It was the standing environmentalist joke of the 1992 presidential campaign. The environmentalists' worst fear was not the reelection of George Bush. It was the election of Bill Clinton. They might have to solve some of these long-festering problems.

In a wonderfully relevant book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer, the longshore sage wrote:

"When a mass movement begins to attract people who are more interested in their individual careers, it is a sign it has passed its vigorous stage; that it is no longer engaged in molding a new world but in possessing and preserving the present. It ceases to become a movement and becomes an enterprise."

Some national environmental groups fear a new consensus will abate the parade of horribles that has become the meat of their fundraising campaigns. Any federal forest management consensus that renews logging in Northwest federal forests threatens timber trade associations that represent private industrial timber land owners who are enjoying artificially higher prices for their stumpage because there is no effective competition from federal forest lands. These forces on both sides are "no longer engaged in molding a new world." They are interested in "possessing and preserving the present."

This presentation deals with identifying which groups are interested in building a consensus; those out to sabotage those efforts and how to deal with both; and why the D.C. "one-size-fits-all" solution to environmental problems does not and will not work.

I'm a political writer. I'll talk about the election and then I will deal with the topic in the program which is "Why Can't We Get To Yes?" which is in a rather different context since last Tuesday. The election is over, the results are known, the will of the people is terribly sullen. Let's rake up our differences and forget the past. I'll hug your elephant and you can kiss my burro. There is less here than meets the eye. The Republican takeover of Congress in my opinion just changes the letterhead on the permanent government that controls Washington. If recent history is any guide the faces will change, the rhetoric will change, issues on periphery will change-everything but the hot shots. You see, even the conservatives still vote together. Voter frustration is not partisan, voters are not unhappy with the Democrats and cheering the Republicans. They are increasingly frustrated with the agenda of the permanent government in Washington that ignores their interests. Don't take my word for it. I'm going to recommend three books that will give you a context like no three books you've got. And these are not crackpot books. These are big name publishers. The first is E.J. Dionnes' big book of three years ago Why Americans Hate Politics. It's out in paperback now, it's cheap. The second is William Greeter's book Who Will Tell The People. That was the big book of last year; it's also out in paper. And you'll have to pay hardback prices for what I consider the most prescient of all of these new books, Kevin Phillips, that card-carrying conservative, the inventor of Nixon's 1968 Southern strategy, who has now been drummed out of the corps of conservatives. It's a great book called The Arrogant Capital. These books will give you an idea of the big picture in which we all live.

This is not a sea change, this is not a tsunami, this is a most tenuous change. Oh, it's changed who occupies certain offices and who chairs certain committees but the Republicans were swept in Tuesday by the fifth twist of a revolving door that has been spinning since voters dumped bumbling Jerry Ford for the conservative Jimmy Carter in 1976. Yes, Carter was conservative. And his program of deregulating banks and airlines was apparently not what the voters were looking for. Because the second twist of this revolving door in 1980 dumped Jimmy Carter and told us we had to tighten our belts, that government couldn't solve all our problems, for Ronald Reagan who said government was our problem. A Republican majority in the U.S. Senate slipped in the revolving door on Reagan's coattails. Reagan's rhetoric was soothing but the Senate's performance was apparently unconvincing because the third twist of the revolving door in 1986 expelled the Republican majority in the Senate and handed control back to the Democrats. The fourth twist of the revolving door in 1992, George Bush, Ronald Reagan's heir apparent who insisted government was the problem for Bill Clinton who said government could solve our problems. The fifth twist of the revolving door expressing building voter frustration with politicians who failed to deliver on their promises handed Bill Clinton his head and invited Dark Dole and Grinch Gingrich to show what they could do.

