John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures

6: With Friends Like These: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Drama of Environmental Politics

1 121 2 chapter six 1 With Friends Like These John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Drama of Environmental Politics Char Miller 2 1 Earth First! founder Dave Foreman was pulling a journalist’s leg when in an interview he described Earth First!, the radical environmental organization he had founded in 1980, as a“secretly controlled” offshoot of mainstream environmental groups that could be “trotted out at hearings to make the Sierra Club or the Wilderness Society look moderate.” Russell Train of the World Wildlife Fund joshed too when he made a similar point about the uncompromising founder of the Friends of Earth: “Thank God for David Brower. He makes it easier for the rest of us to look reasonable .”And James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, could laugh that his combative mien and acerbic style swelled the ranks of both moderate and radical environmentalists.1 Politics is such good fun. Beneath the humor, however, lies an important insight: there is a selfconscious choreography to environmental politics. Contending organizations and, just as often, contentious individuals play to and off one another to gain Portions of this chapter have previously appeared in a different form in Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Washington, DC: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2001). advantage and to secure a hearing. Or they may, as Foreman, Train, and Watt reveal, strike a strident pose, knowing the impact this might have on others’ actions, and then bank on that impact for reasons of their own. A raucous, unfettered environmental left, for instance, makes the Sierra Club appear more centrist and dispassionate. This kind of reciprocity also influences arguments across the political spectrum. James Watt deliberately attacked environmental sacred cows, well aware of—indeed counting on—the reaction it would generate among his opposition; the predictable fury his words unleashed further galvanized his supporters within the early 1980s Sagebrush Rebellion, [a movement in the West, to return federal lands to the control of the states]. For all their ideological differences, Earth First! and the Wise Use movement shared important political traits, even a kind of mutual genesis. This subtle interplay between allies and opponents first emerged in the late nineteenth century, part of the birthright in fact of the then-nascent environmental movement. Its originators were John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, Char Miller 122 1 fig. 6.1. Gifford Pinchot, ca. 1900. USDA Forest Service. With Friends Like These who were centrally involved in developing the movement’s ideological visions, strategic perspectives, and political maneuverability. They understood that politics was a form of theater, and their tangled and tempestuous relationship not only reinforced that understanding, but has a contemporary resonance: out of their heated interchanges emerged a dramatic narrative that has hitherto defined the context for environmental discourse and set its interpretative agenda. Storyline According to Linnie Marsh Wolfe, the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of Muir, the narrative begins with a dramatic exchange in Seattle between Muir and Pinchot over the question of sheep grazing in the Cascades. Although she supplies no date for this event (for now note that they met in that city in 1897), she knows exactly where it occurred—in the crowded lobby of the Rainier Grand Hotel. Pinchot, a recently appointed Special Forest Agent for the Department of the Interior, had traveled to Seattle that fall as part of an extended tour of the newly created forest reserves in the West, the creation of which had greatly angered ranchers and farmers, mine operators, and lumber owners. They had been infuriated that President Cleveland, in setting aside twenty-one million acres, had locked away resources that they hoped to exploit. So hostile and powerful were these forces that through their representatives in Congress they had managed to suspend Cleveland’s action, pending congressional hearings. Pinchot had come west to measure the depths of this hostility and, where possible, to build support for the president ’s action.2 Pinchot’s was no easy task. He encountered the expected stiff opposition, but he also managed to secure favorable reports, notably in the Spokane Spokesman-Review and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He would brag to his mother that the latter’s editor, after a lengthy interview, “came to the right view” and demonstrated his newfound knowledge in a strong editorial supporting Pinchot’s position. But these victories came at a cost, engendering an...