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297 I n the late 1980s and early 1990s, a proliferation of local and regional organizations charged public lands advocacy with new energy. The Arizona-based Wildlands Project promised to join grassroots environmental activists and conservation biologists behind science-based proposals for wilderness and the public lands. In the mid-1990s, it proposed protecting and restoring not 10, not 25, but 50 percent of the land in the United States as wilderness. The Montana-based Alliance for the Wild Rockies harnessed that strategy to a new vision for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. In the 1980s, it first proposed protecting 15 million acres of interconnected wilderness areas, parks, and private and public lands in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming to protect the region’s biodiversity, more than five times as much land as national wilderness groups suggested. And the Oregon-based Native Forest Council rallied activists around an ambitious goal: ending all logging on federal lands nationwide. In place of endless scientific study and weak regulatory enforcement, the Native Forest Council argued that the virtue of “zero cut” was its simplicity; it required no interpretation, no studies, and no complex regulatory oversight.1 Its “sole purpose [was] saving the last of America’s priceless virgin forests.”2 Each of these organizations had different strategies, but they shared one conviction: they had no use for the leadership of the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, or other national organizations. As Mat Jacobson, an emerging leader for forest reform, argued, “The nationals are fading. They have had their day. This is ours.”3 Dave Foreman, Earth First! cofounder, described these new strategies and organizations as the beginnings of a “New Conservation Movement.”4 When we remember the environmental politics of the 1990s, it is often the challenges from the political Right that appear to have been most pressing . But the Wilderness Society’s leadership knew that it faced challenges from across the political spectrum. Christopher Elliman, the chair of the Wilderness Society’s Governing Council, noted privately, “It seems ironic that just as we approach an apogee of intellectual leadership in natural resource and 9 / The New Prophets of Wilderness New Prophets of Wilderness 299 public lands issues, the [Wilderness Society] is faced with so many immediate questions about its future message, finances, and leadership.”5 Since 1986, the Wilderness Society had consolidated its technical expertise, expanded its cadre of economic, scientific, and policy analysts, and maintained its leadership role on public lands policy. In these ways, the Wilderness Society had helped open a new era of public lands reform that raised broad questions about resource extraction, biodiversity and ecosystem protection, and long-range planning for the public lands. But in the early 1990s, the consequences of those strategies were unclear. Much of its legislative agenda was trapped in congressional gridlock . And the Wilderness Society faced a cacophony of critiques from environmental justice advocates, supporters of the Wise Use Movement, and more ambitious advocates for public lands protection. Political scientists have noted two dominant trends in the structure of modern environmental advocacy: first, the steady growth in the number of environmental organizations since the 1960s, and, second, the crucial role of well-staffed and well-funded national groups that provide the resources, stability , and resilience necessary for the environmental movement to participate in the policy process.6 Neither of these trends, however, accounts for the surge of local environmental advocacy in the late 1980s and early 1990s or its significance . Political scientists have often assumed that the well-established national organizations have been the dominant force in environmental advocacy. But that argument, while still relevant in the 1990s and today, better explains the structure of the environmental movement in the 1970s and 1980s, which concentrated power in the national groups, than it does environmental advocacy in the 1990s and 2000s, in which the initiative was increasingly distributed among local groups, ad hoc coalitions, national environmental groups, and foundations . In the early 1990s, the Wilderness Society found itself trying to work with, catch up to, and rein in the New Conservation Movement and its ambitions for the future of the public lands. The Political Authority of the Mainstream Environmental Movement Jon Roush was hired as the Wilderness Society’s new president in October 1993. His charge was clear: to restore the organization’s confidence in its mission. The Governing Council noted frankly, “The internal reality at the Wilderness Society is that there is fuzziness about what we do: a congruence of mission and image is badly...

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