You will observe from this recitation that there is no partisan pattern to these entrances and exits. Partisanship is not the issue here. In their post-election euphoria neither Dole nor Gingrich seem to realize that they, too, are caught in the revolving door that can throw them out at any time. The Republicans appear to have learned very little from their experience in that revolving door from 1981 to 1986. No sooner did voters give them control of Congress than the Republican leaders began singing the litany of permanent government in Washington: tax cuts; bigger defense spending; selling government lands and investments and assets to private investors. This course is conducted by their Heritage Foundation and prayer masters. This self-described think tank is the forerunner of a large number of tax exempt public relations mills that hire intellectually pliable pseudo-academics to give their corporate campaign contributors' political prejudices a patina of academic legitimacy. I've been practicing in academia for two years and I think you have to say that now instead of saying that they're just showboats, they're just propagandists; you have to lard it up. The Heritage Foundation is the ringmaster of the permanent government in Washington these days. The renegade Ross Perot rocked this cozy arrangement in 1992 by giving voice to the growing frustration outside the beltway. You may have felt that yourself: ooh, they're talking about me now. But Bill Clinton won the presidency, not Ross Perot, and the issues Perot raised were promptly stifled by the ideological thought police inside the beltway. Most of the Washington press corps was again singing along with the Heritage Foundation and the wannabees George Will, Thomas Soul, Malcolm Forbes, Cal Thomas and other choirmasters in permanent government.

A political science professor at the University of Oregon anticipated this voter frustration driving this revolving door as early as 1967. Dr. Gerald Kiefer was assistant to Arthur Flemming when Flemming was Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in the Eisenhower administration. Flemming became President of the University of Oregon in 1961 and Jerry Kiefer came out west with him. Kiefer taught a course in federal public administration and I was privileged to be a student in that class. One day Kiefer got into a debate with a belligerently conservative student who had been reading a bit too much Bill Buckley and who felt the federal deficit would bankrupt the country within the decade. Kiefer said that the deficit is not a serious problem as long as it remains small and we owe it to ourselves. But if the deficit grows, the payments on the interest become a larger and larger portion of the federal budget. There is a limit to what people are willing to pay in taxes, said Kiefer; he was a Republican. Eventually, he said, the fixed cost of government and interest on the national debt would soak up all the money people are willing to pay. And then, said Kiefer, there will not be enough discretionary revenue to solve people's problems. That could lead to a series of one-term presidents and a revolving door in Congress as voters became frustrated with elected officials who cannot do anything about their problems. That was 1967. I sat in that class and those are direct quotes from notes from my notebook; I went back that far and dug them up the other day.

Today the federal government is broke and Jerry Kiefer's revolving door has been spinning at the White House and Capitol Hill since 1976. Interest payments on the national debt are the second largest item in the federal budget, right behind military expenditures. And I don't care who's in charge of Congress, they will become the largest in the next fiscal year or two. The Federal Reserve sees inflation in every economic statistic and raises interest rates stifling the U.S. economy to protect the principal of foreign nations that loaned us their money during the rave and reign of borrow and spend during the 1980s when the national debt tripled. Reagan, you will recall, promised a balanced budget. Every Friday the U.S. Treasury holds a sale of treasury bills, about a billion dollars worth. And they use this money to make interest payments on money we have already spent. While people in Congress pompously posture about cutting taxes further or continuing to spend as we are, we are borrowing on the national MasterCard to make the overdue payments on the national VISA. It has been suggested that we run government like we run our family budgets-we are! In the 1980s the Republicans blamed Reagan's failure to balance the budget on the Democrats. Now they control both houses in Congress and they will be held accountable for their inability to govern. Last Tuesday the Republicans ran out of scapegoats; there are no more excuses. Newt Gingrich and his conservative choristers are singing about a new beginning. The more carefully you listen, the more it sounds like the same old song and dance. Newt's first order of business was appointing a Republican to take charge of Capitol parking places. Then his second act was to announce that the House would pass a Constitutional amendment forbidding Protestant prayer in public schools by July 4th. His choice of priorities struck me as remarkably similar to Bill Clinton's decision to make his first battle with Congress over homosexuals in the military. Both are losing causes, far from the important priorities that preoccupy the American voter. At Representative George Archet's first news conference, this Texas backfencer who chaired the Texas Ways and Means Committee, announced his first job is tax reduction-to the oil and gas industry.

