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Contemporary environmentalism oftenachieves the exact opposite of what itintends—a healthy, sustainable envi-

ronment. RANGE readers have seen plentyof examples of this. Instead of restoring theland to health, greenness and balance, envi-ronmentalism and its eco-remedy—protec-tion—have caused the land to deteriorate,denude and erode. Instead of restoring andsustaining biodiversity, protection has causedthe land to support less life, even eliminatingpopulations of species that have been desig-nated “threatened and endangered” underlaws that the advocates of protection causedto be enacted.

I’ve written several of those RANGE arti-cles and documented them with before-and-after photographs showing the healthycondition of the land while it was beinggrazed and its deteriorated condition aftersignificant periods of protection and rest.

While I was visiting those places taking

those photographs, I have to admit I wasamazed at the amount of deterioration thathad followed and presumably been causedby what most of us consider to be the solu-tion to most, if not all, environmental prob-lems—“protection.” What amazed me evenmore, however, was that the people who callthemselves “environmentalists” weren’t goingballistic about what I was seeing.

They had certainly ignited plenty of out-rage, opposition, finger-pointing, demon-strations, calls for prosecution and actualprosecutions in response to the conditionsillustrated in the “before” photos of land as it

was being grazed, never mind that the condi-tion of the land in those photos was relativelyhealthy, especially when compared to the“after” photos showing the results after pro-tection. But why weren’t environmentalistsjust as outraged, or even more so, by theresults of protection, which were obviouslymuch, much worse?

Then I realized that I was having anunexpected reunion with an outrage thathad played a huge role in my eco-radicaldays—the role of the profit motive in caus-ing ecological disaster. In this case, however,the shoe was on the other foot.

ECO-PROFITSWhose money harms the environment? Words & photos by Dan Dagget.

1963—Before, grazed for nearly a century. Grass is short and apparently recently grazed, but notice thegrass density (mostly perennial natives) and the lack of erosion.

2013—Same Forest Service monitoring site as above after roughly 30-plusyears of protection. Cattle numbers were reduced to zero during the 1980s. The result is less grass, much more erosion and less diversity.

Nearby, a small grassland remnant has managed to survive 30-plus years ofprotection. When I took Forest Service staffers to see the deterioratedcondition of protected study sites pictured here, the fact that they wereunfamiliar with those sites and had no recent data indicated that the agencyis not monitoring (and therefore not regulating or mitigating) the damageenvironmentalism’s multibillion-dollar “protection” industry is causing onAmerica’s public lands.

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When I came west in 1980,environmentalism was surgingto establish itself as one of thedominant forces in the region’spolitics, and it was basing thatsurge on the contention thatcapitalism, private enterprise,and money were causing the devastation ofthe West’s ecosystems. Protecting naturefrom capitalism, profit, and the damage itcaused, the story went, would restore theregion’s environment to natural harmony, orat least as close as is possible with so many ofus consuming humans present.

“We’ve got to protect what’s left of theWest—our natural/national heritage,” wetrumpeted. And since the apparatus forprotecting anything in our society is, ofcourse, government, our campaign wasright in tune with the New Left socialistagenda of those of us who made up the

’60s’ generation. With that as ouragenda we began construction of abarricade of laws and regulations tochange the management of as muchof the West as possible so thathuman activity on the land wasguided by values at least ostensibly

based on ecology rather than economy.Over time, efforts like this have become

one of the main driving forces of our soci-ety’s tenure in the West. Millions of acreshave been set aside as wilderness, parks, pre-serves and monuments, and human activityhas been restricted on much if not all therest. The justification for these sweepingmeasures is the claim that this is the only wayto return the land to conditions as “natural”and “balanced” as possible, and thus to reme-dy the abuse and overuse the region hasexperienced.This push continues. At present an effort

is underway to designate 160,000 acresaround my home and hometown of Sedona,Ariz., as the Sedona Verde Valley Red RockNational Monument. Just south of theGrand Canyon, 1.7 million acres are also tar-geted, while north of the canyon in Utah, 1.9million acres more are on the productionchopping block.Why is this movement so successful, so

saleable, and so profitable, in spite of its not-for-profit designation? Because it enables itsconsumers to identify themselves as part ofthe solution as “Earth savers,” and makesthem immune to blame and guilt for allenvironmental problems except the vague1958—Before protection, and grazed for nearly a century.

