[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 62 (Tuesday, May 8, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H2012-H2019]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 ENVIRONMENTALIST ORGANIZATIONS EXPOSED

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Flake). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Hansen) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. HANSEN. Mr. Speaker, many years ago when I was a student at the 
University of Utah, I recall working at different jobs after class at 
night and weekends in order to make ends meet and pay my tuition. Money 
was tight. I was newly married. I had a wife and child to support, but 
I still remember sending $25 to the Sierra Club in response to their 
advertisements because I felt strongly about protecting our air and 
water and preserving our forests. But I was moved to donate to that 
particular organization by what they had to say, and during the 1960s 
and 1970s, I believed that our Nation urgently needed a wake-up call to 
action to stop the dumping of raw sewage and industrial waste into the 
Nation's waterways, and to find ways to try to save endangered species 
like the bald eagle and the grizzly bear.
  I saw some of those problems firsthand, and I felt strongly about 
that, and contrary to what groups are saying, I still do. I believe 
some advocacy groups like the Sierra Club played a constructive and 
valuable part in helping to focus public attention on these problems.
  In those days I recall the Sierra Club actually funding some 
restoration projects which were laudable. They were doing more than 
just sounding

[[Page H2013]]

the alarm. They were out on the ground, physically doing something 
constructive by themselves, cleaning up a lake or making a trail, for 
example, in partnership with local or State organizations.
  I felt good about supporting that because I had always been taught 
that it was not sufficient to just point out faults or problems of 
others; what we need to do is put our money where our mouth is and 
pitch in and do something ourselves. It is ironic, given what some 
vocal environmentalist groups today have to say about me, that as a 
member of the Utah legislature and Speaker of the Utah House that I was 
labeled by some of my colleagues as being too green because I often 
sponsored or supported environmental legislation.
  What is more ironic is that my personal philosophy for protecting the 
environment has not changed one iota. I still believe in the principles 
of conservation and environmental protection, like Teddy Roosevelt, our 
first conservation President. I believe man has been given the 
responsibility to be wise stewards of our natural resources, that we 
can find environmentally responsible ways to obtain the energy and raw 
materials that we need as a Nation and as families and as individuals 
to sustain life; and that as human beings we need to not apologize for 
having been born, and that we are part of the Earth's ecosystem.
  Unfortunately, it has been the environmental movement which has 
changed. As too often the case, what begins as a good idea and needed 
catalyst has in many respects been corrupted by money and by power.
  I have witnessed over the years how environmental groups have changed 
from actually doing constructive work into self-interest business 
organizations whose main goals seems to be marketing, self-perpetuating 
power and growth, and to achieve those ends by any means. They become 
masters at slashing and burning the character and reputation of those 
elected officials or reporters who dare to challenge them or who dare 
to take different points of view on specific environmental issues.
  Mr. Speaker, I have witnessed over the years how increasingly 
strident and nasty many of them become in our civil discourse, and how 
increasingly radical many of their proposals have become.
  Finally, what I have noticed as well is that these groups by and 
large are now all about big business, and that is their bottom line. 
When looking at the Sierra Club, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, 
the Natural Resources Defense Council, the League of Conservation 
Voters, or several other environmental groups, what begins as a small, 
bare-bones organization with issues motivating people, soon blossoms 
into larger and larger organizations which must rent offices, hire 
workers and meet their payroll.
  These are not grassroot organizations operating out of some guy's 
basement we are talking about. They are slick, well-organized 
companies, employing rafts of accountants, marketers, and attorneys. 
There is none better. In order to feed that beast or make the payroll, 
they have to raise money. How do they do this? They do it very well. 
They are masters at it. If they were public corporations listed with 
the stock exchange, they would be listed by analysts in the ``buy'' 
category. They pour massive amounts of tax-exempt and tax-deductible 
contributions into emotion-based media and marketing. They are spending 
millions on direct marketing campaigns in order to generate more and 
more contributors and donor lists. They hire impressionable young 
college students, normally at a minimum wage, to go door to door to 
sign up new members, and hire still others to attend public hearings to 
applaud or to boo as directed, in a cynical, purchased attempt to 
influence public opinion.
  What is truly shocking is the amount of money these groups are 
raising and spending, and they are beginning to hit the big-time 
contributions, millions of dollars at a time, disappointingly, from 
such previously venerable entities as the Pew Charitable Trust. This is 
how they can pay for millions of dollars in slick brochures, calendars, 
videos, radio and television advertisements, all designed to shock and 
stimulate individuals to reach into their pocketbooks.
  Like any other pitchmen hawking their wares, they use sensational 
pictures and distortion of facts in order to grab attention, as some 
unscrupulous marketers are prone to do. They take advantage of many 
hard-working Americans who are too busy earning a living and paying 
taxes and raising their families, who do not have the time to 
investigate the claims themselves. These groups take advantage of 
people's natural goodwill and desire to protect green spaces and clean 
water by asserting that their tax-deductible $10, $20, $50, or $100 
donated to them, for example, will keep those blankety-blank, nasty 
Republicans or other Congresspersons from raping and pillaging the 
environment.