This is not a new beginning, it may be a Newt beginning, but it is not a new beginning. This is, however, politics as usual paying off campaign contributors and supporters at the expense of the voting public. Conservatives believe that control of Congress that they have now established means an end to the environmental movement. May I respectfully suggest to you that it is quite likely that the opposite is going to happen. You see, major political events often sow the seeds of their own demise. Republican control surely means that the environmentalists have met their high water act and will be turned back. I think that's wishful thinking. Republican control of Congress means grassroots regeneration of an environmental movement that has grown old, in some cases fat and preoccupied with the perpetuation of the lobbyists in Washington who live off it. No more. A hostile Congress is just the thing environmentalists need to attract new members and open wallets that have been closing to them in recent years. A fever-pitched fight to preserve the Endangered Species Act, land use laws, the Clean Air Act, is just what the doctor ordered for rejuvenation of national fund-raising. No one knows this better than people who have dealt with the environmental movement for more than three decades.

Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield is one of the political pragmatists who knows. Hatfield warns the Republican Congress will not repeal the Endangered Species Act; it will simply add some economic conditions to its exercise. Hatfield knows the Republican control of Congress is tenuous and many suburban Republicans are just as green as their urban Democratic counterparts. Hatfield knows that wholesale repeal of environmental protection and federal management laws will not only rejuvenate the environmentalists, it could cost the Republicans the suburban seats that make up the new Republican majority. What happened last Tuesday is neither permanent nor divinely ordained. Remember this is a revolving door not a sea change. In my state and in many of the states that you come from, Republicans beat Democrats for Congress by less than a thousand votes, less than two thousand votes. These were very narrow squeakers. In this state, only 65 percent of the registered voters showed up; they were expecting 75 percent. The majority of those who did not show up turned out to be the Democrats. Well, this was their mistake this time, but it is bad news for the Republicans next time because those Democrats now have a motivation to turn up. Bill Clinton can still wield his veto over repeal legislation of any environmental legislation that the Republicans choose to trash, and the Republicans do not have the two-thirds majority to override it. Environmentalists can still use the courts to enforce existing laws which as I just said the Republicans can't repeal, just as they have done for decades.

The reason that we are not working in federal forests in the Northwest has nothing to do with Congress. It has to do with the administration cooking the numbers in the forest plans and having the environmentalists go and say the text reads this way, how do they get to these numbers? And Judge Dwyer asked the Forest Service, can you explain? They couldn't. And I'm not ridiculing the Forest Service people. They wrote those explanations to go with a certain set of numbers. The cooked set of numbers couldn't be justified by the text and that is the one things the courts will review administrative acts for: whether or not they are based on reasonable evidence. Dwyer said you can't get there from here. Clinton changed those numbers back toward some semblance of reality, some semblance of conforming with the text. Judge Dwyer is reading them now and he's going to tell us whether we can go back to the woods and how far. (Editor's note: Judge Dwyer found that the "President's Northwest Forest Plan" was legal and appropriate, making this this first regional plan to become case law. Dwyer was however insistent that monitoring be done to confirm its many assumptions). And I don't see a changing majority in Congress changing that picture. Laws stay the way they are or there will be incremental changes in them that they can pass and the President will sign. But they aren't going to be repealed. And if they are not repealed we are back in court with the same issues. Issues on the periphery will change, but the big stuff is not changing. Environmentalists did best when they felt hungry and besieged. The Republican controlled Congress in my opinion will simply send the environmental movement back to its native habitat. So if things really aren't going to change, if only the window dressing and the rhetoric changes, what do we do because the people in this room is where the rubber meets the road.

You're the folks who have to deal with the practical problems. It was a standing joke in the 1992 election campaign the environmentalists' worst nightmare was not the reelection of George Bush, it was the election of Bill Clinton who would insist that they solve some of these festering environmental problems. And they couldn't very well raise money railing at Bill Clinton. You can see the report of the Sierra Club: declining membership and Funding. It's emblematic of all. It's happening throughout the environmental movement. There is a wonderfully relevant book which I recommend very highly, called The True Believer by Eric Hoffer. If you don't know Eric Hoffer he should be part of your cultural literacy. This guy was a longshoreman in San Francisco who also wrote philosophy. The True Believer is some of his best philosophy. One of the things he observed in that volume is when a mass movement begins to attract people who are more interested in their individual careers it is the sign that it has passed its vigorous stage, that it is no longer engaged in molding a new world but in possessing and preserving the present. It ceases to become a movement and it becomes an enterprise.