2013—Exact same place as above. The results of roughly 30-plus years ofprotection are more bare dirt, more erosion and less diversity. Where’s a realenvironmentalist when we need one?

2013—Stepping through the trees the full extent of the impacts of protectionbecomes apparent. Why, I wondered as I shot these photos, aren’t the peoplewho call themselves “environmentalists” going positively ballistic aboutresults like these?

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“American environmentalactivist groups are a

$13-billion-a-year industry.”PAULDRIESSEN, CFACT

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unavoidable guilt of being part of the human“affliction.” Environmentalism offers its consumers

immunity by placing the guilt for all envi-ronmental problems, along with the respon-sibility to fix them, squarely on “deniers”—those who oppose government regulationand thus stand in the way of the “solution”—environmental regulation and protection. An important thing to note here is that

the immunity to blame that comes withbeing a consumer and advocate of protec-tion is not dependent on the results you cre-ate by doing so. In the case of grazing toproduce beef, ranchers have to keep thegrasslands they use healthy enough to enabletheir cattle to eat to survive, reproduce, andgain weight—the healthier the better. Forthat reason, being aware of the results oftheir management and fixing what doesn’t

work is in their best interest.In the case of protection, the more devas-

tated the land, the more effective it is at sell-ing more protection. And no worry aboutbeing held accountable for those deepeninggullies, thinning grasses, and disappearingspecies; they can always be cast as lingeringeffects of problems your opponents created.How profitable is this not-for-profit, no-

fault business? “Behemoth Big Green even outstrips Big

Oil in expendable revenue by orders of mag-nitude,” writes Ron Arnold in “Big Green’sUntold Billions,” a 2014 article published onthe website of CFACT (Committee For AConstructive Tomorrow) and in the Wash-ington Examiner: “[T]he American Petrole-um Institute’s IRS Form 990 for the mostrecent year showed $237.9 million in assetswhile the Natural Resources Defense Council

reported $241.8 million.”In the Christian Science Monitor in a 2012

guest blog, Robert Rapier observes, after“looking through the financials of a promi-nent environmental ‘nonprofit’” and discov-ering “$250 million in assets, annualdonations of more than $100 million, and adozen employees listed as receiving morethan $200,000 a year in compensation,” hethinks “it is safe to say that environmental-ism is indeed a lucrative business for some.”Thus awakened, I did some looking on

my own. In the 2014 annual report of TheNature Conservancy, I found assets listed atmore than $5.77 billion. Total support andrevenue for that year added up to more thana billion dollars.On a blog named “NOYO—News and

Views from the North Coast,” a list of thesalaries of “Big Green” CEOs includes:

■ President, Natural Resources DefenseCouncil: $432,742;

■ President, Environmental Defense:$423,359;

■ Executive Director, EnvironmentalDefense: $347,963;

■ Managing Director, Pew EnvironmentGroup: $400,487; and

■Two nonprofits included in NOYO’s listbecause of their prominence in environmen-tal affairs—the David and Lucile PackardFoundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts—paid their CEOs more than a million dollars.“U.S. environmental activist groups are a

$13-billion-a-year industry,” writes PaulDriessen, senior policy analyst for CFACT,adding that “[t]he liberal foundations thatgive targeted grants to Big Green operationshave well over $100 billion at their disposal.”Getting beyond the tip of the not-for-

profit iceberg, Driessen makes the case thatthe biggest funder of Big Green is govern-ment—federal, state and local. “Under Presi-dent Obama...government agencies havepoured tens of millions into nonprofitgroups for anti-hydrocarbon campaigns,”including “spending $2.6 billion [per year]on climate-change research and only thosewho support the politically correct climate-change narrative receive funding.” Proposed climate-change budget author-

ity for fiscal year 2014-2015 was listed at$21.4 billion according to the federal cli-mate-change expenditures report to Con-gress in 2013.Worth noting here: Cattle and grazing

are blamed as a major contributor to CO2and are therefore one of the main targets of

Big Park, Ariz., near Sedona with iconic Bell Rock in the background. In 1921, this area had been grazedfor roughly 50 years. Here, too, perennial native grasses are cropped and short, but plant density is highand erosion is nowhere in sight.

