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Masters of Media Spin Steal the Language of Conservation

By Ivan Maluski and Ralph Bloemers

The same lobbyists and industry officials who once pushed for the president’s Healthy Forests’ initiative are now collaborating with Rep. Pombo to alter the Endangered Species Act. In early March, a reporter broke a story that revealed their strategies to spin their efforts as “modernizing” through “scientifically supported reforms.”

The mastermind behind the messaging is right here in Oregon. His name is Tim Wigley and he works PacWest Communications based out of Wilsonville. He recently received an award from Chairman Pombo (R-CA) for his work on the Healthy Forests, which Bush stated was just “good, common-sense policy.”

From dozens of interviews and reviews of thousands of pages of documents, a reporter with the Environment, Science and Technology Journal uncovered evidence that Wigley’s “grassroots” organizations are tied to timber corporations and mining companies. Without doubt, these industries stand to benefit financially from Wigley’s effort to push through legislative “reforms.”

To write his anti-ESA bill, Pombo has called on a team of lobbyists, including timber industry lobbyist Steve Quarles. But Pombo, Quarles, and other “reformers” face an important obstacle. For well over a decade, public opinion has run strongly against changes viewed as weakening environmental laws. An October 2005 Harris Poll found that 74% of Americans believe that “protecting the environment is so important that requirements and standards cannot be too high, and continuing environmental improvements must be made regardless of cost.”

To counter possible negative opinion and shape a message that is palatable to political moderates, Pombo and his cronies have drawn on a new form of “grassroots environmentalism” called the Save Our Species Alliance (SOSA). SOSA’s website promotes with a picture of an endangered reptile and the following message: “The Endangered Species Act is a good law with good intentions. The Save Our Species Alliance will work across the country to promote common sense, balanced, and scientifically supported changes to the ESA.”

Wigley is SOSA’s campaign director and the executive director of Pac/West Communications, a public-relations (PR) firm that also has offices in Alaska and Washington, D.C. Wigley claims that SOSA is a grassroots group of farmers, labor groups, and others “who all care about modernizing the Endangered Species Act.”

Wigley has a long history with the timber industry. Before joining Pac/West, he worked for the Oregon Forest Industries Council (OFIC), a trade organization that represents forest-products companies. His work for OFIC included raising large sums of cash and then doling it out to politicians.

Wigley is no stranger to environmental “reform” movements. Several years ago, Wigley led Project Protect, which helped pass the “Healthy Forests” legislation by lobbying Congress, running expensive advertisements and putting forth opinion pieces from “grassroots leaders” to try to influence the public and politicians on these issues. Quite tellingly, Wigley avoids disclosing who financially backs SOSA and claims that Project Protect “was a grassroots organization.”

Project Protect is anything but grassroots.

Wigley registered Project Protect in April 2003, with its official address being a MailBoxes Etc. store in Portland. The following year, the address changed to the offices of American Forest Resource Council (AFRC) and listed Tom Partin as its President. Project Protect’s website billed the organization as a “grassroots coalition of western communities, natural resource groups, labor organizations, and conservationists” whose mission was “to protect our over-populated, dense forests from catastrophic wildfire and disease.”

Critics say that the tactics detailed in this email sent by Wigley are now commonly employed to convince the public to support common sense reforms (gutting laws) in ways that protect the environment (the business environment for large corporations). Project Protect has tried to hide its ties to industry and sources of funding, and, until very recently he was successful at doing so.

In an email that Wigley wrote in February 2005, he revealed his own views on Project Protect. “When I directed the healthy forests battle two years ago, I had to change the way the forest products industry talked,” he wrote. “We didn’t change our goals—just the way we communicated.”

In the ads that Wigley and his backers in industry ran in the Oregonian in September and October of 2004, Project Protect accused the Sierra Club and other local conservation organizations of “stalling forest rehabilitation and common sense solutions.” The ads claimed that burned forest could be “green and full of life again” if we supported the Presidents’ initiatives under the banner of Healthy Forests. In other words, the forest would be green and full of life if only we get in there and log the forests quickly.

The road ahead for the conservation movement has become even more difficult, now that the industry is prepared to steal the language of conservation outright. This is our language, our vision, and industry is using it to accomplish the opposite objective. Fortunately, one reporter has caught on and done an excellent job at exposing the rhetoric that masks the reality. While you may understand that these proposals are not well-intentioned “reforms,” many people have been duped. Not only do we need to take back our language and expose the fraud, we must also learn lessons from it and be smarter about articulating our positive vision going forward.

Thanks to Reporter Paul Thacker who reported on Project Protect on March 8, 2006 and for giving us permission to adapt his story for the Conifer. For the full article and supporting documents visit:
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2006/mar/policy/pt_bigindustry.html

For more information on the rift in the property rights movement that led to the exposure of Tim Wigley’s strategy see: http://www.libertymatters.org/newsservice/2005/faxback/2856_ESA.htm

This page last updated Tuesday, April 25, 2006

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