Now most of you are professionals, land managers, you're not movements, you're technicians, managers and you belong to well-established state or federal or private agencies. The people you deal with defined themselves in the past as movements. They had goals to achieve something concrete, that's one of the reasons you could deal with them. They knew when a deal was a deal. You're not dealing with movements any more. You are dealing with enterprises. You are dealing with things like timber trade associations and some environmental groups that are more interested in perpetuating their organization and using you as a scapegoat to promote their fundraising then they are in finding a consensus. These groups are willing to disown any agreement that they sign off on if they can't get their way. If they get their way it means they can't raise any more money. If they get their way it means they're out of business. When they were twenty and thirty this was exciting; now they're forty and fifty and they're unemployable-like all of us if we lose our jobs at this stage on the ladder. So national environmental groups, for example, fear a consensus on land management issues will abate the parade of horribles that has become the meat of these fund-raising efforts. Any federal forest management consensus that renews logging in the Pacific Northwest, for example, threatens the timber trade associations that represent private industrial timberlands which are enjoying artificially high prices for their stumpage now that there's no effective competition from the federal forests. These forces on both sides are no longer engaged in molding a new world; they are interested, in Hoffer's world, in possessing and preserving the present. This is not well understood by people. There are well meaning people who believe that these conflicts between the timber trade associations and the environmental groups are just the result of mere misunderstanding. Mediation, bringing these contenders together, will save the day. You cannot have mediation if one party or the other is unwilling to reach a consensus. And what I'm trying to tell you is that neither the timber trade associations, the cattlemen, nor the environmental groups (as represented by people they hire) have anything to win by gaining the consensus. It is the conflict they live for. It is the conflict that pays their salaries. And it is perpetuation that is their goal. That's why you've been having more problems. The trick is to get by these functionaries and get to the people who have something at stake. This is where the new magic word stakeholder has come from.

For nearly two years I was privileged to preside over watershed-wide meetings in river basins in Oregon and Northern California sponsored by the Oregon Rivers Council. They have since renamed themselves and taken on wider responsibilities; they are called the Pacific Rivers Council and there are people here from that group today. These meetings were designed to promote ecosystem management by watershed instead of the present piecemeal management by agency and political jurisdiction. Now I know what you're saying, Oh, God, he said that "e" word again, ecosystem management. No, we don't know what it means. But I don't think that's important. We will find the definition as we progress. The most important thing about adopting ecosystem management is that we know what it does not mean. It does not mean single species management. And from state departments of fish and game to the Endangered Species Act, we practice single species management. We've institutionalized it. The Endangered Species Act is probably the ultimate act of single species management. This Endangered Species Act is an impediment to ecosystem management. How big an impediment depends on how we wind up defining ecosystem management. The fact that we don't have a biblical definition written in the scriptures that we all can bow down to on a regular basis is no reason not to go in this direction. We will move away, we are moving away, the Forest Service fastest of all, the BLM moving as fast as it can go along the same lines, toward some more comprehensive form of management. It is going to threaten the fish and game agencies and many of the practices in which we've engaged in the past. As a result of these Oregon River Council meetings we found local governments and state agencies creating forums to discuss watershed-wide consequences of their decisions, rather than making their decisions piecemeal.

I was astonished by the sudden realization of people who lived upstream what decades of their poor decisions have done to people downstream, because the people from all over the watershed were in the same room sometimes for the first time in years. And in a few cases for the first time ever. Now, as professional watershed managers that won't surprise you; it surprised a lot of people in those rooms, I'll tell you. The structure of those meetings is something I want to pass on to you. I think it will fit with the people who follow me, several of whom I know and who have had very successful efforts getting by the professional lobbyists and representatives who have one agenda and getting to the stakeholders who have quite another. The meetings we did for the Pacific Rivers Council were structured to compel interaction among the public land stakeholders. Participants were compelled to walk in the other folks' shoes. The initial presentations in the morning had a goal. We created a fund of common knowledge. Everybody who was a participant in the conference had to sit through all the sessions. This fund of common knowledge prevented the participants from talking past one another in round table discussions that we had later because everybody in the room heard everything that was said and there was a yardstick by which to measure rhetoric. The first presentations that we had in each of these meetings was a cultural and historical overview of the watershed by qualified experts. The next set of presentations were technical descriptions of the prevailing conditions on public resource lands, again by qualified experts in the fields of forestry, watershed management, minerals, fish and wildlife, and public recreation. These were neutral professionals, keepers of the numbers, people who implemented decisions but did not make them. There are people in this room who participated in those meetings in their professional capacities. Subsequent sessions were devoted to round table discussions along the public land stakeholders and in fact those of us who organized the conferences invited people specifically who were not likely to volunteer to come to such kinds of sessions. The question we asked was "how do the public lands provide?"

