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Satan
is
My Co-Pilot
Floyd Satan, That Is
By Mike Roselle |
jj
Last
November I ran into my
buddy Floyd Satan in the Union Club, a bar in Missoula Montana. We were there
with a bunch of local activists to watch the election returns. The
place was
packed. There were three generations of conservationists, party
loyalists and
other assorted wing nuts there; from the crusty tree huggers and
anarchists to
the some of the gray-haired pillars of the movement. After it was all
over,
despite
the outcome for the national ticket, people were still in a good mood.
The
Democrats had managed to elect a new Governor and had achieved voting
majorities in both the house and senate. The Montana voters also passed a strongly worded
anti-heap-leach
mining initiative. Across the country it was much the same, where a
high
percentage of the conservation measures on the ballot passed with
comfortable
margins. All is not lost in the Red States.
Looking
at the
maps on the
cable news shows, it was obvious that the country was geographically
polarized,
pitting the ignorant bible thumping bumpkins from the heartland against
the big
city liberal fornicators. Lines were
drawn and many of my friends from the Blue States were peeling off
their Kerry
stickers and booking flights out of the country. But outside the
cappuccino
districts of the West Coast and the vast cubical wastelands of Washington D.C., San Francisco and
Seattle ,
the mood was not so dark. Well, the mood
was
actually much, much darker, but that has more to do with melting ice
caps and
rapidly diminishing forests, the depletion and pollution of our oceans
and the
rapidly rising rents than it has to do with who currently occupies the
White
House. And the wars? I didn’t see either
candidate speak more than one short paragraph on such loony fringe
issues.
Instead they focused on one subject that we can probably all agree on;
Cheap
Drugs! And the way things are going, we’re gonna need ‘em.
It dawned on me that this
country is nuts. And the Red States, for all the blame they are so
rightly
receiving for bringing on the apocalypse, still have better bars. And
judging
from the crowd present here in the Union Club, the Red States may be
where
most of the action is. Looking over the last four disastrous years of
the Bush
administration, it has been the small town lawyers, local activists and
collegetown treehuggers who have held the line on protecting our public
lands
and forests from the timber, mining and grazing industries. A lot of
these
folks do so in the face of hostile opposition in their own communities
from the
industry, the government and from law enforcement agencies. They
receive only a
fraction of the money from the big city foundations and large
professional
environmental groups. Yet somehow they have fought off some of the most
onerous
efforts of this administration to go into roadless areas, log valuable
wildlife
habitat under the guise of “salvage”, and open
more
public land to oil drilling and cattle grazing.
The next day, Floyd invited
me down to Alabama for
Thanksgiving. I came out and we had a
great
dinner at a Middle Eastern Deli, which was about the only place open in
Birmingham. While eating
my Thanksgiving falafel, Jake called and was still bugging me to fly to
D.C.
for the big, forest strategy meeting. I didn’t want to go. These things
are like
meetings of the Elks Lodge. People usually have strange titles and say
things
like we should be massaging our messaging and developing iconic
placed-based
proactive engagement scenarios that build capacity in the communities.
One
learns that at the end of the day, the bottom line is that in order to
push the
envelope out of the box we have to all be on the same page. It really
does
drive me crazy sometimes. As usual, I tried to weasel out of the
meeting. And, as usual, Jake wouldn’t let
me get away
with it.
It turns out I wasn’t invited
to the really big-dog meeting this year, but we were having the
National Forest
Protection Alliance board meeting in D.C. because a number of our board
members
were going to be in town for the big-skull session. The NFPA is a
national
coalition of redneck and hippie activists, mostly from small towns.
Since I was
about sick of airplanes, and Floyd had a car, we decided to drive to Washington, D.C. We
went by way of Paducha, Kentucky, Bloomington, Indiana,
Boon, Asheville,
and Charlottesville North Carolina,
and Blacksburg, Virginia.
Our goal was to get back to Chattanooga in
time for Charlie B’s tailgater at the
Montana
Grizzly’s game against the James Madison University Dukes for the
national
college football championships.
