Road to the Outhouse

The demonstrators sang “The Star Spangled Banner” and recited the “Pledge of Allegiance.” Then, chanting “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!,” they hauled away a four-ton boulder that they had named “the Liberty Rock” and with which the Forest Service had blocked the road. Waved off by the Justice Dept., the Forest Service again declined to enforce the law or even to replace the boulder, and at this writing ATVs are crossing the river and trashing trout habitat. On July 25 Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Selena J. Werdon wrote Bob Vaught, the new supervisor of the Humboldt-Toiyabe Forest, as follows: “The [Fish and Wildlife] Service considers the cumulative impacts from vehicles in the South Canyon Road area to be directly linked to the road reopening by the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade. However, the US Forest Service shares responsibility for these impacts by allowing vehicle access to continue to the point where additional resource damage is occurring.”

The only environmental groups on hand to witness the Shovel Brigade’s illegal road opening were Nevada TU—including its unflinching director, Matt Holford, who lives just outside the town of Elko, in Spring Creek—and the plucky Great Old Broads for Wilderness, who later marched around with brooms, staging a symbolic cleanup of the mess. The Broads are more or less tolerated; TU isn’t.

“Trout Unlimited was the chief proponent of listing the bull trout as threatened,” complains John Carpenter. “Because of this listing, the Nevada Dept. of Wildlife and Idaho Dept. of Fish and Game will no longer stock rainbow trout in the Jarbidge. NDOW has always stocked from 3,000 to 4,000 rainbows in the Jarbidge. Fishermen are prohibited from catching a bull trout [not true] and if there are no rainbows to catch, why would you go to Jarbidge to fish? Trout Unlimited should change their name to ‘Trout Eliminated.’”

Holford, the guy who got the Forest Service to close the outhouse road, describes the most recent demonstration as “a convention of idiots.” Although he has lived in Spring Creek for 11 years, working as a deputy for the Nye County, Nevada sheriff’s department and as a mechanic and heavy-equipment operator in a gold mine 70 miles to the northwest, the wise-users call him a “blue-blood from back East.” The county has had Holford investigated for “racketeering”—that is, colluding with the Forest Service to sabotage the local economy. Recently, he was obliged to change his phone number because of the threatening calls. His son and daughter have been harassed at school. Holford and other volunteers, including biologists from the state, Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, used to take the sixth graders to six sites in Lamoille Canyon, teaching them about nature—stream entomology, that sort of thing. “It was a really fun day for the kids,” he recalls. “But the crazies pushed the county school board and said, ‘We want teachers teaching our kids, not these biologists.’ So the program was canceled. The mining companies can come in and teach the kids about mining methods, but we can’t teach ecology.”

The important story in Elko County is not the bizarre antics of its angry, paranoid, disconnected residents nor even the participation in those antics by wise-use wackos, aging sagebrush rebels and other assorted misfits from around the nation. It is the response of the federal government. When fed bashers flout US law in Nevada, the US Dept. of Justice is apt to have some other pressing engagement. Nevada’s US Attorney, Kathryn Landreth, seems to believe that the best approach to law enforcement is to sit down and talk things over with the criminal. Hiding behind Justice’s skirts has been Jack Blackwell, Regional Forester of the Intermountain Region of the US Forest Service.

Gloria Flora, who served as supervisor of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest from July 1998 to January 2000, allows that she has major problems with this kind of approach. “There are some things that just aren’t negotiable,” she told me. “The viability of bull trout in the Jarbidge River is not negotiable. The science says the road should not be rebuilt. What are we supposed to do? Sit down, have a chat, and change our minds about the facts?” Flor—who resigned because fed-bashing had become a “state sport” and because Justice kept hanging her people out to dry—had asked the Forest Service’s chief law enforcement agent for Utah and Nevada, Wayne Smith, to give her a list of all the times Justice had failed to prosecute Forest Service cases.

Smit —a decent, competent man who worked hard at his job—complied. In an internal memo to Flora, he revealed that in the previous eight years the US Attorney’s office had declined to prosecute dozens of cases referred by the Forest Service, including at least 21 felonies and 52 misdemeanors, ranging from criminal conspiracy to assault to illegal livestock grazing. “This lack of support places federal law enforcement officers and agents at risk as they enforce the same regulations in the field,” he had written in the memo. Flora showed the document to several of her superiors who needed to see it; then someone leaked it to the press. “It went up and out,” she says.

Smith, who said he couldn’t talk to me because of ongoing investigations, took the hit for the leak and was shoved into a desk job in Milwaukee. “Basically, his career is over,” says a co-worker.

Flora, on the other hand, gave up her job voluntarily, thereby surprising and disappointing a lot of environmentalists, including me. She had never shown her back to anyone. In fact, she’d spent her career standing up to powerful special interests who threatened the public’s natural resources. As supervisor of the Lewis and Clark National Forest, in Montana, she had displayed enormous courage by blocking oil and gas drilling along a wide swath of the Rocky Mountain Front. The American Fisheries Society had honored her for championing native fishes. Her fellow line officers believed that she was being groomed to be the first woman chief of the Forest Service.

It wasn’t long, however, until Flora reassured her supporters by demonstrating that she had sacrificed her job in order to high-profile fed-bashing along with the wimpiness of the Justice Dept. and her own regional office. No sooner had she cleaned out her desk than she started firing off opinion pieces, called in the media, and set out on a butt-kicking speaking tour. Maybe her strategy is working. The Justice Dept. has just filed a complaint—albeit a civil one—against Elko County, seeking unspecified monetary damages in the aborted road repair efforts of 1998, penalties for Clean Water Act violations, and an injunction against further Endangered Species Act violations.