Column by George Sibley
Politics – July 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
I’m sitting here tonight feeling guilty about missing a meeting, an educational forum with the “Pathfinder Group” that is working with the Forest Service to try to peacefully and sensibly resolve the problem of in-stream flows for waterways in the local National Forest.
“Local National Forest.” Now there’s Gifford Pinchot’s worst fears realized. When the National Forests were created, Roosevelt and Pinchot had been persuaded — not entirely without cause — that the problem was how to protect the shrinking forests from the depredations of local residents: ranchers and sawmillers who treated the forests as a local commons to be used and abused at will.
So the National Forests were created and strict measures were instilled to insure that our forests would be protected by highly trained non-local rangers whose promotions depended upon their willingness to keep national priorities first and avoid “going native.”
This of course made the Forest Service a sitting duck for a timber industry that was already more national than local. And a Congressional mandate in the postwar years to “get the cut out” for the national housing boom made matters worse.
By the time the Forest Service finally got ordered by Congress to do some long-term planning back in the 1970s, they discovered, to their apparent shock, that down on the ground their National Forests had been surrounded by educated and passionate local forest lovers — some more educated, and some more passionate — who had no patience with the Forest Service’s sophisticated top-down timber-oriented FORPLAN process.
Now, the forest plans that were eventually tacked together as a result of reevaluations in the ’70s are arriving at a 20-year review and revision point, and the Forest Service is being a little more open and democratic in its planning process. This time around, the Forest Service seems to be starting from the assumption that it is managing ecosystems, not just resources that are lying around waiting to be used up. This environmentally friendly viewpoint is a big step that can probably be attributed — at least partially — to grassroots democratic persistence.
But democracy isn’t making the planning process any easier — as the White River National Forest revision experience has already shown. Meetings can inspire virtual shootouts in which interest groups come in force determined to defend their interests uber alles and to heap scorn or worse on any opposition.
What such experiences suggest, along with the poor turnouts at information forums, is that Americans aren’t very good at democracy, which clearly has to be as much about listening as about speaking up, and a lot about giving in order to get. Absolute freedom is fundamentally undemocratic, which means in the land of the free there’s something pretty un-American about democracy, with its unheroic and unindividualistic need for compromise and consensus-building — and for getting informed.
It’s fairly evident that the practice of democracy is not something that comes naturally to humans. Like hate and racism in the song, democracy probably has to be carefully taught. Alexis de Toqueville recognized that back in the 1830s: “The first duty imposed on those who now direct society is to educate the democracy.”
But I get a little queasy at the magnitude of the work required to get educated enough for democracy today. Practically every night there is an important meeting for something — water planning, forest planning, growth planning, community planning — not to mention just the regular meetings of the local governments. We have two good local papers in the valley and this regional publication that cover what they can, and that helps. But even so, most of us know a lot less than we should know to participate in an intelligent democratic process on local matters. And that’s just at the local level.
One has to wonder: is democracy really possible? I don’t mean this shabby simulacrum we’ve devolved into today whereby the generally uninformed elect the generally unworthy in a circus run by and for that lowest common denominator of value, money. Fifty-percent turnouts aside, the general public attitude of contempt and cynicism for government says all that needs to be said about the level to which democracy has sunk in America.
Of course, real democracy might be more possible if I’d just go to the Pathfinder Group meeting tonight. But after a day at work, I need to get started on this column, and I just don’t have another two-hour meeting in me.
Then there’s the water meeting tomorrow night, and then I have to decide whether to take half a day of vacation time Friday afternoon to go to the Planning Commission’s hearing on coal-bed methane drilling in the valley, and that’s something I’ll need to read about first if I want to understand what’s being said.
And it’s all important.
Do I deserve democracy? Do I even want it, under these circumstances? Those are questions I find myself asking more and more frequently. Maybe freedom is just another word for nothing more to have to get informed about. Freedom and democracy may indeed go together like love and marriage — and we’ve all seen and heard that kind of marriage somewhere in the neighborhood in the wee hours of the night.
George Sibley teaches and writes in Gunnison, when he’s not going to meetings.