Bozeman News

SHOULD LAWS BE BASED ON FACTS?

Freshman Montana Legislator Learns Ignorance Not Blissful

By Todd Wilkinson, 3-29-07

Before (and after) his tenure as a citizen legislator began in Helena, Montana, ecologist Mike Phillips (foreground with binoculars in hand) oversees the Turner Endangered Species Fund which has forged collaborative working relationships with state and federal agencies and promoted the idea of incentives to encourage ranchers to protect habitat for imperiled species on private land. Here, Phillips scans the parched western prairie for signs of swift foxes that were reintroduced—animals which eat prairie dogs and other rodents in order to survive. While Phillips's collaborative approaches at TESF have netted huge positive results for wildlife, he says a similar spirit of cooperation and creative problemsolving has been lacking during the current legislative session in the state capitol. Photo by Todd Wilkinson

As with many of his contemporaries heading off this winter to various “citizen” legislatures in the West, there’s a lot of Jefferson Smith infused in the idealism of freshman State Representative Mike Phillips of Montana.

Like the fictional U.S. senator played by Jimmy Stewart in the Frank Capra film, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Phillips confesses that he went to Helena with an elevated sense of purpose about how government is supposed to work.  He honestly believed that big ideas are debated openly, objectively, forthrightly and blindly to the interference of crass partisan politics, no matter whether the wind blows from the Left or the Right. Carried in the breeze are facts that people should be able to agree upon.

Seated in a chamber where paintings by famous frontier artist Charles M. Russell loom large, Phillips wasted little time in drafting bills.

What he has been initiated into, however, is not a session based on the power of forensic pursuasion.  Rather, it has become a four month slog that, in the eyes of many observers on both sides of the political aisle, has degenerated into one of the most divisive and mean-spirited civic episodes in decades.  And to think, at least in the Montana House of Representatives, that the script setting up the rancor in that body follows very closely to the one that involved recounts and put George W. Bush in the White House in 2001 rather than Vice President turned global warming crusader Al Gore.

By profession, Phillips is a trained wildlife biologist and former civil servant who helped to successfully usher wolves back to the Southeastern U.S. (red wolves) and Yellowstone National Park (gray).  He studied grizzlies in the Alaskan Far North, worked under the mentorship of famed wolf biologist L. David Mech, and spent most of his life in the field, on the ground, talking to local residents about the value of wildlife in their lives.  Phillips says he’s far from perfect, but the last few decades have given him a special obvious expertise with natural resource issues.  And his cautious nature stems from having his scientific opinions, published in peer-review journals, routinely subjected to vetting and scrutiny by friendly and hostile colleagues. 

He, naively, he says, expected to find elected officials in Helena who, having had their platforms vetted by voters, were also open to subjecting their perspectives to challenge in the art of statesmanship.  But there is no peer-review process in citizen politics; no establishment of baseline facts; no arbiter who says that what an elected official says is truth or fiction.  There is no reprimand for speaking hearsay or gleaning one’s information from the tall tales that swirl in taverns and are later proved to be mythology.

As Phillips has largely chomped down on his tongue as a painful reminder to himself that he went to Helena to be a better listener than an grandstander, he has learned that without any of the checks and balances in the way information is disseminated in support of laws drafted and passed, it can be a free for all. 

Laws can be made based upon false pretenses, erroneous information, and grudges.

Phillips by now has heard hundreds of bills being debated, and he’s watched ping pong being played between his parties over how to set a responsible budget that reflects the needs and desires of Montana citizens.

On the wolf front, the Democrat from Bozeman, a community located at the northern peripherary of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, has actually expressed support for controlling lobo populations, albeit through sound science rather than unsubstantiated hysteria.

Today with more certainly than when he drove to Helena in early January, he believes THE greatest issue facing Americans, however, is rethinking the way energy is produced amid the daunting challenges ahead associated with climate change. 

Energy is the lodestar of the future, he says.  How it lights and powers the world has vital long-term implications for Montana’s business prosperity, for the way resources are used, for the health of the global environment to which his own state’s fate is intimately and inextricably linked, and to that amorphous but soulful phenomenon that Westerners call “quality of life.”

It is part of the essence of being an American, Phillips says—that willingness to sacrifice in order to leave your children and grandchildren a better world.  It is an ethic that is a core value of military service, those in natural resource management professions, those in public education, and in the moral obligation most parents possess. 

How difficult it is, he admits, for elected officials to appropriate money and enact laws that are forward minded, that accrue dividends into the future, without being handicapped by short horizon lines or personal greed.

Within the first weeks of Phillips’ arrival in Montana’s state capital, he founded an entity called “the Climate Change Caucus” comprised, as it turns out, only of Democrats.  The Caucus, as of this moment, does not include ANY Republicans.  Republicans have been invited and welcomed to engage in the dialog and except for a few GOP Senators who attended early seminars, they have stayed away, pretending, apparently, that climate change doesn’t exist.  Their obstinance, Phillips says, is hurting Montana.

