“Put a bullet in her head” - Report from B’root Travel Plan meeting
By Matthew Koehler, New West Unfiltered 1-10-08
From: Matthew Koehler
Subject: "Put a bullet in her head" - Report from B'root Travel Plan meeting
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From Jim Miller, President of Friends of the Bitterroot (millerfob@earthlink.net)
All: It was a very sad glimpse at the worst of humanity last night in Darby during the Bitterroot National Forest's Travel Planning meeting . Over 200 angry, hostile, and rude motorized users showed up to berate the Forest Service for "locking them out". The facilitator Ginny Tribe did her best but it was not good enough.
People uttered obscenities, interrupted speakers, and attacked the FS for three solid hours. It was wall to wall people in the Darby Clubhouse with no room to break up into groups, so the FS took comments from people one at a time. I estimate that out of more than 50 comments from the motorized users, only two or three contained anything of substance that could be addressed in a DEIS, the rest was just complaining and attacking. A handful of quiet users made good substantive statements. One individual said that he had invited Baucus, Tester, and Rehberg and that they will be at the Hamilton meeting. I have no idea if that is true.
While one conservationist spoke, an angry motorized user said "Put a bullet in her head" Gary Milner approached him with a FS employee nearby and said to him " Did you say 'put a bullet in her head' "? he replied "Yes. " Gary said "what's your name?" He gave his name and the FS person wrote down his statement and his name. [End of article]
Such lovely people in MT. Can't say I miss them.
Comment By bearbait, 1-10-08Polarized stake holders. 25 years of people being marginalized out of recreational use of the public domain. First they lost their jobs, then their control of local schools, then they got squeezed by MacMansionites and priced out of home ownership. In a place where winter is half the year or more, losing a somewhat affordable recreational outlet is just another perceived and real injustice.
Having watched radicals burn buildings, cars, mink and poplar farms, from afar in the newspaper, the outrage and admonition towards radical envirnomental activism was never equal to the verbal blasts of outrage Joe Sixpack gets when he or she voices utter frustration. The total destruction of rural economies and governments across a wide belt of the New West if most felt by the people who have lived there the longest.
No person should threaten another. No person. People are just doing their jobs, albeit some not well, and respect for their being the messenger should be limited to just that: respect. The villains are far away in the SO, the RO, the Chief's Office. The secret planners and planning process that produces this dribble of Preferred Alternatives based on pre-addressed post card responses from afar is the bad boy in this deal. If you want to keep something or change something, you had best get your Congressional delegation on your side or you are just trying to make yellow snow upwind. They control the purse, and therefore the agenda.
Thanks, Matthew, for not letting this episode dissolve away. Why are these people so furious? Why do they band together in mobs, threatening, trying to intimidate?
It is because their arguments for their actions and desires won't hold water. They (and yes, I realize I'm using "they" alot) are in command (mostly) of new technologies- fancy, expensive ATVs and snowmachines- that did not exist even twenty years ago, technologies that are capable of carrying these folks into the backcountry with a minimum of physical effort, capable of transporting the heavy snack foods and the beers, of making every place accessible without effort. Security for big game? Not an issue. The game is there to be killed with the least amount of effort, and if it can be killed-that big bull, like the ones on TV-in time to get back for the ball game on TV, that's even better. Trash and erosion or the destruction of sensitive plants are problems that only despicable eggheads worry about. If you hold different values, we will shout you down, beat you up, run over you, or...put a bullet in your head. Forcing others to let you do whatever you want, no matter the cost, through the threat of violence, is not a new tactic. It reaches its heights when what you want is irrational and selfish and will cause obvious damage.
If the motorized use crowd gets what it wants, the "rights" that other citizens may have to quiet, or to walk-in hunting, or to a trash-free mountain lake, are utterly and even violently trampled. Therein lies the necessity for rage- because the motorized advocates are wrong. Whether they win or lose the debate, it will not change the essentials. For them to do what they want on public lands means that others must surrender their rights, their values. And that we all-the motorized users, everybody, must accept quantifiable damage to our lands, to the native plants, wildlife, and watersheds, invasive weeds, erosion, etc. The question is not based simply in some esoteric value of wilderness or solitude.
The question does, however, take this into account: it has been estimated that about 98% of the American landscape is accessible by road or motorized vehicle. These folks who want to ride the public lands without limits are demanding the very last of the last non-motorized landscapes.
