurrence like it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s. But it’s not something that’s gone away. I can think of several different projects where we’re all on the same side.”

Dorothy Bradley helped organize Montana’s first Earth Day observation in 1973. The eight-term state legislator also participated in the 1972 Constitutional Convention, which produced Montana’s inalienable right to “a clean and healthful environment,” which just got reaffirmed by the Montana Supreme Court in Held v. Montana. She said seeing the new assaults on environmental laws made her feel like “things are coming at us like a truly runway freight train.”

“In the ‘70s people became theatrical,” Bradley recalled. “You had the Sagebrush Rebellion [opposing environmental laws] and chaining yourself to trees and all those things. It’s crossed my mind to get rebellious.”

But Bradley also looked across the modern landscape of political activism and counseled cooperation.

“When old coalitions don’t work, you build a new one,” Bradley said. She recalled how the conservation effort she helped start in the 1970s was known as the “unholy coalition” for its linkage of environmentalism, women’s rights and organized labor. While she felt grounded in the first two topics, her upbringing in Bozeman left her unfamiliar with the goals of the labor movement. It took teaming up with union activists from Butte to show her the shared horizons they were all pushing toward.

“We’ve got to bring the family together again,” Bradley said. “I’m not sure how, and I’m not sure who the family is any more. Certain elements have no bend, and you can’t build coalitions without some bending.”