                              {time}  2100

  As it was for me as a young college student to be influenced by their 
solicitation, so it remains today with many of us. Only there is so 
much more media influence by those groups than in the 1960s. They have 
a very loud and a very strident voice.
  When I hear the completely overblown rhetoric they put out about many 
of my colleagues who are working hard, honestly motivated by wanting to 
do the right thing by the environment and by finding a balanced 
approach, it can be very disheartening. Some days it is tempting to ask 
why do we keep trying?
  Despite years of trying to reach out to these groups, to enter into a 
constructive dialogue to come up with legislative solutions to vexing 
environmental problems, all I have received is the hammer to the head. 
At least to this point they have not shown an interest in doing what 
Isaiah counseled in the Old Testament, ``Come now, let us reason 
together.'' I am still waiting for the phrase to be uttered, ``Mr. 
Chairman, we would like to work with you on that proposal.'' I have 
been here 21 years and still have not heard it. Indeed, all we get is 
the fire hose approach of heated and hostile rhetoric.
  I still believe that a majority of Americans when presented with all 
the facts will support the right environmental policies. They will 
recognize the need to achieve balance between obtaining resources and 
preservation. The key becomes getting all the facts out on the table. 
At the present time those of us who are often cast by these groups as 
being on the wrong side of their issues are outgunned in terms of money 
and media access. With their vast sums of tax-exempt money pouring in, 
they buy huge media influence, which they do not call lobbying, but 
rather public education. This is an abuse of our tax laws and lobbying 
disclosure statutes.
  These groups have also shown a propensity to try to intimidate 
Members of Congress mainly from urban, eastern districts into 
supporting radical proposals affecting many large western States like 
Utah, Idaho and Colorado. These groups advocate locking up huge areas 
into formal wilderness designations even though most people do not 
understand what those designations mean, or draining Lake Powell. After 
all, most of the Members from eastern States have not even been to 
those areas in the West that the legislation would affect, so maybe it 
is just a throwaway vote for them. However, if they do not sign as a 
cosponsor to their radical legislation such as H.R. 1613, locking up 
nearly 10 million acres of Utah lands, these groups will openly attack 
them in their States and districts by vocally and visibly labeling them 
an enemy to the environment. Nothing could be further from the truth.
  In my opinion, it is shameful that tactics such as these are 
sometimes employed by these organizations. Those tactics ought not to 
be rewarded by Members, and I urge Members who feel they are threatened 
politically to show these men and women to the door.
  Raising all this money would be okay if the money was being used 
mostly to go toward preservation and conservation projects. I would 
applaud it. However, what we are seeing is the abuse of the IRS 
guidelines by many of these groups who disguise their extensive 
lobbying activity and very often very partisan lobbying activities 
under the guise of public education. If the true costs of lobbying were 
to be ascertained, I believe that some of these groups would be in 
jeopardy of

[[Page H2014]]

losing their 501(c)3 tax-exempt charitable status, as well they should 
if they are violating the law.
  That is something, Mr. Speaker, that Congress ought not to be shy 
about looking into. While some on the Hill and elsewhere seem fixated 
on campaign finance reform aimed at cleaning up perceived corruption of 
the American political process by money, I wonder who is actually 
watching these self-appointed and self-ordained watchdogs and special 
interest groups who are shoveling in money by the truckload. Where is 
their accountability? Where are the news cameras following them as they 
drive to the bank to make these big deposits? While liberals and 
extreme environmentalists lambast their contrived bogeyman big oil and 
those nasty extractive industries, I can tell you that big oil such as 
it exists cannot hold a candlestick to the money and influence these 
environmental groups assert these days in this city of Washington, DC.
  How long will they get away with these distortions and character 
assassinations unchallenged and unchecked? Is their abuse of our 
Nation's tax laws and lobbying disclosure requirements not worthy of 
examination?
  This abuse is the untold story that too many people are afraid to 
explore, and it is something that Congress ought to look into. This is 
the purpose for me and my colleagues coming to the floor tonight to 
raise awareness of how many of these groups are exploiting the public 
for their own selfish reasons.
  I have often wondered where the national press has been on looking 
critically upon these groups. Are they too cowered by political 
correctness or afraid of offending their liberal constituencies, or are 
they card-carrying members of these groups themselves? How long will 
the press releases and bald-faced assertions issued hourly by these 
groups remain unchallenged by the media?

