Today's Stories

May 24, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Yellowstone: the Vision Thing

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

This is an excerpt from Jeffrey St. Clair's new environmental history of the American West, Born Under a Bad Sky, now available from AK Press / CounterPunch Books.

Yellowstone.  The word itself rings with wildness.  America’s first and largest park.  Home to grizzly and bison, bubbling mudpots and steaming geyser basins.  But, in fact, the high plateaus and mountains of Yellowstone Park are only a central core of a much large ecosystem.  An ecosystem that spills over into six national forests in three different regions, Grand Teton National Park, the Rockefeller Parkway, and two federal wildlife refuges.  The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem also includes hundreds of thousands of acres of state lands, private and Indian lands, and lands managed by the BLM.

The management implications of this landownership pattern are complex, convoluted, and intensely controversial.  For example bison, which carry brucillosis, a disease that sometimes causes abortions in domestic cattle, often stray out of the park onto private rangelands and grazing allotments on national forest lands.  Annual bison hunts at the park boundaries designed to cull the bison herds and stop the spread of the disease have outraged animal rights activists and some environmentalists.  Conversely, many ranchers have intensely opposed efforts to reintroduce the gray wolf to Yellowstone, because they fear the wolves will migrate out of the park and prey on sheep and cattle. 

Geothermal energy developments outside the park boundaries, like those at the Church Universal and Triumphant ranch in Montana, may threaten Yellowstone’s world-famous geyser basins and other thermal features.  Clearcutting, roadbuilding, and oil and gas development on national forest lands surrounding the park have contributed to the decline in grizzly bear populations.

Forest fires sweep across all boundaries.  Indeed some of the blame for the intensity of the 1987 Yellowstone fires has been leveled at the Forest Service’s aggressive fire suppression strategy.  Others, of course, pointed fingers at the Park Service’s let-burn philosophy.  While the fires may have been good for the ecosystem, they certainly blackened the reputations of both agencies.

Commercial developments in the parks—like the Fishing Bridge complex—remain in place in prime grizzly habitat despite agreements to remove them.  Conservationists charge that Fishing Bridge and other questionable developments, such as the airport runway extension at Grand Teton Park (the only national park with its own airport), continue to proliferate throughout the region as a result of direct political interference in the management of the parks and adjacent forests.

The image of Yellowstone as wilderness or ecosystem it seems is more of an American myth than a reality.  In fact, Yellowstone is a political landscape in which ecological forces are warped and bent to serve a variety of often conflicting bureaucratic, political and economic demands.  To make matters worse, or at least more convoluted, the land itself, the 12 million acres known as Greater Yellowstone, is managed by numerous different entities with often radically different objectives—the diversity of the ecosystem is rivaled only by the diversity of its managers.

The Coordinating Committee

As a result of these and other conflicts, in the early 1960’s, the Park Service and Forest Service formed the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee, a task force with representatives from both agencies, each of the states, the BLM, and Fish and Wildlife Service.  The GYCC was designed to provide a working relationship for the “integrated” management of the Greater Yellowstone area.

For decades, however, the GYCC was as dormant as the Yellowstone caldera.  The agencies communicated only when they had too, usually when their were problems with grizzly bears or when politicians, like Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY), wanted park roads opened to log trucks hauling timber off national forest lands.

Two events worked to raise the profile of Greater Yellowstone.  First, the forest plans for the national forest in Greater Yellowstone started to emerge in the early and mid-1980’s.  Most scheduled increased logging and roadbuilding near park borders and full-scale oil and gas develop of the Overthrust Belt.

Second, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition emerged as one of the first and most effective of the new crop of regional grassroots organizations.  Greater Yellowstone Coalition began to aggressively advance the idea that the ecological health of America’s oldest national park depended on the eight million acres of surrounding lands were managed.

Congress held hearings on Greater Yellowstone in 1985.  The Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the House Subcommittee on Public Lands and National Parks and Recreation, severely criticized the Park Service and Forest Service for the lack of coordinated planning and information on the Greater Yellowstone Area.  The CRS report said that developments on Forest Service lands were threatening “the values of the entire Yellowstone area.”

As a result of the hearings, the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee began to compile the various management plans and objectives of each forest and park.

