News Detail
Young rural residents urged to become activists
2/4/2010 10:55:24 AM
By Sandra Hansen, The Scottsbluff Star-Herald
The 200 plus audience at the Farm Bureau Young Farmers & Ranchers Conference Jan. 22-23 in Scottsbluff were encouraged to step out and start telling their story. Bruce Vincent, a former Montana logger turned activist, said the 1960s awakening to environmental issues has veered off course and is now a run away. New adherents to the message are mismanaging the environment in their own way. Vincent cited the current pine beetle infestation as one of the results of the new environmental philosophy. He said Lodgepole Pine tree cones are spread when fire pops them open. The trees have a life span of about 100 years, and rely on fire to pop the cones open in order to spread a new generation. Without proper management, pine forests become disasters waiting to happen, which is what we see now when millions of acres burn at will. Proper management would allow forests to burn as nature intended, to keep new growth constantly cycling through. However, with man's misguided assistance, the forests explode into flames that cannot be controlled for weeks, months or years. "The problem is we have too many trees, the wrong size, and it's going to take an ice age to cap it for our kids," he said."
Vincent noted that after the last logging sawmill closed in his area, he uses the equipment for fire fighting equipment, parked around his house.
He said a 1910 fire raced across Idaho, Montana and into Canada, burning 3 million acres "without filing an Environmental Impact Statement," he said.
Vincent said rural Americans are politically impotent, and are dispensable, according some of to today's environmentalists.
"Professional litigants have more control of our environment that professional environmentalists," Vincent charged. He questioned the credentials of "Dr." Merly Streep, "Dr." Woody Harrelson, "Dr." Ted Turner, and others who testify on public policy.
He also discredited what he refers to as a "Disney" mind set. Vincent said that after 50 years of viewing wildlife through Disney's lenses, the public has no idea that the wolf eats the rabbit, and now that Disney Utopia is shattered and man is considered the "bad actor."
However, according to Vincent, contrary to some, capitalism is not the problem. "Poverty is driving the bus," he said. "You need a healthy environment to have a healthy economy."
Vincent said the arrival of television in the 1960s started a good movement to get legislation to take care of the Planet Earth. But now those laws and the movement are showing their age. They aren't doing what they're supposed to do. According to Vincent, the movement to protect the environment has turned into a conflict industry that relies on conflict to use fear as a marketing tool to sell its product for cash.
Vincent referred to past efforts to protect forests from man as the piata syndrome. But the effort to extinguish the timber industry by any means has dried up. Logging is nearly extinct and fires and insects are destroying what was supposed to be protected and saved. "They need a new piata," Vincent said. "They are water and animal rights, and you folks are in the crosshairs. You're the next piata."
"Learn from us," Vincent pleaded. "We were the third ring of a three ring circus. Our fighting gave them (environmentalists) front-page coverage. We were part of their business plan. The more we fought, the more publicity they got. It took us a while to realize that we were doing exactly what they wanted.
"We can be in business only because the public says so," Vincent reminded his audience of 20-30 and 40 Somethings. "We can win in court, but still lose in public opinion. The real enemy is not the Humane Society of the United States and the Sierra Club. The problem is the public's ignorance. That's the enemy we have to address."
Vincent went on to say that farmers and ranchers are the big success story of the past century. He said more food is raised on less land, and there is more forestland than in the last century.
"You are a green success story in production agriculture," he said.
Vincent said that "Activism" should be on everyone's To-Do List, right in front of equipment maintenance. "It should be part of doing business. Spend one hour a week championing rural America, as you know it.
"The next generation has every reason to have hope for our country," Vincent proclaimed. "We need them back on the farm because our culture and our industry are at stake. That crying baby will take it up when you retire."