Once these groups began laying out all their claims on the table it became immediately obvious to everyone in the world that the resources were over-committed and were unable to sustain what has historically been provided to all stakeholders. It was crystal clear to everybody. We can't keep doing this. This was a reality check and it permitted a discussion of common ground to protect resources for the long term good of the most. And isn't that our goal? That's how we got to "yes." That's how we got to an action plan. By the end of the day or the end of the weekend depending on how long we scheduled these dog and pony shows, we actually had people talking about working together. In some cases county commissioners created task forces that continue to function to this day, continued as forums for the contending interests. That's fine just so long as the contending interests don't wind up institutionalizing themselves, then we get people on payrolls who are interested in perpetuating their job instead of resolving the conflict.

Perhaps the most important part of this message before I conclude is to emphasize that the problems we have cannot be solved in Washington, D.C. Ecosystems by definition are unique. The Forest Service, for example, is an agency that functions best only when the Washington people pay attention to the field people. When the Washington people try to tell the field people what to do, that's when that agency invariably gets into trouble. And the reason for that is simple enough. You cannot understand all of this stuff from one place, especially a super-heated incestuous place like Washington. Every country that has faced economic and social decline has first had its capital completely isolated from its people and we are embarking on that phase right now. There are more than 90,000 people in the capital who make a living trying to influence legislation of 465 people. Only decentralized restrictions are gong to work.

Now I've heard a lot of people argue that with the best of intentions local people still will do what's economically best for them and not what's best for the long-term management of the land. That's a half truth. You will see examples in the people who follow me who have been engaged in this serious business of trying to find a common ground with contending and conflicting uses, even uses that are mutually exclusive. The cornucopia is over; there isn't a river in the Pacific Northwest that isn't over-appropriated. Not a single watershed. And as for the heavy logging, its days are over. This was the last bastion of the timber that stood at the time Columbus bumped into the islands. And except for the remnants that we are fighting over, it's gone. We have followed New England, the South, what we used to call the Great Northwest which is the Great Lake States, into the second growth economy. No nation has kept its native forests, we are going to fight over the remnant but even if we were to make the decision tomorrow that we would log that remnant it wouldn't last twenty years. Indeed, most of the mills now have made the conversion to second growth and it's uneconomic to log the stuff. We're not likely to go back on that, even with Republicans in Congress.

With the old growth gone and the watersheds over-appropriated there is not a lot of window room. Everybody who gets their goody will find somebody now who loses their goody, and there's nothing better than deterioration for bringing people to the table. One of the reasons that some of the small groups you'll hear from work is because they are peopled by folks who are excited enough to realize that no winner really wins now in the game of getting the goodies. Winning comes at somebody else's expense and the expense is usually the long-term health of the resource. That's why ecosystem management has a future, that's why groups like the Applegate Partnership that you'll hear about and some of these other management groups where resource land managers sit down with the stakeholders, will work. They will continue to work. But you have to have people with a stake and the people who do not have a stake are the lobbyists and other self-appointed representatives, salaried representatives who are more interested in keeping their jobs than reaching consensus. That's why we've had trouble getting to yes.

The urgency of the problem, the deterioration of the resource, is going to create the break in the gridlock if there is to be any break at all. And it is the stakeholders, not the institutionalized representatives of various interests, who must be cultivated. They are the people that people like you need to deal with. I hope I've done a little bit to clear up the fog that surrounds this issue. Not a lot except the rhetoric is going to change. You will walk out from here today doing essentially the same work that you have done for the last five years or more. Styles may change, members of Congress will change, but the essential mission remains the same. The public resource is hard-pressed these days and our job is now, as it has always been, two steps forward and one step back, to keep it whole. When I was at the university I had a speech professor who said at gatherings like this it was my job to talk and your job to listen. I notice that only two or three of you have finished before me, so we'll give these services the benediction and thank you very much.