In a long ago conversation, several friends and I were talking about how people change. One friend asked us: How old were you when you stopped shooting turtles for fun? (in the south, turtles bask on the surface of ponds with just their heads visible, pond owners don't care if you shoot them, it is the height of boyhood .22 caliber recreation). The average age of seeing how that might be wrong, to take life for fun like that, turtles have rights, turtles have a role in the pond, etc. was eighteen.
Then we got onto dirt bikes and 4 wheeling (muddin'). Most of us had lost the thrill of muddin in our early twenties, after (1-an infuriated landowner almost shot me with a twelve gauge (it was a misunderstanding, his land was torn up, I was driving a mud covered pickup, he was out of his mind with rage) 2) we'd learned about how driving in creeks messed them up for fish and water quality 3) you could see more of the land if you were walking 4) anger at other motorized yahoos, trash throwers, and the destruction of once isolated hunting and fishing spots ("I just don't want to be one of those people who are wrecking the place" was a typical response)
One question/conclusion in the conversation- "Do you think that people who really, really love motorized recreation are all fifteen year old boys at heart, that they never move beyond the muddin'/ turtle plinkin' stage? What is the kind of off road use we see all the time, say, on the Bitterroot, but technologically advanced vandalism? And vandalism, if I recall my own history, peaks at around age fifteen.
But fifteen year old boys have the option of the boxing ring, the mat, the track, the football field, the ski hill, etc etc. The dirt bikes can be taken away if they are used to vandalize the neighbor's wheat crop or hayfield, their irrigation ditches, or if they are used to terrorize the old grump down the road. In trying to regulate motorized users of public lands, we face a different equation - adults who habitually conduct themselves as adolescents, but furiously demand official sanction of, or at least non-interference with, their destructive and/or offensive adolescent actions.
It's a blueprint for conflict. It is nationwide. And it is new. The motorized folks seem to see themselves as some kind of bastion of traditional values, or traditional views of the land, but this is far from the reality, (unless you want to consider that utter disregard for impact to land, as during the frontier, or that human beings should destroy the land and treat it as a kind of disposable theme park, is a traditional value). The powerful ATVs, and a large population, equipped with enough disposable income to buy them, are a new phenomenon. Traditional ethics- unless you are talking about Aldo Leopold or John Muir or Roosevelt- are not really applicable to the debate.
Another fundamental question is why motorized recreation attracts this kind of anger, and angry people. Why don't hikers, who have to witness the trash and toilet paper and the erosion and watershed damage left behind by people who-until these motorized technologies became available- did not ever venture into the backcountry at all, who seem to not see any value in it other than as a canvas for their antics-why aren't hikers threatening people and yelling obscenities? Why aren't backcountry bowhunters out brawling in the parking lot with people who would happily drive right over them in the backcountry? I think I know why the motorized folks are furious but why does everybody else seem so meek and reasonable?
Dang, bearbait answered all my questions while I still trying to type them down.
And I was gettin all inteeleckshuall and stuff, bashin on the downtrodden, forced-out-of-work rural westerners who can somehow afford to move from California (how many times have I heard them shriekin that the Desert Protection Act forced them to move to the Bitterroot? Many), buy a giant enclosed trailer filled with ten top-notch ATVs and snowmachines, unhitch it at their 4000 sq foot log home and drive their 2008 Dodge Ram down to the meeting in Darby. Yeah, its righteous anger, buckaroo. Those treehugging pencil pushers in Washington are really keepin the people DOWN. And the western economy of the 1950's has got to be brought back, now, or we're going to rise up!
200 pissed off people may be wrong, but its still 200 pissed off people. Oh that they were as articulate as Mr. Herring. marginalized people can be very dangerous. Don't think they could get a conviction if Bubba acts on his threat...all the DNA is the same in Darby.
Comment By Robert Hoskins, 1-11-08Justice failed in one forum is justice pursued in others.
Comment By George Vincent, 1-13-08One of Bearbait's comments was particularly interesting:
"The villains are far away in the SO..." Yes, it's SOOO far from Darby to Hamilton. And let alone the RO, light-years north and totally run by "liberal" Missoula.
Lest we forget, it's the Bitterroot NATIONAL Forest. The taxpayers of this country put a whole lot more money into the Darby economy than the locals pay to the rest of the U.S. So if the motorheads just have to run their toys around destroying the land, let them do it in their own, private backyards-- not on the commons.