Tiny New Mexico Community
Ground Zero In War On West

By David Bowser

"In the management of each reserve, local questions will be decided upon local grounds. Sudden changes in industrial conditions will be avoided by gradual changes after due notice." — Gifford Pinchot, First chief of the U.S. Forest Service, USDA Use Book, 1906 edition.

GLENWOOD, N.M. — There is a war waging in the West, and Glenwood, N.M., is one of the battlegrounds.

As with most wars, the reasons behind it are complex and often convoluted by historical precedents and hidden agendas. Radical environmentalists say it is over ecosystems that have been damaged by livestock grazing, logging and mining. Local governments say it is the usurpation of power by the federal government. Ranchers say it is a matter of the sovereignty of the nation as opposed to the implementation of rules created by non-governmental organizations, foreign and unelected groups that are the antithesis of democracy.

The epic tableaus aside, the issue in Glenwood is simple. Like many rural communities, Glenwood is fighting for its life.

The battle rages at several levels.

The county school district superintendent tells Wendy Peralta that a New Mexico state law was passed in the 1990s that forbids a stockyard within the immediate vicinity of a public water source.

The Glenwood school was built in 1952 on U.S. Forest Service land. When it needed water, the Forest Service drilled a well on a neighboring piece of private property. In those less contentious days, the agreement to provide water to the school by the landowner from a well drilled by the Forest Service was reached on a handshake.

When the Peraltas bought the land with the well, they continued to provide water for the school.

But in the 1980s, a roping arena was built near the well. The arena includes pens for roping steers.

Now the school is in danger of being closed. The school, which is the soul of any town, is in danger of going out of existence.

"It's a battle to keep the school open every year," Wendy Peralta says. "We have anywhere from 15 to 24 children."

A majority of the children in the school are children of government employees, she says, but the school is supported by property taxes.

"When they did away with timber and mining and cattle, teachers lost jobs," she says. "State, federal and county employees lost jobs. Now, they're saying tourism will save us. It's not going to save us."

There is the Catwalk National Park and a state fish hatchery. Beyond that is the Gila National Forest and Gila Wilderness.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service two years ago began re-introducing Mexican gray wolves across the state line a few miles to the west. The gray wolf was exterminated from this area in the early 20th century. In their initial study of the program, the FWS projected that the re-introduction of the wolves would increase tourism to the region. Now they are proposing a buffer zone and wanting to release the wolves in an area where there are no people and no roads.

"They want to introduce the wolves to these areas where people are going to want to hike and hunt and then have the buffer zone; it's not going to be accessible," Peralta says.

At the economic level, decisions made almost 2000 miles away are having a direct impact on this community of about 350 residents.

About one third of the land in New Mexico is owned by the federal government. Two-thirds are owned privately or by the State of New Mexico.

Wendy Peralta's father was Buddy Allred, a Catron County commissioner who helped found the Coalition of Counties.

"When the Forest Service started cutting back the timber industry, the cattle numbers and mining on public land, all these rural counties between Arizona and New Mexico, it affected our livelihood," Peralta says.

The counties depended upon the Forest Service road funds and the schools depended upon the stumpage fees.

As much as the decrease in funding, Howard Hutchinson with the Coalition of Counties says local businesses have been destablized because of rapidly changing governmental policies.

"When you create uncertainties, the businesses that operate here know their revenues come in this way now," Hutchinson says. "Where's this going to come from with this change? If, as the government says and the environmentalists say, we're going to tourism, where is the tourism to replace these other dollars from production activities, mining, livestock, and when is it going to occur?"

That has been one of the key factors in the political, sociological and economic problems that Catron County has faced.

The federal laws dating back to the early 1900s state that any changes wrought by the government would be gradual so as to not disrupt the local economies.

The Organic Act was passed in 1905. Eleven years later, Congress passed the 25 Percent Fund Act, under which 25 percent of the revenues from the national forests would be returned to the states. In 1913, Congress directed that another 10 percent of national forest revenues be spent on road construction and local road maintenance.

In 1976, Congress amended the 25 Percent Fund Act to provide for the disbursement to state and local governments funds that would be calculated from gross revenues rather than stumpage fees. That included recreation fees, special use fees, all of the fees taken in by the Forest Service.

Then there is the Multi-use and Sustained Yield Act. Hutchinson says it states that the concept of the National Forest is to manage the land for multiple uses: recreation, grazing, logging and mining, and the forest lands are to be managed for a sustainable yield.

Hutchinson says these goals are being changed, and changed without the permission of Congress.

"The trend is to take international agreements and put them into effect in the United States," Hutchinson says. "The normal avenue for doing this is to go through Congress. The Senate ratifies the treaty and that treaty becomes the law of the land and Congress enacts various amendments to these various land management acts. That would be the constitutional method of accomplishing these, but we're doing it backwards. We're implementing regulations. We're implementing international agreements without any of the changes in statute by Congress or ratification of the treaties by the Senate."

There is a proposal out for comment that redefines the mission of the Forest Service, Hutchinson says.

