Editor's Note: This story was originally published by searchlightnm,org
The rise of the Coalition, and Hutchinson’s political evolution, occurred alongside the rise in the 1980s and ’90s of a right-wing land-use movement called Wise Use. The movement took its name from an early twentieth-century debate between Gilford Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, and John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club. Muir believed that nature is a source of wonder, and that people have no right to profit economically from it. Pinchot countered that people can practice a sustainable “wise use” of natural resources that promotes both economic benefit and ecological health.
Anti-federal activists in the late twentieth century used the term to characterize themselves as environmentalists who fought against environmental regulations, because those regulations interfered with economic benefit, which, they argued, could be garnered responsibly. But they’ve since been criticized for elevating profit over all other considerations, and the rise of their rhetoric has been linked to an increase in threatened and actual violence against environmental activists, as journalist David Helvarg discussed in his 1994 book “The War Against the Greens.”
To understand how Wise Use developed, it’s necessary to go back to the 1970s and a movement called the Sagebrush Rebellion. In 1976, with bipartisan support, Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which contained regulations that cattle ranchers, miners, loggers and oilmen found restrictive. State legislatures throughout the West rebelled, passing laws that declared federal lands to be under state control.
But none of the states tried to enforce those laws. “It was just a gesture,” said John Leshy, a law professor at the University of California who wrote a history of public lands called “Our Common Ground.” In those years, Leshy served as an attorney in the Interior Department. When Nevada passed its law, the Nevada attorney general called and requested a meeting at the department. The staff assumed he was going to ask to litigate for state control. Instead, he asked for assurance that counties within the state would continue to receive payments for federal lands within state borders.
“Nevada shows up and says, ‘We still want our checks, and our checks are based on the fact that you own the land,” Leshy told me. “So we laugh, and we said, ‘Okay, fine, we’ll assure you, if you don’t take any steps to enforce your law, we will not interrupt your taxes.’”
On the campaign trail in Utah in 1980, Ronald Reagan aligned himself with the Sagebrush movement. But a couple of years later, when his administration proposed the sale of 35 million federal acres, ranchers across the West who feared losing their grazing lands, along with Democratic and Republican politicians alike, responded with fierce opposition. “By the time Reagan left office in 1989, he had signed into law more bills protecting more acres of wilderness in the lower 48 than any president before or after,” Leshy said. “So that’ll give you some idea of what happened to the Sagebrush Rebellion.”
Discontentment with federal regulation and a desire for local control never went away, though. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Wise Use picked up the pieces.
In the same period, the private property rights movement was taking shape. Corporations hoping to cast off regulation, with the help of think tanks and private legal foundations, looked for individuals who could amplify what they deemed the harms of government. Stories about local ranchers and farmers, some of whom were Wise Use proponents, were more compelling politically than complaints made by CEOs. Corporations and extractive industries often funded legal efforts by groups like Hutchinson’s Coalition to oppose environmental protections.
Though the aim of the Wise Use movement was narrower than that of the private property rights movement — one centered on control of public lands, the other on private property more generally — they both fought against federal regulation. Activists like Hutchinson eventually became proponents of both private property rights and Wise Use.
Catron County, where Hutchinson lives, has long been a fertile ground for Wise Use rhetoric. Wise Use and private property rights activists have frequently pursued their agendas at the county level, arguing that county ordinances, rather than the state or federal policy, should govern them, as Harvey M. Jacobs, emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin, has noted.
The debates around protection, use and resource management got quieter after the 2000s but are heating up again. The Trump administration’s environmental policy, like Wise Use philosophy, prioritizes industry interest over environmental concern.