The GYCC released a 240 page report in 1987 entitled An Aggregation of National Park and Forest Service Management Plans which provided an overview of the often divergent management directions of the various forests and parks and called for a more formalized relationship between the Greater Yellowstone forests and parks.  The report also suggested that an interagency document was needed that would describe a future “vision” for the Greater Yellowstone area and how that vision could be achieved through “coordinated management goals.”

Initial Visions

In 1988, the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee, which was co-chaired by Lorraine Mintzmayer, regional director of the National Park Service for the Rocky Mountain Region and Gary Carghill, regional forester for the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Region, began work on what was to become known as the Yellowstone Vision Statement.

“The Yellowstone vision document was not simply to be a regional plan or decision document—it was intended to be a study of the conditions of the areas involved and a formalization of coordinated, guiding principles,” Mintzmeyer said.  “It was to be a model for interagency cooperation in this area and a model for other areas, well into the next century.”

When the seventy page draft report was released in August 1990, it was hailed by the agencies and some environmentalists as the first ecosystem approach to public land management in the country.  The Vision Statement provided three overriding goals for the management of the Greater Yellowstone Area:

• Conserve a sense of naturalness and maintain ecosystem integrity throughout Greater Yellowstone; 
• Encourage opportunities that are biologically and economically sustainable;
• Improve coordination and inter-agency cooperation in Greater Yellowstone.

The Vision statement subdivided these goals into some fairly specific objectives.  For example, the goal to conserve a “sense of naturalness” throughout the area included mechanisms to protect geothermal features, fish and wildlife, air and water quality, biological diversity, and cultural resources.

The sustainable development goal outlined ways to reform range and timber management practices on national forest lands and offered proposals for working with local communities to help diversify their economies.  It also established a formalized process for consultation and coordinated planning between the agencies.

While the philosophy of the Vision may learn more toward the “natural management” paradigm of the Park Service, the document reads like a forest plan.  It is general and obtuse, filled with loopholes and tendentious language. 

Still, the document provided a pathway for change, perhaps the only way Forest Service could be dragged through the process.  Even so there were indications early on that the Forest Service was not exactly eager to have its plans reviewed by the Park Service.  Afterall, from the Forest Service’s point of view it seemed a one-way street—there wasn’t much chance that the Forest Service was going to change the Park Service’s management of Yellowstone or Grand Teton.

James Caswell, supervisor of eastern Idaho’s Targhee National Forest, was apparently one of those who thought the Vision was too restrictive, that it imposed too much of the Park Service’s philosophy on the Forest Service.

Shortly after the release of the draft Vision, Caswell said: “This is by no means the final product.  I was on the team wrote it and my copy’s full of red ink.”

The Firestorm

While some agency officials and conservationists praised the Vision statement as a revolutionary document, others noted that much of the language in the report was vague and non-binding.

“The Vision report was non-binding, a kind of sweeping, but vague policy agenda that outlined how the various land management agencies can cooperate to protect the region’s wildlife and biological diversity,” said Scott Garland, public lands director for the Jackson Hole Alliance.

The Vision report was unilaterally condemned by members of the Wyoming, Idaho and Montana congressional delegations.  Rep. Ron Marlenee and Senator Conrad Burns attacked the report as “a blueprint” for preservation.  Burns said that he believed the Park Service was attempting to extend its management philosophy onto national forests lands.  “There planning on creating a 12 million acre park,” Burns said.

The Wyoming Heritage Foundation, a coalition of industry groups, and People for the West, led most of the opposition to the Vision report.  “Yellowstone National Park is not endangered,” the group charged after the release of the draft report.  “Common sense tells you that.  Jobs and local economies will be endangered if the Vision policies are approved.”

The most vocal opponents of the Vision statement were private landowners within the Greater Yellowstone Area who contended that the report would place restrictions on private developments in the Yellowstone area.

From Vision to Framework

The final version of the report, which no longer contained the word “Vision” in its title, was released on September 11.  The new report, now called “A Framework for Coordination of National Parks and National Forests in the Greater Yellowstone Area” and sliced from 70 pages to 11 pages in length, eliminates all references to biological diversity, ecosystem management, and the preservation of a sense of naturalness that high-lighted the Vision statement.

The “Framework” calls for a balance between the preservation of natural values and resource development.  “Resource protection and resource use are not inherently mutually exclusive,” the report concludes.