"What is contained in it and what they state in it is that they are using the Montreal Protocol," he says. "The Montreal Protocol came out of the Rio Accords, which is called Agenda 21."

Agenda 21 refers to the 21st century.

"It lays out how the nations of the world are going to manage their forests," Hutchinson says, "and also, they've changed the mission of the Forest Service, which is a job for Congress. The Constitution says that Congress is given the power to manage the federal lands, not the executive branch."

The new direction for the Forest Service, Hutchinson says, is "ecological sustainability."

"There's no mandate from Congress to manage the forest lands or BLM lands for ecological sustainability," Hutchinson says. "The definitions they are adopting into regulation are definitions that were created by these international organizations such as the IUCN, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. That's where these came from."

The IUCN is an organization that includes the Nature Conservancy, the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club and a multitude of other non-governmental organizations, or NGOs as they are known in politics.

"The whole concept came out of Prince Philip," Hutchinson says. "He established this concept of the IUCN."

Is it Britain's revenge on the Colonies?

"If you look at it from that standpoint," Hutchinson says, "they're taking back everything we won in our revolution. They're doing it in a very slick manner."

Hutchinson says the revolution has already occurred. What is happening now is counter-revolutionary.

"We're trying to win back what we've already lost in this revolution that has already taken place," Hutchinson says. "It's a revolution that most American people don't even know happened."

In the shadows of what was happening in the early 1990s, Hutchinson says, the federal government denied any hidden agenda.

"Now, they're finally coming out and admitting it openly," he says. "I'm not saying this. They're saying this."

The Forest Service is mandated to develop rules to implement the acts that Congress passes, Hutchinson says, but the rules sometimes extend beyond the agency's authorization.

"When you look at the National Forest Management Act and the mandates that are in there and then you try to find the authorization in laws passed by Congress for these actions, they don't exist," Hutchinson says. "Yet whenever you go to Agenda 21, or some of these other international documents, you find the Forest Service's new mission that they're adopting, which is sustainability."

The definition of "sustainability" in those documents is to provide for present generations while securing the resources for future generations.

"What are we securing for future generations?" Hutchinson questions. "We're locking everything up now and everything is going to be secured for future generations."

The Coalition of Counties was formed in January 1990, to bring attention to the problems in this region and try to get the attention of Washington. While Catron County has only about 1200 registered voters (it is the largest county in New Mexico but the least populated) the hope was that by joining with other counties in the state and in Arizona, they would be able to attract the attention of lawmakers in the nation's capitol.

Today, the coalition consists of 11 of New Mexico's 33 counties and six of Arizona's 15 counties.

While many of the counties have public lands, some of the counties in the coalition are dominated by private lands.

"At first, the private land counties said those are federal lands problems," Hutchinson says. "Then they began to realize when they started doing these endangered species, the federal jurisdiction comes in on private land as much as it does if you're running your cattle or mining operation or oil and gas on federal land. It's the same on private as federal land."

When the group was first formed, Hutchinson says they did studies to see where the counties' money came from.

"At that point, the livestock industry was the number one producer of economic activity and revenue for the county," Hutchinson says. "Timber was second."

Hunting and recreation and tourism were next, followed by mining.

"But at one time mining was the number one industry," Hutchinson says. "That was destroyed by government action during World War II. Non-strategic mining was shut down."

Ten years ago, the timber industry was shut down. Since then, Hutchinson figures the local schools have lost $20 million in revenues.

"Another $20 million would have gone to road construction," he says.

That means that $40 million is missing out of the local revenue stream over that 10-year period.

Until recently, the county operated in the black, Peralta says. They had no debt.

The decrease in funding was magnified by the multiplier effect. Economic theory holds that a dollar put into an economy will turn over a number of times as it passes from consumer to business to payrolls. As one dollar is added or subtracted from a local economy, it has the impact of several dollars.

"You start taking the multipliers," Hutchinson says, "What does road construction do? What is the effect of having a couple more teachers in the schools or a couple more classrooms or more science equipment? That's when you start looking at the sociological impacts. What does that do for the children as far as their education potential?"

West of the Rio Grande, most of New Mexico is managed by the federal government.

The rules adopted at the beginning of the 20th century were as controversial then as many of the proposed changes to public lands regulations are now.

"The original rules that they wrote on these lands prohibited entry," Hutchinson says. "You could not cross that line and set foot into those lands."

Westerners started setting them afire.

"Congress woke up and said, 'Hey, this is ridiculous,'" Hutchinson says.

The first sagebrush rebellion was pretty literal, he says.

Despite clouds over the battlefield, Hutchinson is optimistic.

"I see it going to where more people are learning," he says. "As more people learn, I think we'll see a return to more local control. I'm optimistic about it."

The federal government does not have the personnel or the money or the capacity to do the management, Hutchinson insists.

"It's not possible," he says. "The Soviets proved that. It takes local people living in the area. This idea of having half of the North American continent in wilderness and another 25 percent in buffer zones around that, it's being pushed and it's certainly being implemented, but I think as people learn what's really going on, the situation will change."