Review by Kay Matthews
Public Land – April 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
This Sovereign Land: A New Vision for Governing the West
By Daniel Kemmis
Published in 2001 by Island Press
ISBN 1-559-63842-7
THIS SOVEREIGN LAND by Daniel Kemmis, director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana and former mayor of Missoula, is a validation of everything those of us involved in community forestry and watershed restoration have been saying for years: The Forest Service has failed in its mission of forest stewardship and is incapable of meaningful collaboration with communities that are ready to get the job done.
Kemmis puts it this way:
“Watershed councils and other mechanisms of western collaboration have become both increasingly effective and increasingly incompatible with the prevailing centralized and adversarial decision-making structures on the one hand and with the region’s arbitrarily bounded political jurisdictions on the other. The West may soon be prepared to recognize how consistently those old structures prevent the region from determining its own fate on its own terms. That recognition may in time enable the West to begin inventing institutions appropriate to a democratic people inhabiting a unique landscape.”
Kemmis believes that institutions like the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) have lost their governing legitimacy and it’s time for western stakeholders to begin the real work of developing collaborative processes to govern our public lands. He develops his argument in the context of how national sovereignty and imperialism defined western settlement.
Kemmis begins with the story of U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s attempt to introduce the grizzly bear into the Selway-Bitteroot region of Idaho and Montana during the 1980s, triggering the kind of battle that so often leads to an impasse in the West. On one side stands the People for the West, funded by the extractive industry, that says unilaterally “No Bears!” (backed by the Republicans). On the other side the national environmental movement says, “These are our national forests, they do not belong to the people who live here and you are not going to tell us how to manage them” (backed by the Democrats). Attempts at compromise by a coalition of people who represented both sides eventually failed — after being attacked by extremists who refused to relinquish their sovereignty to a group of local people who sought a settlement.
WHAT THIS REPRESENTS is the essential story of the West: the conflict between the West’s development through the expansion of the American empire, or manifest destiny, and its attempts at self-governing, or local sovereignty.
Kemmis goes back in history to follow the story of these two threads, empire and sovereignty, starting with an analysis of the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt, whose policies largely determined the shape and politics of the West.
“Jefferson the imperialist” set in motion Lewis and Clark’s expedition to find the headwaters of the Missouri and Columbia rivers, which started an imperial policy to gain the geopolitical control of the Pacific coast. Kemmis goes on to trace this imperialist policy through the acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase, the Civil War (largely fought over the question of slavery extending into western territories), and the Mexican-American War, to the time of Roosevelt, a hundred years later.
Like Jefferson, Roosevelt was a naturalist, but he actually lived out his “western romanticism” by ranching and hunting throughout the West. Kemmis points out that Roosevelt displayed a “deep ideological conflict” in celebrating western individualism and heroism while pursuing an imperialistic agenda and nationalizing millions of acres of western land. It is this conflict — that Kemmis believes the West has inherited from Roosevelt — that lies at the heart of its identity crisis: nationhood versus sovereignty.
In his chapter “A Century of Rebellion” Kemmis explores the history of western resentment of national control that began with Roosevelt and his forest administrator, Gifford Pinchot. Kemmis writes about what came to be known as the Sagebrush Rebellion in the late 1970s and 80s, when states tried to claim public lands as state property. Orin Hatch of Utah actually introduced a bill into the U.S. Senate that would have allowed states to transfer ownership of public lands to their jurisdiction. But environmentalists went to court to block that bill and the rebellion lost steam.
Then it resurfaced in the 1990s in Catron County, New Mexico. This time the county attempted to assert jurisdiction over all federal and state lands, waters, and wildlife. This county movement, which initially spread across the West, also began to fade, but, according to Kemmis, it led to “a less legalistic and more symbolic attack on federal land management in general,” which is largely ineffective.
BUT KEMMIS goes on to say, ” … the centralized system against which westerners have struggled for a full century has itself become more than a little pathetic as it grasps at ever newer formulas to maintain its governing legitimacy.”
What Kemmis sees in place of this fight is the relationship between a growing “global ecology and global economy” that decreases the authority of the nation-state and opens the door to regional and local forms of governance.
The Forest Service, described in a 1989 memo by forest supervisors as “an agency out of control”, has become increasingly incapable of managing our public lands. The agency is demoralized from within, assaulted by environmental and property rights advocates from without, and — as described by its own chief — suffers from “analysis paralysis.” The agency has also been manipulated from both sides of the political spectrum, by those who demanded it “get out the cut” after World War II at unsustainable levels and by an environmental movement that burdened the agency with endless paperwork and litigation. This has made it impossible for local managers to keep the promises they make to local communities.
IN THE LAST FEW CHAPTERS of his book, Kemmis guides the reader through possible solutions to this gridlock. He believes it’s time for the West to seize the moment and create a new regionalism where public lands are managed watershed by watershed or along geographic lines that define communities.
According to Kemmis, this process has already begun. He highlights the work of such groups as the Malpai Borderlands Project in southwestern New Mexico, the Applegate Partnership in southern Oregon, and the Ponderosa Pine Forest Partnership in southwestern Colorado. But such groups tend to come up against the ethos of the Forest Service as “expert” because the agency only wants collaborative help up to the point where decisions are made. This, Kemmis points out, “is fatal to genuine collaboration.”
How then do we make collaboration a force in western land management? Kemmis believes it is time to “begin thinking about realigning sovereignty to give westerners more control over public lands, not in order to exploit them or ruin them but for the long-term sustainability of western ecosystems and communities.”
But first Republicans will have to get out of bed with the extractive industry, and Democrats will have to quit romancing environmentalists: “If both western parties could more or less simultaneously let go of what no longer serves them or the West, they might also each carry forward half of a new, broad-based and therefore potentially potent western agenda.”
This Sovereign Land leads the way.
— Kay Matthews
(Kay Matthews edits La Jicarita News, a monthly “community advocacy newspaper for northern New Mexico.” Subscriptions are $5 a year from Box 6 El Valley Route, Chamisal NM 87521; website is www.lajicarita.org)
