Criticism
Academics Ralph Maughan and Douglas Nilsona write that wise use is a "desperate effort to defend the hegemony of the cultural and economic values of the agricultural and extractive industries of the rural West", and have "argued that the Wise Use agenda stemmed from an ideology that combined laissez-faire capitalism with cultural characteristics of an imagined Old West"
Some critics of the wise use movement claim that the strong rhetoric used has deepened divisions between opposing interest groups, and has indirectly increased violence and threats of violence against environmental groups and public employees. "Many observers noted that Wise Use activity in some areas overlapped heavily with the 1990s formation and growth of militias, self-styled volunteer paramilitary organizations presciently committed to their own version of homeland security."
Environmental historian Richard White has criticized Wise Use for upholding the rights of large landowners at the expense of working rural people in his essay, "'Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?': Work and Nature."
Broadcast journalist Stephenie Hendricks claimed in her book Divine Destruction that wise use is in part "being driven by biblical fundamentalists who believe exhausting natural resources will hasten the Second Coming of Jesus Christ."
Read more about this topic: Wise Use
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“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)