June 9, 2003
If their image doesn’t soon morph, modern day environmental activists will be fodder for a Hollywood portrayal of the newest bad guy of the 21st century.
The opening scene starts with the newfound ability of environmental activists perfecting the fine art of role reversal.
A textbook example of role reversal can be found in the closing chapters of the ongoing saga between Mobil Oil and the land-rich Nature Conservancy.
Eight years ago, Mobil Oil gave the Nature Conservancy what was one of the group’s largest corporate donations, a patch of prairie that encompassed the last native breeding ground of a highly endangered feathered friend.
Mobil PR types said that the donation offered something very special, in their words "the last best hope" of saving the Attwater’s prairie chicken. To the uninitiated, the prairie chicken is a speckled grouse whose high-stepping mating dance draws avid bird watchers to the Texas plains each spring.
Unlike the Hollywood version, this is not a story where everybody--particularly the speckled grouse--gets to live happily ever after.
Enter stage left the most unusual role reversal of the century.
The Nature Conservancy--whose main claim to fame is preserving land to protect species such as the prairie chicken, started making like a multi-national oil conglomerate.
To get an inkling of the magnitude of Mobil Oil’s gift to the Conservancy, the entire breeding population of Attwater’s prairie chickens can be found on 2,300 acres, a tallgrass prairie, one hour south of Houston as the crow flies.
The outright gift of a parcel of land containing the natural habitat of an endangered species is an environmentalists’ dream in full technicolour.
What did the bequeathed do as a first move? They sank a well under the bird’s nesting ground.
Anybody who’s ever crossed swords with environmental activists can tell you that drilling in sensitive areas is automatically defined as destructive. But the Conservancy just happens to advocate an aggressive form of "compatible development," best described as "a pragmatic approach that seeks to accommodate the needs of business as well as environmentalism."
If this sounds like the politics of latter day environmentalism, it is.
In any case, the Conservancy wanted the Texas City Prairie Reserve to be showcased the world over as a national model to show that drilling can be accomplished without harming the environment. Besides, bottom line drilling profits anticipated could always be used altruistically, to buy up more habitats for the birds.
Somehow along the way, the chapter of Saving the Prairie Chicken, never made it to the script.
Indeed, facts and unromanticized statistics began to tell a completely different story. Today, there are fewer prairie chickens on the preserve than there were when drilling began. The number of endangered grouse nesting there has fallen from a peak of 36 in 1998, to a current estimate of 16. A previously unreported analysis by the Conservancy’s Texas science director states that the project had subjected the grouse to a "higher probability of death."
The script now jumps from charming romance to melodrama, with silence for a musical score.
Going into the financial red comes in part two, which also introduces a major court battle. Along comes another national charity, which accuses the Conservancy of stealing its mineral rights. The end of that scene sees the Conservancy, and its partners, forced to pay a $10 million settlement in 2002.
One might wonder where the precautionary principle was in all of this.
In none of the voice-overs by actor Paul Newman does the donating public ever hear that the Nature Conservancy has veered off from the protection of endangered species to drilling.
The Conservancy drilling operation was in quest of striking gas and oil.
But something funny happened along the Conservancy’s road to drilling for riches: Washington Post staff writers Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway.
Courtesy of this enterprising duo, we know now that by January 2002, the Conservancy’s natural gas operation had generated about $8 million in revenue.
Although officials had planned on spending half purchasing additional habitat along the Gulf Coast, they failed to do so. Much of the profit from drilling went into a lawsuit settlement with another non-profit group.
Stephens and Ottaway report that gas explosions, and an unspecified number of oil spills, took place at the preserve under the Conservancy environmental watch.
There were no protesters from Greenpeace or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) on site.
Say Stephens and Ottawa: "Biologist Stanley A. Temple, who toured the site in October at the Conservancy's request, wrote in a report: "I was shocked to find, for example, that one of the release pens is subject to flooding in heavy rains, and that birds have drowned in the pen."
"Temple was also surprised at the radio tracking devices on the captive-bred birds.
"All released prairie chickens are radioed with permanent `poncho-style harnesses. These will remain on the bird long after the transmitter has died (in a few months) and continue to compromise the bird throughout its life. There is no way I can justify this practice.’"
Perhaps the only guarantee of a happy ending is for Mobil Oil executive to become environmentalist activists, take back the land, and make Conservancy agents the capitalists.
Meanwhile, you can no longer pick out Hollywood’s shifty-eyed bad guy by his black cowboy hat, holster, and spurs. He’s become much more chameleon like, out on the open plains waving a Save the Environment placard at the rest of us, while drilling ever so patiently for gas and oil.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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