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Collision of Visions
By Bruce Vincent
"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. And crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
That's Bobby Kennedy, South Africa, 1966. It's also each one of you, 2001.
I grew up in a timber family. I grew up believing that as a timber family we had a responsibility to be good stewards of the ground that we lived in, the forest we lived in, and if we did a good job of taking care of it, it would do a good job of taking care of us.
It was after I graduated from high school and went to Portland, Oregon to go to college that I learned that the rest of the planet did not look at me as a steward of the forest. In fact they kind of looked at me as an axe-murdering Neanderthal.
But I soon learned that there's a third environment that's going to dictate whether or not I get to continue to live here or raise my family here, or my family will have hope of coming back here, and that's the political environment. And it's in that environment that we're having a collision. We're having a collision because the rest of America has more leisure time, more wealth than they've ever had before. They have been spending the last 20 years' vacations coming out to places like Montana, and they too have fallen in love.
What's going on in rural America? We're having what I call a collision of visions. And one of the reasons we're having a collision of visions is because people have fallen in love with the same things I fell in love with and wanted to move back to Montana for. I fell in love with the natural environment; we live in one of the most stuning places on Earth. What a beautiful place Montana is. I just drove here today. You cannot drive from Libby to Helena without falling in love again. It's an awesome place. The natural environment is part of why I moved back here. I also moved back for the cultural environment. The last vestige of what built the greatest nation on Earth is alive and well in Montana. When we watch things like the last Presidential campaign and we see the rest of America trying to refind their family values, we wonder where theirs went because ours are still at home -- hard-working, hard-playing, community-oriented, family-oriented, church-oriented, school-oriented people still live in Libby and in Lincoln and in Ekalaka, in Wibaux.
But their vision for protecting the last best place has a fatal flaw. It has very little provision in it for the last best people.
Who's doing the management of the forests where I live? Where the mills have closed? Where our logging company has shrunk from 65 to three families? Nature is.
Something's wrong when our nation has rightfully fallen in love with the environment, but is willing to get information on this important subject from such noted experts as Doctor Merril Streep. (laughter) The woman pretends for a living. What is she doing testifying on agro-chemistry issues in Congress, and what are they doing listening to her?
If you lived in downtown Seattle and you were an intelligent person and you thought you had to pick between the world's butt-ugliest clear-cut and a pristine forest, what would you pick? If you lived in New York City and thought the only way to keep Montana from turning into an open pit was to stop all mining ... If you thought the only way to have clean water in Montana was to do away with agriculture in Montana ... If you were faced with those two choices, there would really be only one thing to choose, and it wouldn't be the resource producers' position. I'll tell you why. America has been making the right choice. They've just been given the wrong choices from which to choose.
This is not a partisan thing. A bunch in this room are Democrats. A bunch are Republicans. Rural people don't care. You could belong to the pajama party for all we care. What's important to us is do you understand the issues that are driving our decisions in rural areas, and are you acting on them?
In an estimation that 281 million voracious consumers, if they would like to continue to enjoy the standard of living we have helped build for them, while protecting the environment they have suddenly come to love, they would be ill-advised to deal out the people who have been providing from and protecting their environment for 200 stinking years.
America is ready for a new environmental vision built on hope instead of fear, science instead of emotion, education instead of litigation, resolution instead of conflict, and employing rather than destroying human resources.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is a way to protect the last best place without destroying the last best people.