After all cattle were removed around 1990, more than 20 years of protection have produced thefamiliar results of less grass, more erosion, and less diversity. In spite of results like these, the value of acontemporary environmental economy continues to be estimated in hundreds of billions of dollars.

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climate-change campaigns and research. Infact, the movie “Cowspiracy,” which claimsthat cattle contribute more CO2 and aretherefore a greater cause of climate changethan all forms of transportation combined,was funded by grants of $117,000 fromvarious sources. Federal energy and envi-ronmental spending in 2015 equaled$44.85 billion, adds www.NationalPriori-ties.org in “Federal Spending, Where Doesthe Money Go?”

The 50 states added more than $23.5 bil-lion in environmental spending for fiscalyear 2015 according to “Ballotpedia—TheEncyclopedia of American Politics.”

One of the methods by which govern-ment subsidizes environmental groups is atactic called “sue and settle.” Here’s how itworks: An environmental group (or groups)files a lawsuit against a federal agency toincrease regulation to protect an endangeredspecies, and then, rather than allowing thesuit to proceed to argument and decision,the agency settles, usually out of court, byagreeing to environmentalists’ demands. Inthe process, the government (i.e., taxpayers)pays the environmental group’s legal fees,which can include $750 an hour per lawyer,

and, by caving to their demands, gives theenvironmental group a success to market inorder to increase its not-for-profit profits.

These cave-ins routinely happen with lit-tle or no input from opposition, as in thecase of the “threatened” spikedace minnowin the Verde River in Arizona, which wasdescribed in my article “Critical Mass” in theSummer 2008 issue of RANGE.

How does the environment fare in allthis? There hasn’t been a spikedace seen in theVerde River since sue and settle caused cattlegrazing to be removed from public landsalong the Verde in 1997. In spite of that, sue-and-settle groups can claim that they “saved”the spikedace and the Verde River.

Add to all the above the political offices“environmental protector” claims enabletheir holders to win, the bureaucratic agen-cies and positions created, the professorshipsestablished, and science programs initiated,and you have a “not for profit” Big GreenBehemoth that accounts for over a hundredbillion dollars annually. In 10 years that’s atrillion bucks.

So now as you review your copies ofRANGE or travel the western outback andsee all those instances of ecosystems dam-

aged, even devastated, by protection, you’llknow the reason you hear no mea culpasfrom the protectors—because contemporaryenvironmentalism has a vested interestamounting to hundreds of billions of dollarsin those deteriorating environments.

Which means environmental corpo-ratism is guilty of the same offense of whichit has made a career of accusing capitalism,the free market, and private enterprise: get-ting rich at the expense of the health of theenvironment. And its consumers are just asblind to the damage they cause as theyaccuse the private sector of being. Actually,more so. ■

Dan Dagget, a reformed eco-radical, is a free-lance writer, speaker, range consultant and aPulitzer Prize nominee. He was selected by theSierra Club as one of 100 EnvironmentalHeroes on the occasion of the group’s centen-nial celebration. He lives in Sedona, Ariz.Check his blog at RightWay2BGreen or con-tact him at dandagget@aol.com. His highlyacclaimed book, “Gardeners of Eden, Redis-covering Our Importance To Nature,” will bereprinted and published as an eBook by theUniversity of Nevada Press in the spring of2017.

For contrast, here’s a U.S. Forest Service study site on central Arizona land that is grazed. It is not seeded, irrigated, or fertilized, just grazed in a mannerinspired by the insights of Allan Savory (check “Cows Can Save the World,” RANGE, Summer 2015 at rangemagazine.com). Federal and state agency staffersare monitoring this site to make sure the rancher and his cattle aren’t harming public lands. This leads to an obvious question: Why have those same agenciesstopped monitoring the “protected” sites pictured in this article to see whether the multibillion-dollar environmentalism industry is harming public lands? And if protection is causing harm, as the photos seem to indicate, why isn’t the government bringing action against these groups, as it would against a rancheror other commodity producer if he or she were causing harm?

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