  While Members of Congress are scrutinized up one side and down the 
other for every word we utter and every vote we take, these groups are 
somehow coated with Teflon. It must always be accepted by the media as 
unrebuttable truth. Must they always be given the last word?
  At least one reporter has recently had the nerve and the courage and 
professionalism to explore and investigate these groups, their fund-
raising and their tactics. I commend the members to a five-part series 
of articles which appeared recently in the Sacramento Bee newspaper by 
Mr. Tom Knudson, and all these are posted on the Committee on Resources 
Web site. Mr. Knudson has come under fire in the last few days by the 
very groups he scrutinized by having published his series, which 
unfortunately is to be expected these days.
  I am afraid that the truth must hit a little close to home. 
Therefore, the natural self-preservation response has been to simply 
attack the reporter personally and professionally. Having been a 
chairman for a long time of a subcommittee and chairman of another 
committee, I am always amazed how when you cannot beat them with issues 
and fact, you always go to personal assassination. I found Mr. 
Knudsen's series to be balanced and confirms many of the concerns that 
I have had myself for some time. I wish that more reporters would 
follow his lead and look to what he has uncovered.
  Now, I would like to point out on this chart that I have here, 
executive salaries. According to the information compiled by Mr. 
Knudson, a good share of the money raised by these groups goes to pay 
salaries for their top officials. They are easily within the top 1 
percent of all wage earners in the country. For example, this chart 
shows that the executive directors of the Nation's top environmental 
organizations are paid very well.
  The salary of the National Wildlife Federation top executive, Mr. 
Mark Van Putten, was nearly a quarter of a million dollars last year. 
This represents a 17 percent raise over his salary the year before. 
Think about that the next time you contemplate your 3 percent cost of 
living adjustment.
  If you were among those who sent in a $25 contribution to this group, 
do you realize it took over 10,000 of you contributing in order just to 
pay his salary?
  The salary of the World Wildlife Fund president, Kathryn Fuller, was 
$241,000. The salary of the National Audubon Society president, John 
Flicker, was $240,000. The salary of the Natural Resources Defense 
Council director, John Adams, was $239,000. The salary of the 
Wilderness Society president was $204,000. The salary of the Defenders 
of Wildlife president and CEO was $201,000. Earth Justice Legal Defense 
Fund president, Buck Parker, was $157,000. And the Sierra Club's Carl 
Pope's salary was $138,000 in 1998 and listed as $199,577 in 1999, 
nearly a 50 percent raise. The list goes on.
  Now, folks, think about it. How many of those $25 contributions does 
it take you as you did like I did as a young college student, send a 
few bucks there because you believe in what they are doing just to pay 
these salaries? Where are these missionary zealots who had a great idea 
back in the 1960s and thought we were going too far? Where are these 
people that were in there doing the thing because it had the burning in 
their heart to do it, not because it was a big business? Unfortunately, 
you can see new environmentalism has grown into a big growth industry.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Idaho.
  Mr. SIMPSON. I thank the chairman of the committee for yielding the 
time and for setting aside this hour to talk a little bit about what is 
happening in the environmental community. As the gentleman from Utah 
has suggested, I think all of us are environmentalists. In fact as he 
once said that in college he gave his money and dues to the Sierra 
Club, I believe it was, I gave money to the Idaho Conservation League 
because I believed in what they were doing and in fact in many things 
that they are still doing, I think they are doing a good job but like 
most environmental groups or groups that call themselves environmental 
groups, they have stepped over the edge. They have gone beyond simple 
environmental issues and trying to save our environment.
  Before I get into that for just a minute, I want to talk for a second 
about another environmental issue that was just talked about previously 
by the minority party here in their hour that they reserved and that 
was the energy policy which deals with the environment as much as these 
issues that we will be talking about here today. I was glad to hear 
that the Members suggested that we need a bipartisan effort in energy, 
a solution to the energy problem that we have in this country.

  They were, it seemed, very critical of the Bush administration and 
some of the stances that he takes, but I will tell you that when the 
report comes out and in our conversations with Vice President Cheney, 
conservation will be a part of the report, renewable, sun and wind 
power will be a part of the report, new sources of energy, discovering 
new sources of oil and coal and natural gas will be a part of the 
report, nuclear energy will be a part of the report. New technologies 
such as fuel cells will be a part of the report. They suggested 
geothermal power. Geothermal is a power that is used in some areas.
  But if we look at some of the things that the Democratic Party has 
done just recently on TV, I saw the chairman of the Democratic National 
Committee on TV slamming Bush for his energy policy and holding up a 
picture of Yellowstone National Park with an oil well over it and said, 
this is Bush's policy. Then next was one of the Grand Canyon with an 
oil derrick over the top of it saying this is what Bush wanted, 
drilling in our national parks. Nobody has suggested drilling in 
Yellowstone. Nobody has suggested drilling in any of our national 
parks. They have said that we ought to look in our national monuments 
which we do drilling in now and look at the reserves we have there such 
as the ANWR and other places. And then the DNC put on a commercial 
which suggested a young lady holding up a glass of water and saying, 
``Mommy, could I have more arsenic in my water?'' And then there was a 
child with a hamburger saying, ``Could I have more salmonella in my 
hamburger?'' It seems to me that the DNC has taken on the same 
characteristic that the extreme environmental movement has taken on 
where raising money has become more important than the truth. They will 
say anything to try to discredit this President and the policies that 
he sets forward.

[[Page H2015]]

  That is exactly what the extreme environmental movement has done. 
They have stolen the true grass-roots environmental movement. This 
series of articles that was written in the Sacramento Bee newspaper, 
and I would commend them to anyone who wants to look at how these 
groups are funded and some of the things that they are doing, I would 
like to go through some of the provisions of these articles and some of 
the things that they are doing because I think it is important for the 
American people to know where that $15 that they are contributing or 
that $25 or $100 or $10,000 that they are contributing to some of these 
groups is going and what they are going for. One of the concerns is 
that, as I said earlier, the extreme environmental movement has taken 
over the grass-roots environmental movement. It is no longer about 
saving the environment; it is about raising money. They spend an awful 
lot of their funds raising money.
  One of the letters written by the Defenders of Wildlife says:
  ``Dear Friend, I need your help to stop an impending slaughter. 
Otherwise, Yellowstone National Park, an American wildlife treasure, 
could soon become a bloody killing field. And the victims will be 
hundreds of wolves and defenseless wolf pups.''
  So begins a fund-raising letter from one of America's fastest-growing 
wildlife groups, Defenders of Wildlife.
  Using the popular North American gray wolf as the hub of an ambitious 
campaign, Defenders has assembled a financial track record that would 
impress Wall Street.
  In 1999, donations jumped 28 percent to a record $17.5 million. The 
group's net assets, a measure of financial stability, grew to $14.5 
million, another record. And according to its 1999 annual report, 
Defenders spent donors' money wisely, keeping fund-raising and 
management costs to a lean 19 percent of expenses.
  But there is another side to Defenders' dramatic growth.
  Pick up copies of its Federal tax returns and you will find that its 
five highest paid business partners are not firms that specialize in 
wildlife conservation. They are national direct mail and telemarketing 
companies.
  You will also find that in calculating its fund-raising expenses, 
Defenders borrows a trick from the business world. It dances with 
digits, finds opportunity in obfuscation. Using an accounting loophole, 
it classifies millions of dollars spent on direct mail and 
telemarketing not as fund-raising but as public education and 
environmental activism.
  Take away that loophole and Defenders' 19 percent fund-raising and 
management tab leaps above 50 percent, meaning more than half of every 
dollar donated to save wolf pups helped nourish the organization 
instead.