Lorraine Mintzmayer, who received her directed reassignment shortly before the release of the new Yellowstone report, alleged in her testimony before the House Civil Service Subcommittee that While House Chief of Staff John Sununu considered the original Vision statement a complete “disaster” from a political perspective and ordered that it be completely rewritten.

Much of the political pressure apparently came from Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, who convened a meeting with assistant secretary of agriculture James Moseley, Gary Carghill, and Scott Sewell then the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife.

Mintzmayer, who was in Washington D.C. at the time, was intentionally not invited to the meeting, where Simpson outlined his objections to the report and requested that it be substantially altered.

Soon after this meeting, apparently Simpson, who Ed Lewis, executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, describes as having “a deep personal desire to micromanage Yellowstone Park,” contacted White House Chief John Sununu to complain about the Vision report and Mintzmeyer’s leadership.

Mintzmayer recounted a meeting she had with Scott Sewell, and Parks for the Department of Interior on October 5, 1990 where Sewell said that “significant political contacts and pressure had been made to the White House and the Secretacy regarding the Vision document.”

Sewell blamed Mintzmayer personally for the political problems caused by the draft Vision statement and informed her that he had been “delegated by the Department” to personally rewrite the Yellowstone report.

Mintzmayer said the Yellowstone Vision statement had been sheared down to a mere “brochure” that had little or no basis in scientific research and had little utility or credibility for professional land managers.

Both the White House and the Department of the Interior have flatly denied that Sununu discussed the Yellowstone Vision statement with Sewell.  The Interior Department also claimed that Mintzmayer’s removal was unrelated to her role in the preparation of the draft Yellowstone report.

Marlenee denied charges by conservationists that he had used political influence to have the report altered or that he played a role in the directed reassignements of Mintzmayer and John Mumma.  However, his office confirmed that he helped arrange and provide transportation for ranchers and loggers to the contentious hearings in Montana on the Yellowstone Vision report.

“They’ve considerably scoped down the Yellowstone report and have met some of our concerns, but we’re still not entirely pleased with its direction,” Marlenee said.

“The final document completely fails to establish a set of principles to ensure ecological sensitivity and coordinated management of greater Yellowstone,” charged Ed Lewis.  “Political interference, apparently directed from the highest levels of government, has led to the complete abandonment of the concept of ecosystem management which was featured in the draft.”

Saving Face

The new “Framework” was publicly defended by several forest supervisions in the greater Yellowstone area.  Brian Stout, supervisor of the Bridger-Teton National Forest, said that criticism of the report’s elimination of the words “naturalness” and biodiversity” were overstated.

“What we’re talking about is maintaining scenic values,” Stout said.  “It was never about limiting timber harvesting, grazing or oil and gas leasing.  The goal was to continue multiple-use activities in a way that preserves other values.”

Privately, several forest supervisors and deputies said that they were disappointed that the report had been “gutted” and were concerned that the manner in which the report was altered indicated a troubling trend toward politicization of natural management decisions.

“It appears that any significant decision we make will be subjected to a kind of political litmus test,” one supervisor said.  “And if you stand up you better be prepared to take a hit.”

Park Service officials expressed similar concerns.  “Any major decision, whether it deals with concessionaires, outfitters, or restrictions on overgrazing, now appears to be lifted out of the hands of professional managers and into the hands of politicians and political appointees,” said a Park Service official.  “It seems that even the director of the park service and Secretary Lujan are often out of the loop on these decisions.”

The official supported Mintzmayer’s allegation that officials in the White House had worked directly with the deputy secretary of Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks on the redrafting of the Yellowstone document and other matters relating to development in the national parks.

The Yellowstone Vision document is dead.  And among the causalities are one of the best regional Park Service directors and perhaps, the Forest Service’s best regional forester.  Other reformers inside both agencies are laying low.  But perhaps there is a more fundamental casualty, the idea espoused by Gifford Pinchot, and other public land managers, that scientifically trained managers paid by the public would automatically act in the public interest.

It should now be obvious that even when high-level agency officials develop innovative ecosystem management scenarios, ideas that invariably conflict with the dominant political paradigm, politics will prevail—often with disastrous consequences. 

Until environmentalists begin attacking corporate subsidies with the same vigor they pursue wilderness designations, politicians are going to continue to run roughshod over even the best ecosystems of the American West.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. 

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