Environment Played Big Role
In ‘96 Election, Or Did It?

WASHINGTON — Environmental activists — the "green" lobby — had predicted for months that their pet causes would play a decisive role in this year’s elections.

Along with big labor bosses, the "greens" pumped scores of millions of dollars into House and Senate races across the country in an effort to replace Republican lawmakers with liberal Democrats. They also promoted a bewildering array of state-level initiatives ranging from anti-hunting measures to one that would force Oregon ranchers to fence livestock away from thousands of miles of creeks and streams.

To hear them tell it, their efforts were wildly successful. More sober analysis, however, suggests the eco-activists fared little better than Big Labor, which lost 60 or more of the 71 wars it declared on conservative freshmen House members.

In the "win" column for the "greens," Washington State voters banned the use of bait and hounds to hunt bears or cougars, and Oregonians rebuffed an effort to rescind a similar measure that they approved two years ago. Colorado outlawed leg-hold traps, and Alaska banned the pursuit of wolves by airplane.

Idaho voters soundly rejected a proposed ban on baiting and hounding, Alabama passed a "sportsman’s bill of rights" by 85 percent, and Michigan voted by more than two to one to keep wildlife management within the state’s game and fish department and out of the hands of radical meddlers, but those losses didn't keep Wayne Pacelle from celebrating.

"We're calling this a major, major victory," said Pacelle, spokesman for the Humane Society of the United States, a prime promoter of hunting and trapping bans.

The activists could cite other successes, but their lack of practical significance shows how far the radical environmental movement has had to reach to proclaim victory. Case in point: the Green Party won a three-person majority on the city council of Arcata, a small Northern California coastal town; the race meant nothing to anyone outside Arcata’s city limits, but as "the nation's first ... council dominated by Greens," the "news" was trumpeted nationwide.

The Sierra Club poured more funds and effort into this election season than ever before, said Bill Arthur, the group's Northwest regional director. In Washington State alone, 500 volunteers handed out thousands of "voter guides" and staffed phone banks.

Whether such efforts had an effect is open to debate. Many Democrats supported by the environmentalists did well. The party picked up three U.S. House seats in Washington state, two in California, and one in Oregon.

On the other hand, Republicans reclaimed Montana's sole House seat, and Utah returned to a unanimous GOP voice in its three House seats. One of the Utah seats had previously belonged to Democrat Bill Orton, but his constituents threw him out after President Clinton locked away 1.7 million acres of the district’s land as a "national monument" in a royal decree calculated to buy "green" votes elsewhere.

Arthur claimed Sierra’s aggressive campaigning heightened public awareness of environmental issues and helped moderate the "extreme" views of candidates the group opposed.

"I think the environment came out the winner in 1996, period, because everybody ran as an environmentalist," Arthur said.

Not everyone agreed with that assessment.

"The environment did not play a big role in this election," said Cathy Jewell, spokeswoman for People For The West, which supports the rights of property owners and resource-users including ranchers, miners and loggers.

"The greens spent millions of dollars and in the end got nothing," Jewell said. "For every seat they claim to have won in Congress, they lost one somewhere else."

Noting that Congress still has a Republican majority, she said Clinton was re-elected "not because he was green but because he moved to the conservative side of things."

Among other ballot initiatives that went against environmental activists:

— Mining interests in Montana won their fight against tougher wastewater treatment standards.

— Idaho voters refused to void Gov. Phil Batt's agreement with the federal government allowing nuclear waste to be stored in Idaho.

— A Florida "rice tax" that would have shifted the cost of cleaning up the Everglades to farmers was literally "swamped."

— and Oregonians handily defeated the infamous stream-fencing initiative known as Measure 38. The initiative went down by an almost two-to-one margin only days after its promoters insisted they had an easy victory in the bag.

The Oregon activists’ boast may have been correct at the time it was made; the stream-fencing measure could eventually stand as an example of how decisively the public can turn against a movement when they realize they’ve been hoodwinked.

Promoters of Measure 38 touted it as necessary to save streams from trampling and pollution by livestock, and that posture appeared to resonate well with voters in a state that has long been on the cutting edge of eco-activism.

Opponents fought an uphill battle in their efforts to explain that the measure was a smokescreen purporting to "correct" a natural condition, and that its backers were radical livestock opponents whose real target was ranching itself.

In the campaign’s final days, however, opponents of the measure received unexpected assistance from an entirely unlikely source — one of the fencing initiative’s own staunchest backers.

Oregon physician Dr. Patrick Shipsey, one of the two "chief petitioners" who instigated Measure 38, had already insulted his backers’ intelligence by logging his property and building a home smack-dab over a stream-side spring. Then, less than two weeks before the vote, one of his loggers found almost a dozen head of a neighbor’s cattle shot dead on Shipsey’s land.

His true motives revealed, the "good doctor" was arrested, his opponents were vindicated, and his anti-livestock scheme went down to flaming defeat.