                              {time}  2115

  That was high enough to earn Defenders a D rating from the American 
Institute of Philanthropy, an independent, nonprofit watchdog that 
scrutinizes nearly 400 charitable groups.
  It is interesting when one looks down the list of some of the groups, 
some of the environmental groups did very well. The Nature Conservancy 
was an A minus; Environmental Defense was a B; Greenpeace was a D; 
Defenders of Wildlife was a D. That is based on the amount of money 
they actually give to the cause for which they are raising the funds; 
how much of it goes into their organization to support fund-raising.
  So many of the dollars that people are giving, because they read 
these articles in the newspaper that support protecting wolves and 
other types of things, people send in their $15 or so. Much of that 
money, over half of it in many cases, does not go to saving wolves; it 
goes to raising more money or to the organization or, as the chairman 
suggested, to the salaries of some of these individuals in these 
organizations.
  One of the other things that sort of concerns me, well it concerns me 
a lot, is the massive waste in this fund-raising. The Wilderness 
Society mailed 6.2 million membership solicitations; an average of 
16,986 pieces of mail a day. This is mail fatigue.
  The letters that come with the mailers are seldom dull. They are 
steeped in outrage. They tell of a planet in perpetual environmental 
shock, a world victimized by profit-hungry corporations, and they do so 
not with precise scientific prose but with boastful and often 
inaccurate sentences that scream and shout. Some of the examples were 
given in the Sacramento Bee. From the New York-based Rain Forest 
Alliance, ``By this time tomorrow, nearly 100 species of wildlife will 
tumble into extinction.''
  The fact is, no one knows how rapidly species are going extinct. The 
Alliance figures an extreme estimate that counts tropical beetles and 
other insects, including ones not yet known to science, in its 
definition of wildlife.
  Another example from the Wilderness Society: We will fight to stop 
reckless clear-cutting on national forests in California and the 
Pacific Northwest that threatens to destroy the last of America's 
unprotected ancient forests in as little as 20 years.
  Fact: The national forest logging has dropped dramatically in recent 
years. In California, clear-cutting on national forests dipped to 1,395 
acres in 1998, down 89 percent from 1990.
  From the Defenders of Wildlife again, ``Will you not please adopt a 
furry little pup like Hope?'' Hope is a cuddly brown wolf. Hope was 
triumphantly born in Yellowstone.
  Fact: There never was a pup named Hope. Says John Valerie, Chief of 
Research at Yellowstone National Park, ``We do not name wolves. We 
number them.''
  Since wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone in 1995, their 
numbers have increased from 14 to about 160. The program has been so 
successful that Yellowstone officials now favor removing animals from 
the Federal endangered species list.
  One of my favorites that I want to talk for just a minute about again 
comes from the Defenders of Wildlife, and I wish I had some blow-ups of 
it, but it is a poison alert. ``Wolves in Danger,'' one of the sections 
that runs in the newspaper or letter that goes out to individuals, a 
fund-raising letter. Another one that says, ``a special gift when you 
join our pack,'' and it has pictures of these cuddly wolves.
  More than 160 million environmental fund-raising pitches swirled 
through the U.S. mail last year. Some used the power of cute animals to 
attract donors. The problem is that in many cases those campaigns were 
less than honest. And this was the pitch, and this is the one that 
caught my attention, in Salmon, Idaho, which is in my district. In 
Salmon, Idaho, antiwolf extremists committed a horrible crime; they 
killed two Yellowstone wolves with lethal poison, compound 1080. 
``Please do not allow antiwolf extremists to kill our wild wolves. 
These wolf families do not deserve to die. Please, we need your help 
now.'' And then, of course, they solicit a contribution.
  The fact is, the two wolves were not Yellowstone wolves but wolves 
reintroduced by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service into central Idaho, 
against the objections of the State of Idaho to reintroduction of those 
wolves.
  Some wolves were killed illegally, but the population of wolves 
continues to increase at a pace faster than Federal wolf recovery 
officials had anticipated. The government expects to remove wolves from 
the Federal endangered species list in 3 to 4 years. In fact, in Idaho 
we have already met our commitment of 10 mating pairs. The problem is 
that they take Montana and Wyoming together and say we have to have 30 
breeding pairs within the entire region.

  Wolves are overpopulating Idaho better than anyone had anticipated, 
and they are using these instances, this group, Defenders of Wildlife, 
to raise money to try to save wolves. Unfortunately, much of the 
pleading that they do with the American public at best can be called 
dishonest.
  I, like the chairman, want to save the environment. We want to make 
sure that what we do is compatible with the species and protecting 
species. But we also think that human beings play a role in this 
environment and in our world, and that human beings ought to be 
considered in this whole equation.
  Look at what the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden) is going through 
right now, where they have taken 170,000 acres of 200,000 acres of 
irrigated land that will not have water this year because a judge has 
ruled that the sucker fish that they are trying to protect is more 
important than those people.