To make a long story short,
we put about 2,000 miles on the car before getting to our Nation’s
Capitol.
During that time we talked to a lot of people about what they were
doing and
what they thought we should be doing in the upcoming year. Many of the
organizations, such as Appalachian Voices and the Mountain Justice
Summer
campaign will be fighting mountaintop removal. And there are ongoing
campaigns
under way stop logging the remaining mature forests in the Southern
Appalachian, the most biological diverse temperate forest in North America.
Everywhere we went, folks were gearing up
for a
fight. Out here in the land of Katua Earth First!
And the Dogwood Alliance, that usually
means direct
action. We didn’t see anyone sitting in a cubicle until we reached the District of Columbia.
Now friends, I’m not going to
divulge any secrets from these strange lodge meetings I was in or
anything, but
what I see going on here is close to insanity. Over the past 20 years I
have
worked and lived in this city for five years. None of the things that
happen
here have ever seemed normal to me. The way the big groups are
organized, led
and managed seems based on an antiquated corporate structure that even
the big
corporations no longer use. They can’t seem blow their nose without
hiring a
two thousand dollar a day facilitator.
What gets me is that the
infrastructure of the environmental movement in Washington, D.C.
must cost at least a quarter of a billion
dollars a
year to maintain. This seems like an Enron scandal ready to explode.
Our stock
is over valued and we are not being honest with our investors. If you
give a
dollar to a big ten environmental group don’t be surprised if less than
a dime
goes to accomplishing the organization’s mission. And even then it will
likely
go to project managers, media consultants, contractors and other
mercenaries.
And while I’m thankful for all these folks do, I have to wonder
sometimes if we
are getting our money’s worth. In my conversations with many current
and former
DC staffers, as well as with many leaders in the grassroots movement, I
think
there is a prevailing opinion outside the Beltway that we are not. As one Alabama
lawyer put it “I’ve seen better heads on
stale beer”.
And it does seem to me that we lack professionalism in our fields, and
have a
low level of expectations and accountability from the small part of the
environmental movement that is lucky enough to get a salary and a 401k.
It
appears that for all the hundreds of millions of dollars we spend here
we are
not getting all that much firepower.
It is just a fact that most
of the best wildlife habitat and wilderness areas are in sparsely
populated and
socially conservative areas. I think this is why the Red State
activists are not crying in their lattes or
slitting
their wrists like many of my big city leftists friends seem to be. Out
here in
the heartland, nothing has changed. Being in the Rocky Mountains, the
Siskyous
or the Southern Appalachians usually means you don’t have the luxury of
picking
your issues based on polling data or from the learned mouths of
consultants.
No, the issues usually find you, and you either stand up or you get
rolled
over. Traveling around the country with Floyd has taught me that there
is still
a lot of attitude left in this movement, and that we won’t be rolled
over that
easy. You have to be tough to live in a Red State.
I have also learned over the
years that you can’t get anything published anymore unless you have
your own
web site. And while there seems to be a gazillion websites out there,
most of
the ones I’ve seen that deal with conservation are about as exciting as
drinking flat beer out of a river guides rubber booty. I believe that
there
must be people out there somewhere who have a sense of humor and are
doing
something other than cry in their beer over this stupid election. We
want to
cover the environmental buckaroos that are going to be out there on the
front
lines; the lowbaggers and the high rollers, the lawyers and the
lawless, the
scrappy small and the big guys in Washington
with bad haircuts. So if you are tired of
the
standard boilerplate environmental propaganda you get online from the
Alphabet
Organizations, then this site might be for you. And if you are one of
the
downtrodden laborers working for the big-ten groups in some airless
badly lit
cubicle, or some federal employee working in a basement for an agency
that is
kowtowing to the greedy, pig-dog, multinational corporations instead of
protecting our environment, or even if you are a bike messenger, we
hope you
will send us money.
Mike and Floyd are currently four months into a two-year roadtrip, and
will be reporting regularly from the field.
Tune in Next Month for: The
State of Oregon
vs. Mike Roselle
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