Phillips introduced a bill that directs the state to pursue goals for alternative energy advanced by 25 X 25, a special initiative of the non-partisan Energy Future Coalition.  The goal is to have a quarter of all the energy generated in the U.S. come from renewable fuel sources by 2025 and it gives added weight to the contributions made by agriculture.

The EFC happens to be an organization that grew out of the Turner Foundation established by global media visionary Ted Turner.  When Phillips isn’t on sabbatical as a citizen legislator, he oversees the Turner Endangered Species Fund.  He works for Ted, once a devout card-carrying Republican, and he has access to some of the brightest thinkers in the multinational business community—yes, including powerful executives who happen to be Republican— with whom Turner has forged friendships over the years.

Turner just bought a stake in a solar power company; he is investigating the potential for generating wind power on his ranches in the West; and his president of the Turner Foundation and former Yellowstone Park Superintendent, Mike Finley, is working closely with the National Restaurant Association on a pioneering intiative to promote fuel efficiency in restaurants nationwide. 

Even if the existence of human-caused climate change were not substantiated solidly by science, Phillips says the actions being proposed to address climate change would be no less valid, for energy conservation, investing in sustainable alternatives to oil [Bush, after all, has said America must rid itself of its addiction to oil], and being at the forefront of cleaner coal technology, make sense for the national security, economic prosperity, and environmental health of Montana and the nation.

The other day, Phillips told me that he’d like to start a dialog with his legislative counterparts in Cheyenne and Boise about taking a regional approach to energy that makes this part of the northern Rockies and western plains a powerhouse for producing energy cleaner and more prosperously, letting the states more effectively dictate the terms of exporting energy resources rather than having them dictated to them by large populous states down the grid.  The days of Montana allowing itself to be treated as a Third World natural resource colony to the large cities must end, he says.

What’s the first epiphany Phillips had as a newly minted Montana politician?  It involves accountability for backing up what one says.  “I’m afraid that people, even elected officials, make decisions they are not qualified to make.  It’s been eye opening for me to see that there’s no process requiring a legislator to demonstrate even a basic command of an issue before he or she steps forward to vote on it. Their votes can have far-reaching consequences and they owe it to their constituents to be educated.”

The 2007 session in Helena has turned into a donnybrook, with Republican lawmakers who hold a one-vote edge in the House of Representatives slashing funding or turning back increases for social, environmental, and other programs in the name of fiscal conservatism and smaller government. Yet they support government subsidies without being willing to discuss them.

Republicans who side on issues with Democrats are considered traitors, and threatened with being rendered ineffectual but the same kind of attitude exists among Democrats, too.

This week, Phillips watched his GOP colleagues approve, on largely partisan lines, an appropriation of $200,000 to have Montana join a lawsuit to hasten the delisting of wolves. 

Diane Rice, a Republican from Harrison, wants Montana citizens to spend $200,000 of taxpayer money helping a group called Friends of the Northern Yellowstone Elk Herd—a controversial organization founded by anti-wolf zealot Robert T. Fanning—to force the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove lobos from federal protection.

The money, most likely, would go to the law firm of Karen Budd-Falen in Cheyenne, Wyoming, who has been retained by Fanning and has been a major player in the latest version of the anti-government “Wise Use Movement"” and which has cultivated a reputation for challenging environmental laws.  Some members of Budd-Falen’s staff served as interns with PERC in Bozeman, headed by political economist Terry Anderson who has served as an environmental advisor to former Interior Secretary Gale Norton and who, more recently, wrote an editorial supporting the overturning of Montana’s stream access law. 

Budd-Falen’s website states: “We represent industry clients in BLM and Forest Service appeals. We also represent clients in litigation arising under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act (FLPMA), the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Water Act (CWA) and other environmental statutes.” In other words, the firm has represented clients in industry that have pushed back against the federal government’s enforcement of those laws.  The firm also is representing a man, Mr. Fanning, who said that wolves have turned Yellowstone into “a biological desert” and that wolves have destroyed entire Montana communities. Those kinds of assertions may make for great headlines in the supermarket rag, The World Weekly News next to fictional stories about Sasquatch, but they’re pure fiction.  And yet, there are legislators in Montana who believe them.  [NewWest.Net columnist Dan Whipple has has an excellent overview of wolves’ impacts on park elk in a piece written for High Country News’ “Writers On The Range” that is carried by Headwaters News]. 

The appropriation of Montana taxpayer dollars by Rice to help a private group marshall a lawsuit, whose aim is to accomplish something that the Fish and Wildlife Service already is pursuing [i.e. delisting of wolves], is interesting given the charges made by people like Rice who in the past have accused Democrats of being free-spending and environmentalists of being litigious.

But Rice also has distinguished herself by calling upon the state to spend thousands of dollars on radio transceivers to be placed around the necks of wolves so that parents constantly know if wolves are in an area.  Rice once claimed, with a straight face, that school children at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park can’t walk to school without being in constant mortal fear that wolves might gobble them up.  As of today, the total number of school children in Montana, Wyoming or anywhere else in the West who have ever been documented to be attacked by wolves going back to the Lewis and Clark Expedition:  0.