[[Page H2016]]

  Mr. HANSEN. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman from Idaho (Mr. 
Simpson) for his very interesting comments.
  Mr. Speaker, let me point out, we both got into the idea of how much 
money these folks bring in. I have a chart here that points out some of 
the money that is brought in. Look at the amount of money that came in 
in one year to these organizations. And then the question comes up, 
well, what do they spend it for?
  When we first got into this thing, we were arguing the idea, are 
these the people that have the fire in their bosom to go out and take 
care of the public land? Well, no, as we both discussed in the last 
while, it is not that. It is more of an idea of raising more money and 
more money and more money. And where is it spent?
  I would like to give a little example, if I could, about an 
environmental group in the State of Utah, and I would hasten to say 
that if that is what the public wants, fine. If the public wants this 
money to just go into paying lawyers, paying marketers, paying 
advertising, K Street-type of thing, Madison Avenue, fine. But I 
thought that most of us who got involved in this thing did not want 
that. I thought we wanted to restore the forests and the clean water 
and the wildlife, and do it in a way that is environmentally sound and 
at the same time to take good care of the energy.
  Let me just refer to this one group. They are called the Southern 
Utah Wilderness Society. Nice people are there, and some of them, I 
think, are a little misled, but they probably think the same thing 
about me. This group raises more than $2 million each year in donations 
from hard-working people who care about protecting our environment. The 
money is raised under the idea of protecting Utah wilderness lands. 
Send this group some money and you will help wilderness in the Colorado 
plateau, you are told.
  So they send out these beautiful calendars saying, this is what you 
will protect. However, some of it is in national parks. Only one was in 
that area, but it was a pretty calendar anyway.
  However, when you look at their tax reports, you find that not one 
dime of this money is actually spent on the environment. Not a penny 
goes to plant a tree, restore a streambed, or protect an acre of ground 
in Utah or anywhere else; not a dollar to create a habitat to take care 
of an animal.
  What this group does is, they lobby for the passage of a wilderness 
legislation. In fact, they lobby to pass virtually the same old, tired, 
worn-out legislation every year, but they keep raising the ante.
  I find it interesting that that group went with me and we have said, 
now, look, no one from Utah really wants this. They said, oh, go back 
to the time that Congressman Owens was here; he wanted it and he 
introduced it.
  In those days, what they do not realize is Congressman Owens was then 
a member of the majority party, which was then the Democratic Party. 
The President was a Democrat. The House and the Senate were Democrat, 
and I was the ranking member of the committee and they never, ever 
asked for a hearing. So I wonder how serious they were about it in 
those days.
  As a recent Associated Press story noted, the only impact this bill 
has in the last decade are the trees that were killed to provide for 
the paper on which the bill is printed year after year. They are fierce 
lobbyists. They have a staff of 20 attorneys, lobbyists, and 
strategists who operate offices in four cities, including Washington, 
D.C.
  They spent only $11,000 in 1999 in grassroot efforts to reach out to 
the public, though they claim their primary reason for existence is to 
educate the public about the environment; but they spent nearly $1 
million in the last 4 years to lobby to get their wilderness 
legislation passed.
  I privately believe that the last thing in the world this group wants 
is to pass that bill. That is why they keep moving the goal posts. That 
is why the numbers keep going up. Above all, this organization is a 
self-perpetuating consumer of resource and energy. They deal in volumes 
of paper and plastic. They issue their own credit cards, the Affinity 
credit card. That is what our environment needs, more credit cards.

  They do a rich business in the sale of videos, T-shirts, hats, books, 
posters. Most of these products are made from nondegradable materials 
like plastic, or require the cutting down of trees and the use of 
paper. They send out more than 100,000 newsletters, fliers and 
bulletins each year. That is a lot of trees, and that does not even 
include their reports, press releases, and lawsuits. They are 
aggressive users of electricity. Four offices. All these things they 
talk about.
  Now I would like to just say something about the lawsuits. If I could 
move this one chart here, look at the number of lawsuits that the 
environmental community has done between 1992 and 2000; 435 
environmental lawsuits. Now I thought we were out here taking care of 
the environment. I did not know we were just in this thing of 
litigating. It is the most litigious society we have ever had, but let 
us litigate again.
  This is how much they have made, $36.1 million in legal fees paid by 
the U.S. Government, whether they won or lost. That is your taxpayer 
money, $31 million right there. If they win or lose, they get that 
money. One case netted $3.5 million for the Sierra Club, and it was 
questionable whether it was even endangered.
  The average award is in excess of $70,000 and they risk nothing. So 
why go out and get you to give them money to plant a tree, to pick up 
the garbage, to be aware of these things, to take good care of the 
environment, when you can get in court and make that kind of money?
  Let us be smart about this thing. This thing is not in there to 
protect the environment.
  That reminds me of when I was back here as a freshman in 1981. The 
Secretary of Interior was Jim Watt. He was supposed to come in and see 
me with Senator Garn over in Indian School. That morning I received in 
the mail something from a group who was going to save the Chesapeake 
Bay that was all ruined. It said, ``Mr. Hansen, if you will send us 
$10, $20, $30, $40, $50, we will do our best to meet with the Interior 
Committee and Secretary Watt who is ruining the Chesapeake Bay.''
  So that afternoon, the Secretary walked in. I said, ``Jim, I want to 
show you this.'' He laughed, and he said, ``What do you mean? I put 
$285 million into protecting the Chesapeake Bay.'' And he said, ``That 
is just poppycock.''
  So I sent them $10 because I was curious what was going to happen. 
Six months later, I got a letter back. It said, ``Mr. Hansen, due to 
your generous contribution, we have met with the Interior Committee of 
the House,'' which I sit on or was sitting on in those days also, and 
they never walked in. ``And we have influenced the Interior Department 
to do their very best to take care of this terrible problem, and we 
have that. And if you will send us some more money, another generous 
contribution, we will be there to help do these other things.'' And I 
thought, what poppycock. It is just like these people who prey upon the 
elderly regarding Social Security when half of those allegations are 
not true.

