We have changed, but the wilderness hasn’t

Emigrant Peak in the Custer-Gallatin National Forest (Photo by Jacob Frank | National Park Service | Flickr).

We are flooded today with a dizzying array of images, activities and even ideas that we accept without question.  The flashy picture of a handsome couple gazing out the window of their luxury hotel. A new Ford Bronco driving straight up a gorgeous, untracked sand dune. Even the type of person you’re supposed to date. One of the promotionals for the much-touted Gallatin Forest Partnership is footage of smiling, Patagonia-clad folk leaving a trailhead, heading into the wild beyond; glory, adventure, youth. Even peace and quiet can be packaged for us, such that it’s hard to tell what that truly is. And who would have guessed that even the term, “conservation,” can be misused?

The Greater Yellowstone Coalition, The Wilderness Society, and Wild Montana – who shed its worn-out old clothes called Montana Wilderness Association – these groups have been vocal drivers of the most “practical and realistic” Greater Yellowstone Conservation and Recreation Act . It carries the hope we need today, that of “breaking bread together,” bringing together diverse Montanans, traditional rivals, excluding no one from open discussion. But is that what really happened?

The censored “rest of the story” in any society and in any institution – like environmentalism – if told, always opens up a space where legitimate public debate and deliberation can occur. Without open speech, painful, regrettable short-sightedness happens too easily, and irreversibly. When a vision’s dissenting voices are dismissed as being “on the margins” – as happened here in public testimony to a Montana Congressional subcommittee, we must wonder: What is going on? We must wonder what irreversible regrets will later arise.

From 2002 to 2009, I was a board member and then President of Montana Wilderness Association. In fact, in those roles, I was one of the promoters and implementers of Montana environmentalism’s movement away from the scrappy, uncompromising fighters for wilderness, to the now acclaimed “compromise and collaboration” strategy.

We did not see what was censored; we saw any “rest of the story” as belonging to old has-beens. We thought we were visionary, not “caught in the past.” We began the divvying-up approach to Wilderness-quality lands. We opened the doors to such actions as Wilderness Study Areas going in part to recreation, in part to logging, in part to wilderness designation. We most decidedly did not collect and consider the environmental and ecological consequences of our actions.

As we began this strategy transition, the money that flowed into our coffers grew and grew. We did not wonder about that co-occurrence. We resisted open, public debate and deliberation. We were delighted with “having it all.” We were proud of our presumed superior vision, our glimmering offices, and the professional salaries and benefits we could then pay to new positions like those of development director, conservation associate, and the like. We felt legitimated and up to date with retired big city financiers and corporate executives now as the new type of Board Member.

Gone were the days of the scrappy, fighting grassroots environmentalists who knew the wildlands like the back of their hands; who had called out the United States Forest Service when it itself was already carving up the land. Gone from our staff were the environmentalists instrumental in the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, and the Montana Wilderness Study Act of 1977. Gone were the founding leaders of MWA, GYC and TWS who publicly fought for complete wilderness protections for the whole Gallatin Range.

Like us then, and with the corporate money of big foundations and wealthy philanthropists filling their own coffers, members of the Gallatin Forest Partnership for years now have been working hard, being true to their new resources. They have spent thousands and thousands of hours, hundreds of thousands of dollars courting governmental and public endorsement. Selling a vision. A vision that they, like us 20 years ago, truly believe in. A vision they regrettably believe is advancing humanity and its centrality.

But the birthing and wintering elk of the Buffalo Horn and Porcupine drainages of the Gallatins don’t know anything about “collaboration and compromise;” only that they are being run out of some of the richest lands of the Yellowstone ecosystem by a never-ending increase of bicycles, of snowmobiles and motorcycles. The grizzly bears who need those canyons in order to reach the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, for genetic integrity into the future, know nothing of human fantasies of glitter and fun, of true grit and romantic adventure. The existence-threatened wolverine can’t see the ballyhooed wildlands recreationists.

When the creators of “conservation and recreation,” the collaborators and compromisers, actually bar groups who see flaws in their vision, censorship is still happening. When a venerable Montana leader is silenced, right before our too-often closed eyes, censorship is still happening.

We must be very careful what we believe. Question what you think you know. Instead of assumptions of being right, can’t we insist on uncensored public discussion that faces up to the fragile precipice on which we stand today?

Joseph Scalia III, Psya.D. is a psychoanalyst and environmental critic and activist. He is a past President of Montana Wilderness Association and of Gallatin Yellowstone Wilderness Alliance.