State wildlife officials thought Rice’s proprosal was so silly and misquided that they were hesitant to even respond to it.  This is an elected official trying to make a law and spend public dollars that, when the information she used was faced with fact-checking, proved to be absolutely false.

Rice is not alone. 

She shares philosophical affinity with Representative Krayton Kerns, a Republican and veterinarian from Laurel, who is best known for three things.  First, it was because of Mr. Kerns winning a recount by three votes over incumbent Democrat Emelie Eaton that the balance of power shifted from being in the hands of Democrats to Republicans.  Nothing wrong with that; it’s how the votes added up but the delay of resolving who was the winner in Kerns’ House district fueled the enmity between the parties as each eyed control of the House.

Second, Mr. Kerns has gained notoriety for advancing some especially nutty positions.  Visit his website, mentioned below, and see if you agree.

Third, as Phillips the professional scientist notes, Kerns, because of his degree in animal medicine, has annointed himself, and has been given the title by the Republican Party, as the unofficial “go-to guy” when it comes to interpreting the validity of science.

Parroting U.S. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Kerns has committed into writing his belief that global warming is a “hoax” and that the science supporting it is a “sham.” Kerns resides in a Montana community where, on a calm day, it is impossible to escape the foul-smelling air caused by a local oil refinery, which, according to the watchdog group, Environmental Defense, had one of the worst environmental compliance records of refineries in the U.S. [as in the lowest 20 percent of refineries meeting federal standards during the 1990s) and still does not meet federal clean air standards for sulfur dioxide emissions.

At the top of Kerns’ personal website, he offers this announcement:  “CAUTION:  RAMBLINGS OF A CONSERVATIVE COW DOCTOR… Some of you readers with liberal leanings may find my opinions sting a little.  That is okay.  Liberalism is a disease you can beat.  Trust me, I’m a doctor!”

And what does the good doctor turned legislator say?

“Carbon dioxide emission as a cause of global climate warming is the biggest hoax of the last 30 years,” Kerns claims.  “Frighteningly, man caused global warming is being taught as a religion, and the ministers who promote it are particularly aggressive.... In the process of turning coal into electricity, the coal is burned and the carbon molecules are released into the air.  The believers radically proclaim this release is causing global warming.”

I would hazard to quess that most NewWest.Net readers have, by now, come to their own conclusions on the cause of global warming because they’ve read what scientific experts, who have subjected their analysis to rigorous peer review, say on the matter.  With few exceptions, no serious scientist argues that the burning of coal isn’t a major source for carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere. 

Yet here is Krayton Kerns, who has been given the nickname by some as “Dr. Science” and who claims to be an “authority” on global warming for his party, saying it doesn’t exist.  Even the Bush Administration doesn’t believe that.

Phillips doesn’t know what the best solution is for bringing science into the legislative chamber if colleagues, who sit in the majority and control what can be discussed and what cannot—even colleagues with veterinary degrees—are unwilling to have their own ideas tested and scrutinized using the best science available.  It is parallel, in fact, to the way discussions about global warming were carefully controlled in Congress when Inhofe and his colleagues ran the committees.

“Maybe you bring experts before the various committees and provide seminars on relevant topics about the salient features of an issue,” he says.  “After that, before a legislator can cast a vote, they must pass a test, much like taking a driver’s exam or earning citizenship.  You could take the test as many times as you needed but until you passed you wouldn’t get to vote.  It would at least force elected officials to be more informed when contemplating the gravity of the decisions they are making.”

He concedes there are going to be some legislators who take offense at his observation, but think about it, he asks? Is it unreasonable for citizens to expect that their elected officials possess at least an objective, non-partisan grasp of facts?  It’s a question both parties need to answer.

Phillips says he has learned something else:  In order for good ideas to prevail, “your voice has to have volume to carry over the noise and there’s a lot of noise out there,” he says.  “You can only achieve volume by working with other citizens and by taking the time to become personally informed.  That requires hard work.  I see people who have volume and those who don’t when they testify and, as an elected representative, I’ve learned that in order to truly advance the best interests of my own neighborhood, my town, my state, and my country, I can only be effective if I, too, have done my homework.”

All citizens deserve to have a say, he notes, but not all say is equal or makes for forming the foundation of good laws. “ Like many of us, I grew tired of having a view of the world from the cheap seats sitting in my living room, watching the TV, reading the local newspaper, and arming myself with just enough information to be dangerous,” he notes. “That isn’t good enough. It prompted me to want to do more.”

Legislators can only be held accountable to speak the facts and make good laws, he says, if their constituents are willing to consider what the facts are first.  Facts, he said, aren’t partisan but the people who make sport of distorting them are.

EDITOR’S NOTE:  Bozeman writer Todd Wilkinson is currently writing a book about the environmental work of Ted Turner.

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