                              {time}  2130

  Well, I can just tell you, you just rest assured. Members here on the 
Committee on Resources, we are not going to drill in parks as the 
gentleman from Idaho was mentioning some people say. That is not going 
to happen. We are not going to hurt or rape or pillage the ground. If 
anything, in a moderate and reasonable way, we are standing ready to 
take care of the ground.
  So I guess we can ask ourselves the question, do you want to pay 
attorneys? Do we not do enough with the attorneys retirement bills 
around here anyway? I do not know why we have to make it easy for other 
people to do that. Those folks seem to do pretty well. American trial 
attorneys do extremely well. I do not think we want to do that.
  I think your money should go to take care of the public grounds of 
America and take good care of it. I would hope that every American is a 
good conservationist and a good environmentalist in the true sense of 
the word, and that is what I am hoping would happen.
  So if you want to spend your money, put it somewhere where it does 
some good. Put it somewhere where we can have access to the public 
ground, and while we have access to the public

[[Page H2017]]

ground, let us each one of us take good care of it.
  I took my children, we went to the very top of the Uenda mountains, 
King's Peak, highest peak in the Uendas. I have taught my children when 
we go in an area, and we find all kinds of things, we found 5 beer cans 
right on the top of this beautiful pristine area. Of course, we crushed 
them and took them out. Our theory is, is clean up ours and somebody 
else's, and take it out when we are backpacking. I wish we would all do 
that.
  I am happy to yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Radanovich) 
the chairman of the Western Caucus and an extremely important member of 
the Committee on Resources.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. I want to thank the gentleman for putting together 
this special order regarding this topic, which I think is very 
important to the American people. As we are speaking here with an 
audience of probably over 1 million people tonight, I really want to 
kind of pose a question to the American people.
  We were dealing with an issue that is important to you and important 
to me with regard to local influence over Federal Government lands and 
the management plans of our National Forests and our Federal lands, and 
it was said by some critic about local influences that those people 
that are closest to the resources really do not speak in the interests 
of the American people on public lands, which are lands for the 
American people, and that somehow the national organizations that send 
out contribution forms like which the gentleman just mentioned are 
somehow speaking for them.
  In some ways I wanted to agree that the local perspective on some of 
these resources, and keep in mind the Quincy Library Group, which is a 
group in California of local people that work together with Federal 
forest lands to develop forest policies that are not only good for the 
forests, but also good for the local communities, and it was a better 
plan than by far any Washington bureaucrat could put together.
  My concern was that while people might understand that a local 
person's influence may not represent the best interests in the American 
public for public lands, there is another side to that too, and that is 
when you have extreme sellouts like the list that you just mentioned of 
people that solicit, for any reason or another, money to keep their 
influence, it does not necessarily mean that those groups have the 
environment as the best interest in their minds and in their hearts, 
and that they pursue public policy that is good for the American people 
and good for America's public lands and environment, because it is not.
  What it really boils down to is power and influence and keeping that. 
I think you have done that in an excellent way in demonstrating tonight 
it is not necessarily about good environmental policy for Federal 
lands; it is about power, keeping power, keeping power and influence. I 
think that the Federal policies become secondary to that.
  It is proven by some of the foolish notions that have come up in 
these last years, like roads moratoriums and the Sierra Nevada 
framework, a nightmare for the people in our Sierra Forest in 
California, and some issues where people with good intentions and maybe 
fears that on the Earth we are becoming too populated and that we have 
to reserve and guard these public lands at all costs, but are basically 
operating out of fear and not good common sense when it comes to 
management of public lands.
  So I just am grateful that the gentleman has pinpointed even the 
Sacramento Bee in California did a series of articles on the 
environmental community and how they are such a money-raising 
operation, whose sole interest I think these days has become to remain 
an influence, and secondarily was the environmental policy that they 
promoted, that it has really has become out of control.

