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203 9 Lawsuits, Libraries, and Legislatures The Quincy Library Group and Venue Shopping The preceding chapter illustrated how the QLG successfully contained participation in the conflict over its forest management plan. To members and supporters of the QLG, however, the idea that they had contained participation was absurd; members of the QLG note that the core group consisted of nearly thirty people and that meetings often drew more than one hundred citizens, at least in the early years. Moreover, Michael Jackson, one of the founders of the QLG, claims that they “begged” national environmental groups to send representatives to the meetings but to no avail: “What do you do when they won’t come? Tell your neighbors we can’t meet because they’re too busy having cocktail parties down in San Francisco?” (quoted in Sagoff 1999, 169). But these critiques miss the point: The QLG’s biggest strategic innovation around participation was to shift the lines of cleavage among the “usual suspects” in the forest policy subsystem. By breaking up existing local alliances and forging new ones, leaders in the QLG managed participation in ways they might not have foreseen. The creation of the QLG broke up the local environmental group, Friends of Plumas Wilderness, and delayed the mobilization of opponents who feared being labeled as adversaries of local cooperative approaches to resolving natural resource conflicts. Participation patterns shifted, and the QLG benefited from the new lineup of allies and opponents. The QLG was innovative in another way: They created a new venue for action outside of the typical forest policy arenas. Forestry politics at both the national and regional level in the decades leading up to the creation of the QLG was characterized by a kind of stalemate, brought on by the fact that 204 The Containment of Conflict in Northern California environmentalists and their opponents in the timber industry were targeting different policy venues. Environmentalists largely relied on the courts to achieve their policy goals, while the timber industry fought back in Congress, often resulting in short-term victories for each side (Burnett and Davis 2002; Hoberg 1997). The QLG’s original solution to the alleged stalemate was to eschew the usual venues for decision making and create a new arena for decision making at the local level. The idea was to overcome the gridlock and adversarial politics that characterized forest politics in the 1990s by abandoning the preferred venues of each side in the conflict—namely, the courts and the legislature. As this chapter will demonstrate, however, the QLG was only partially successful in forging a new arena for action. As it encountered institutional resistance to its forest management plan, the QLG looked to Congress and eventually to the courts to realize its policy goals. The story of the group’s efforts—first to create a new venue and then to use the “same old” policy arenas—highlights the difficulty of achieving policy stability in systems characterized by multiple policy venues, overlapping jurisdictions, liberal rules of participation, and rapid countermobilization. This chapter first tells the story of how and why the QLG “went local” and then examines its venue shopping strategies at the national level. Going Local: From Lawsuits to the Library The conflicts over forestry in northern California in the early 1990s reflected larger trends in U.S. forest politics described in chapter 6. Local and regional environmental groups in the Sierra Nevada were following the lead of their colleagues in the Pacific Northwest in using NFMA and NEPA to appeal timber sales on the Lassen, Plumas, and Tahoe national forests. As noted in the last chapter, local environmental group FPW was having considerable success in using the courts to delay or halt logging in the northern Sierras. Its success mirrored patterns elsewhere: In a study of national litigation patterns , E. S. Jones and C. P. Taylor (1995) found that environmentalists initiated the majority of NFMA and NEPA lawsuits against the forest service and were more likely to succeed in the courts than their counterparts in the timber industry. Malmsheimer and his colleagues (2004) found similar results when analyzing U.S. Courts of Appeals rulings on national forest management between 1970 and 2001. Environmental interest groups made up the vast majority of plaintiffs and appellants in the 119 analyzed cases and won almost half the cases they appealed (48.2 percent), while commodity interests [18.191.195.110] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...

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