Wise Use - History

History

The term "wise use" was coined in 1910 by U.S. Forest Service leader and political Progressive Gifford Pinchot to describe his concept of sustainable harvest of natural resources.

Today's wise use coalition has appropriated a nineteenth-century term. According to historian Douglas McCleery, the idea of "conservation as wise use" of natural resources began with conservation leader Gifford Pinchot in the late nineteenth century. The original "wise use" movement was a product of the Progressive Era, and included the concept of multiple use—public land can be used simultaneously for recreation, for timber, for mining, and for wildlife habitat. The multiple-use and wise use concepts advocated by Pinchot reflected the view that nature's resources should be scientifically managed so as "to protect the basic productivity of the land and its ability to serve future generations."

The modern use of the term "wise use" to refer to opposition to the environmental movement dates to the publication of Ron Arnold's book Wise Use Agenda in 1989. The wise use movement has it roots in both the earlier "Sagebrush Rebellion" in the western United States during the late 1970s and to the earlier opposition to the formation of the national forests.

However, unlike the Sagebrush Rebellion, which consisted largely of the formation of industry public relations groups by resource extraction industries and corporations such as Coors and Co, wise use included grass-roots groups. Ron Arnold argued that the inclusion of citizen groups would make the movement more effective In 1979 in Logging Management magazine Arnold wrote: “Citizen activist groups, allied to the forest industry, are vital to our future survival. They can speak for us in the public interest where we ourselves cannot. They are not limited by liability, contract law or ethical codes... industry must come to support citizen activist groups, providing funds, materials, transportation, and most of all, hard facts.”

McCarthy wrote:

The Wise Use movement is a broad coalition of over a thousand national, state, and local groups. Its existence by this name dates from a 1988 ‘Multiple-Use Strategy Conference’ attended by nearly 200 organizations, mainly Western-based, including natural resource industry corporations and trade associations, law firms specializing in combating environmental regulations, and recreational groups. The conference produced a legislative agenda intended to ‘destroy environmentalism’ and promote the ‘wise use’ of natural resources - an intentionally ambiguous phrase strategically appropriated from the early conservation movement.