  I think the American public needs to take a second guess, because 
groups like the Sierra Club and NRDC do not corner the market on good 
environmental policy in this country. I think the American people need 
to realize that. It needs to be balanced by somebody who is there.
  It is like an on-site landlord, rather than somebody who is never on-
site on a piece of rental property. The one who is on site knows what 
is going on, knows the detail, knows the property better than anybody 
else. It is no different in our Federal lands with the Sierra Club and 
the NRDC and groups like that depend on people that are miles and miles 
away and never see the resource. So how do they know one way or the 
other if they are being improperly influenced by these groups or not?
  They do not know. They tend to react on the pictures of Bambi on the 
TV or mailers that they get, and they give money. But these people need 
to know those groups are not necessarily promoting the best 
environmental policy for public lands. That is why I wanted to come 
down and kind of reinforce it as to what you were saying, is that 
people need to really be aware of these groups, and they need to learn 
to second guess them and do not take for granted that what they are 
doing is good environmental policy.
  I thank the gentleman for holding this special order in order to 
bring up points like that, as well as many of the other points that you 
brought up.
  Mr. HANSEN. I thank the gentleman from California.
  I yield to the gentleman from Idaho.
  Mr. SIMPSON. I thank the chairman, and I thank the gentleman from 
California for his comments. I agree with him fully.
  The chairman made a good point that, unfortunately, this money that 
is spent on litigation is money that could go, it is taxpayers' money 
to start with, and could go to protecting the environment. When I met 
with Chief Dombeck a couple of years ago and talked with him about some 
of the problems we were having in Idaho in our natural forest, he said 
to me one of the problems they have in the Forest Service is making a 
decision, because they know that no matter what decision they make, 
they are going to be sued.
  Last year in this article from the Sacramento Bee, during the 1990's, 
the government paid out $31.6 million in attorney's fees for 434 
environmental cases brought against Federal agencies. The average award 
per case was more than $70,000. One long-running lawsuit in Texas that 
involved an endangered salamander netted lawyers for the Sierra Club 
and other plaintiffs more than $3.5 in taxpayers' funds, as the 
chairman has already pointed out.
  That is money that could be used for other environmental purposes and 
actually cleaning up the environment and taking care of the backlog in 
maintenance we have in our National Forests and in our National Parks.
  Again, it is taxpayer money. One of the main arguments for the 
roadless issue was that the Forest Service did not have the money to 
maintain the roads that they currently had, and so if they couldn't 
maintain those, how could they justify building more roads, so we might 
as well make them roadless. If we are spending all that money on 
lawsuits, then certainly we do not have the money to take care of the 
roads.
  One of the things that was interesting in this series of articles is 
that the effect of these things are actually damaging to the 
environment oftentimes. Let me read a portion of these articles.
  Wildfire today is inflicting nightmarish wounds, injuries made worse 
by a failure to heed scientific warnings. For example, and there are 
three of them here that they list. In 1994, Wallace Covington, a 
Professor of Forest Ecology at Northern Arizona University and a 
nationally recognized fire scientist and a colleague warned that the 
Kendrick Mountain wilderness area in northern Arizona was so crowded 
with vegetation that it was ready to explode. ``Delay will only 
perpetuate fuel build-up and increase the potential for uncontrolled 
and destructive wildfires,'' they wrote in a scientific analysis for 
the Kaibab National Forest. Some thinning was done, but not enough. 
Last year, a large fire swept through the region carving an apocalyptic 
trail of destruction.
  What happened is much worse ecologically than a clear cut, much 
worse, Covington said, and that fire is in the future. It is happening 
again and again. We are going to have skeletal landscapes.
  The other example, listening to fire and forest scientists, Martha 
Ketelle pleaded in 1996 for permission to log and thin an incendiary 
mass of storm-

[[Page H2018]]

killed timber in California's Trinity Alps. ``This is a true emergency 
of vast magnitude,'' Ketelle, then supervisor of the Six Rivers 
National Forest, wrote to her boss in San Francisco. ``It is not a 
matter of if a fire will occur, but how extensive the damage will be 
when the fire does occur.''
  Because of an environmental appeal, the project bogged down. Then, in 
1999, a fire found its way into the area. It spewed smoke for hundreds 
of miles, incinerated Spotted Owl habitat and triggered soil erosion 
and key damage in a key salmon spawning watershed.
  These stories are something I hear about daily as I go back to Idaho 
from my resource advisory group and my ag advisory groups and I talk to 
them. We did more damage last year in Idaho with the Nation's largest 
wildfires. We did more damage to the environment, to salmon habitat, to 
spawning habitat, than was done by any logging practices that ever have 
been done. And today as the snow melts and the rains come, hopefully 
the rains come, that erosion is going to filter down into those streams 
and it is going to cover the beds, and consequently you are going to 
have a difficult time with managing salmon habitat.
  So, oftentimes these efforts to address these environmental concerns, 
the potential for catastrophic wildfire, today the Forest Service says 
something like 35 million acres of our National Forests are at risk of 
catastrophic wildfires. These are not just fires, but these are 
cataclysmic fires that burn everything, they burn so hot. They burn the 
micro-organisms, they sterilize the soil down to as much as 18 inches, 
and for years and years those forests never recover, if they ever do 
recover.
  We still have spots in Idaho from the 1910 fire that nothing will 
grow on. We do more damage to the environment by not proactively 
managing it. Of course, every time you try to do that, there is an 
environmental lawsuit from someone.
  Now, they say, well, maybe we can do thinning if it is not for 
commercial purposes, as if commercial or business or profit adds some 
damage to the environment that thinning just to thin does not do. Of 
course, there are the Sierra Club groups that want no cut.
  The fact is we have to proactively manage these forces, and we can do 
that. It was managed by fire before. Now we have to get in and do some 
management so that we do not have these catastrophic fires. 
Unfortunately, at every step of the way, we are fought by groups who 
think that man should not touch the forest, that they should be left as 
natural as they ever were before we came.

