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Bern Shanks
"Natural resource professionals are advocates,
even when they remain passive."
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Mike: I am interested in your experiences with the sagebrush rebellion.
Bern: . . . When the sagebrush rebellion erupted I was on the faculty of Utah State University teaching a course in federal land policy. I went around for months grousing to my colleagues about how stupid the whole idea of the rebellion was, giving lands back to the states and how all their underlining premises were totally wrong. A colleague said, "Well, you should give a seminar." So I gave a talk at his little seminar series in the college.
. . . A powerful rebel in Utah was a guy named Calvin Black. He’d been in the Legislature and had been a very influential county commissioner. Black was making statements that BLM employees should travel in groups of twos and threes because it wasn’t safe to travel alone. The rebels labeled BLM employees as jack-booted thugs. Then, western political leaders, like Senator Hatch, started saying these same things and calling federal public servants dictators who were out-of-touch federal bureaucrats trying to, "... tell us what to do." And it worked. Many BLM people feared for their well being in these rural areas because the talk was so venomous. In my seminar talk one of the ironies I pointed out was that the College of Natural Resources at Utah State had more alumni who were BLM employees than any other university. So I also made the appeal that our product as the College of Natural Resources is our alumni. Criticism of their management is criticism of our college.
. . . One of the people that came to seminar was a stringer for the New York Times. He met with me after my talk and said, "You know, you’ve really got some good stuff. If you package it little different, your message will really get out. Here’s what the newspapers will pick up on. . ." I took his advice and really worked at making the my message vivid. Pretty soon I was being invited to give more and more of these talks and started getting quoted in newspaper stories which spawned more invitations to speak, mostly from environmental groups. Eventually these groups organized a rally on the steps of the Idaho state capital and I was the featured speaker. This time in front of network television cameras. In a course of a few months I gave this talk twenty-five or thirty times around the western states. It was my first experience with a little notoriety.
. . . As that went on the local Utah politicians got very upset. The Utah Legislature had passed a bill laying claim to all the federal lands in Utah, which I, a Utah State University professor, was lambasting as bullshit. But the bill was passed and signed by the Governor. Cal Black was a leader behind that bill. He organized a complaint letter about me signed by the Utah Wool Growers Association, the Cattlemen’s Association, and the Farm Bureau. The letter told the dean that as long as I was on the faculty the University was not going to get a new Natural Resources Building, which was the Dean’s fondest hope. The president of the University wrote back saying they were taking care of this problem - which was me.
. . . As this boiled up and my activities became more public, many of my University colleagues were very offended. I can remember one of the old Forestry professors saying, "You’ve really fixed us now. You’ve just screwed us for years."
. . . But I became more and more identified as the Utah State professor who was a dissenting voice. Before that, the sagebrush rebellion got up ahead of steam because no one refuted them. No one. The press is compelled to give both sides of a story, so, as the only person speaking out against the rebellion I soon became the person reporters would interview for an opposing view. . .
. . . After having confronted the rebel’s arguments a number of times, I got very adept at ripping apart their rhetoric,
. . . Each time the rebels criticized federal managers I responded by ridiculing the critics, saying that they were motivated by greed and selfishness and their own financial well being. I’d say they were really on a form of welfare as miners, ranchers, and others making easy money off of public lands. But for my dean, I’m sure I was a problem. I brought undue attention to the University. I was acting out of the norm, even though my academic job was to teach a course about public land policy and to talk about these kinds of larger political and economic forces that influence public land management. In most Western universities there is one faculty position designated as their resource policy position. I had that job at Utah State. I felt like it was in my bailiwick of responsibility. It wasn’t like I was speaking out on technical issues of forestry or range or wildlife. That job description meant we were supposed to comment on the public policy aspects of land management.
. . . I also felt it important to acknowledge that these federal employees were graduates of our University applying the management skills we taught them. They were not jack-booted thugs running wild on the range. They were professionals using and applying the principles and techniques we taught them. Entering into the public debate about their performance seemed like the responsible thing to do. Remaining silent was condoning the dishonest criticisms being heaped on them by the sagebrush rebels. I thought the University had that kind of responsibility to our alumni, but nobody else at the University took on that obligation.
. . . I watched my university colleagues wax eloquently in a faculty meeting about how important it was to do independent research, practice academic freedom, and have no one interfere with what they say in the classroom. Then turn around the next day and criticize me for speaking in front of five hundred environmentalists on something as politically volatile as the sagebrush rebellion. I could talk to twenty-five scientists in some obscure meeting where there was no press coverage and say anything I wanted. That would be fine. Saying the same things in public was a different matter. It’s context.
. . . A lot of my academic colleagues were really technical advocates for their discipline and the traditional use of resources - maximum sustained yield in forestry, the idea that we should improve the productivity of range lands to grow more cows - that sort of thing. These scientists had a narrow view of themselves as neutral professionals, but really, they were advocates for logging, livestock grazing, and so on. They simply didn’t look to broader values like ecological consequences.