Organizing for Endangered and Threatened Species Habitat Draft

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subservient to their needs. Traditional users of BLM land had no more guaranteed rights to these public assets than anyone else, but many ranchers and farmers depended for much of their revenue on easy unrestricted access to public BLM land as an extension of their private operations. Bankers and other market forces had capitalized low cost access to these assets into the valuation of their businesses (Andrews 1999). Any threat to their cheap availability would be energetically resisted by farmers and ranchers who were struggling for survival in an economy that was organized to extract the maximum ftom them and repay them minimally. As the BLM undertook to irnplement its iricreased environmental mandate, and used its authority to begin to seriously constrain access to public land and water, the agency triggered a backlash among some Western public-land users who fought for continued access on the old terms. Those users organized a lobbying campaign-the'Sagebrush Rebellion'-to intimidate the agency and reduce, if not stop, meaningful federal intervention in their traditional local control. A later smooth more sophisticated successor came to be known as the "wise-use" movement. It continued the fi t for traditional uses of land and water free of significant constraint from federal agencies with environmental mandates. By the early 1990's the wise-use movement consisted of 600 property rights grc?ups formed under an umbrella organization called "Alliance for America" (Nestor 1997). When Ronald Reagan's adrninistration took office in 1981, the President began to reverse much of the Carter administration's environmental advance. Reagan adopted much of the sagebrush rebellion agenda and placed leaders of the movement in positions of authority. With this shift, farmers, ranchers, and state water user interests were able to push back hard against the biologists in the Fish and Wildlife Service who issued biological opinions that favored "varmints" over people. They would attempt to build a coalition of forces that could "guY" the ESA and other environmental laws governing ranching, logging, and mining, but they soon found that more environmentally conscious congressmen from other regions would prevent overturning the United States' new-found environrnental priorities. The subsequent George Bush administration moderated the anti-environmental priorities of the early Reagan years, but honored environmental priorities more by simple neglect. During the course of the 1992 election, the wise-use movement divided its energies between George Bush Senior and Koss Perot and thereby lost impact. William Jefferson Clinton won and upon entering office appointed strong erivironmental protection advocates to positions in the Department of Interior. But in 1994, in the elections of the 104'h Congress, voters-especially in the West-sent to Washington anti-Clinton politicians who had no love for environmental agendas. The anti-Clinton-and in part anti-environmental-backlash had given control of the House of Representatives to a Republican majority for the first time in 40 years. Control of important Congressional committees shifted to a group of aggressively anti-environmental legislators. Over the next two years-1994-1996--conservative Republicans mounted an all-out assault on the center of environme:ntal law that had been constructed in the 1960's, and 1970's. This produced Congressional log jams and repeated Clinton vetoes, which sometimes all too narrowly derailed mounting efforts to overturn environmental legislation including the ESA. The years leading to an eventual 1994 agi-eement to negotiate water issues in the Platte river basin-and the subsequent peliod of actual systematic negotiations between 1994-1997-were 45