Thursday, April 23, 1998 | 9:06 a.m.
PAULA DEL GIUDICE has been an outdoors freelance writer, author and photographer for 13 years. Her column appears Wednesdays.
REP. JOHN Ensign, R-Nev., slam dunked sportsmen over the weekend when he called the leaders of the nation's top environmental organizations "socialists who use the federal government to take away the property rights of Americans" during a conference in Reno.
Ensign seems to have bought into what the "wise disguise" or the anti-environment movement has been espousing about those who care for the environment. One of the leaders of the anti-environment movement, Ron Arnold was quoted in Outside magazine as saying, "Contrary to what they claim, green organizations aren't really concerned about protecting the environment; they simply imply environmental threats in order to recruit members and make money.
"Environmentalism is a new paganism that worships trees and sacrifices people. Last month the new pagans sacrificed 11,000 timber workers in the Pacific Northwest, and this very minute they're planning to sacrifice every wool grower in New Mexico."
The movement and now Ensign, who has bought into the mantra, uses the Sierra Club as a whipping boy for all environmental organizations. But they fail to realize that they are offending all the organizations who work so hard to protect the air that we breath, the water that we drink and the wildlife that we love.
From the Sierra Club to the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, the organizations work to protect and conserve what they can.
Hooking up with the anti-environment movement is a bad choice. Their record and their agenda certainly do everything to work against protecting the environment. The movement's basic underlying philosophy is to seek unrestricted access to all natural resources for economic use, benefit and profit.
Some of the specific goals include mining and oil exploration in national parks, wildlife refuges and wilderness areas (including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge); widespread off-road vehicle access; the systematic logging and replanting of all ancient forests; and the gutting of the Endangered Species Act.
Other pieces of the agenda include establishing the National Rangeland Grazing System to ensure that rangelands will be used principally for grazing while making it possible to preempt hunting, fishing and/or wildlife management on the land.
All of those issues should raise red flags for those who fish and hunt. These activities will destroy critical wildlife and fisheries habitat that can never be replaced.
Hunters and anglers have always done a good job of protecting wildlife habitat and insisting on professional wildlife management. It goes without saying that habitat declines will result in fewer tags to hunt and fewer streams to fish,.
Loss of habitat to overgrazing and mining already have taken their toll on some of Nevada's wildlife -- sage grouse to name one. Or Lahontan cutthroat trout and mule deer.
The most transparent part about the anti-environment movement is that it's composed of and funded by the National Cattlemen's Association, American Farm Bureau, People for the West (formed to fight mining reforms and funded by Homestake Mining Company, Energy Fuels Corporation and Chevron Petroleum), the BlueRibbon Coalition -- a coalition supporting more access to off-road vehicle use (funded by Honda and Kawasaki) -- and other industry-funded organizations.
Ensign tends to back pedal on his support of the anti- environment movement during press interviews.
He says its not the organizations but just some who run them who are the socialists. (Why, then, would millions of people belong to environmental organizations, if their leaders were socialists?)
He also said that his appearance at the conference does not mean that he endorses the Wise Use Movement. Apparently, he was well received. The few (100) who were there gave him a standing ovation.
In my book, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck ... it's a duck.
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