  Mr. HANSEN. I thank the gentleman.
  Mr. Speaker, let me just say a word about what the gentleman from 
Idaho just talked about. We were having a hearing not too long ago and, 
lo and behold, one of the big clubs was there, and I asked this vice 
president the question, why is it that you resist managing the public 
ground? Why is it that you resist the idea that we can go in and do 
some cleaning, thinning, prescribe fires and take care of it and keep a 
wholesome forest, like many of the private organizations have?
  We now have, as the gentleman from Idaho said, fuel load. What is 
that? It is dead trees, it is dead fall, it is brush. So now you have 
the potential of this summer, as last summer, is a careless smoker, a 
fire caused by a campfire that is left unattended, or a lightning 
strike, which is one of the bigger ones, and here we go again, we are 
going to burn the forest.
  This person from this organization answered me and said, because it 
is not nature's way. Nature's way is just let it do its thing.
  I do not know if I bought into that. You get down to the idea of 1905 
we started the Forest Service, and if you read the charter of the 
Forest Service, it is to maintain and take care of the forests of 
America. And that means cleaning it, thinning it, fighting fires, 
instead of getting ourselves in what we had in the year 2000, the 
heaviest fire year in record. And I dare say, and I am no prophet, but 
I think the fuel load is still there after these 8 years of 
mismanagement we have had, and we now have 2001 waiting for another 
one, because talk to your local forester and the people, Mr. Speaker, 
those who are watching this should talk to their district rangers, talk 
to them and ask the question have we still got that fuel load? The 
answer is a resounding yes.
  Here we go again. We are going to spend taxpayers' money all over the 
place, because we have not done what they said in 1905 we should have 
done, and that is manage the forest.
  This new administration luckily has a man of the stature of Dale 
Bosworth, now the chief; and I am sure we will see some management.
  I have to ask the question. Does it mean to be a good 
environmentalist if we let the forest burn to the ground? Does that 
mean being a good environmentalist? If that is so, I hope there are not 
too many of them out there. Does it mean the idea that we drain some of 
our water resources, like Lake Powell that services the whole southwest 
part of America, and that is the way we live because we have got water, 
does that mean being a good one? Yet one of the biggest organizations 
around in their book, the Sierra Club, had a whole four or five pages 
on let a river run through it and drain Lake Powell.
  Does the gentleman want to comment on that?

                              {time}  2145

  Mr. RADANOVICH. Mr. Speaker, I do, and I want to comment on one 
specific thing, because I think I have an unusual perspective on being 
from California, I say to the gentleman, and that is because we are 
going through the California energy crisis.
  Mr. HANSEN. Mr. Speaker, I have to be careful there to the gentleman.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. I know, and I love my State and it is the best State 
in the world, and do not mess with California.
  But what I am saying is that we have really seen the overinfluence of 
environmental zealotism in California and we are viewing that in our 
energy policy. We have had the worst problem with the nimby attitude on 
the development of energy generation resources in California, but it 
has all been backed by our top environmental groups who have really 
wanted not the population of California to grow, so they basically 
forced officials to stick their heads in the sand and pretend it was 
not happening until we have an energy crisis like now and an upcoming 
water shortage.
  Unfortunately, California is going to get to the point where they 
turn the faucet, they get no water; they flip the switch, they get no 
electricity because of the environmental influence on public policy in 
the State of California, and it is not just in California, it is 
happening all over the world.
  This summer, we are going to have to face the fact of we either force 
a temporary relaxation of air quality standards or we are going to have 
rolling blackouts and people are going to be dead, and those are the 
choices that we are facing in California. People are going to face that 
choice all over the country because of the undue influence of the 
environmental community in this country right now.
  Mr. HANSEN. Mr. Speaker, we are going to see it this summer, if I may 
say to the gentleman from California. This summer is going to be the 
biggest wakeup call that America has had for a long time. We have had 8 
years of neglect on these things which is now going to catch up with 
us.
  We are asking, what does it mean to be a good environmentalist? Does 
it mean to deny access to the public grounds of America for Americans? 
I think not. Does it mean that we protect the Housefly over children? I 
do not think so. In southern Utah we have a desert tortoise and we have 
spent $33,000 per turtle and we cannot really say that it is 
endangered. Do you want to know what our per pupil unit is to pay for 
our kids every year down there? Mr. Speaker, $3,600. So I guess the 
turtle is more important in some people's mind.
  So it comes down to this: can Americans, who are great and wonderful 
and good-thinking people, can we come to some common sense on this, or 
have we become way too extreme in this issue? I think tonight we have 
tried to make that case that we feel we have.
  I yield the gentleman from Idaho.
  Mr. SIMPSON. Mr. Speaker, I think the point has been made that 
unfortunately, the environmental movement has become far too extreme. 
That does not mean that there are not good environmentalists out there. 
There are many housewives and husbands across the Nation that want to 
take care of

[[Page H2019]]

our land and our country, I being one of those, and I am sure the 
gentleman from Utah and the gentleman from California also. But as I 
was saying earlier, many of these things do not really address the 
environment, they hurt it more than they address it. They are trying to 
use environmental issues for other means, and I will tell my colleagues 
an example in Idaho.
  We have a sage grouse problem, declining sage grouse populations, and 
we are trying to find out why and what we can do to control it. The 
Fish and Wildlife Service and the Idaho Fish and Game have been 
studying this for 20 years, and they decided that predators are a main 
problem with sage grouse populations. They eat the young chicks. So 
they proposed a study to take 2 areas, one where they do some predator 
control this year and the other one where they did not do any predator 
control and examined the 2 of them and watch the sage grouse 
populations. But 2 environmental groups have sued them to stop the 
study because they want to protect the sage grouse, they say, but their 
real goal is, their argument is to get cattle off of this land. And if 
it is shown that sage grouse can be protected by removing some of the 
predators, the argument for removing cattle goes away. So they do not 
want this study done.
  So is it truly their aim to try to save the sage grouse, or is it 
their true aim to try to get cattle off of public land, regardless of 
what cattle does to the sage grouse?
  When I want to look at a true conservationist, an original 
conservationist, I look at the farmers and ranchers of this country, 
because it is the land that produces the crop that produces the grass 
that the cows eat, that is what they do for living and they take care 
of it; overwhelming majorities of them take care of it. So when I want 
some true conservation issues, I generally talk to my farmers and 
ranchers.
  I yield back to the gentleman.
  Mr. HANSEN. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for joining me this 
evening.

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