Democracy? What we have here is an opportunity to communicate

Americans in general and public hunters and anglers in particular make much ado about the ‘democratic’ character of government in this country.

In the context of preserving wild things and wild places in a human-dominated country, pretty much everybody shouts huzzahs to the idea that public policy and wildlife management should derive from the agreement (or consent) of the people.

Unfortunately, the essential question that logically flows from that democratic idea gets precious little attention: “from whence comes agreement?”

People living in a dictatorship can skip this question. The tyrant delivers agreement on a platter along with the heads of those who didn’t agree. People living in a democracy, however, face a parallel hazard; failure to answer the ‘whence’ question can also land our societal heads upon a metaphorical headsman’s platter.

Along with the proverbial 500-pound gorilla, an invisible tyrant lurks in the rooms where democracy is practiced. That tyrant has a name and the name is Compromise. Alas, the path to decision always leads through compromise given the fact-of-life that a society of people will invariably disagree among themselves about how to use and preserve their natural resources.

When we say ‘compromise’ what we are really talking about is the ‘Art of the Deal.’ While compromise leaves a bad taste as a word to speak, deal making is as American as hickory nuts. Unfortunately no deals can be struck, and democracy cannot work, if we are not able (or willing) to communicate with people on the other side of a decision-making transaction.

Communication is the nervous system of our civil body politic - the electrical charge that energizes movement of people toward both agreement and disagreement.

Whole libraries of books are published about communication among individual humans and between groups of people, large and small. With the possible exception of quantum physics no more complex subject of study is known to man. But we do need a basic understanding of what the word means.

To keep this simple I’m going to employ a bare-bones definition of ‘communication’ – the transfer of an idea or understanding from the mind of one person to the mind of another person.

Just as all politics are local, all communication is personal. The transfer may be one-to-one. Or, it may be what has come to be called “mass communications,” which is in reality the simultaneous personal transfer from one individual broadcaster to dozens, thousands or millions of individual personal recipients.

Adam and Eve enjoyed the most basic of communication equations – only two people in the loop and a really positive environment in which to establish consensus. But they immediately proceeded to botch the deal because they couldn’t agree on the cost-benefit analysis of eating an apple. Expulsion from Eden became their metaphorical headsman’s platter.

Our 21^st Century garden, on the other hand, is as complex as Eden was simple. 350 million apple-munchers live in the USA alone, with a plethora of internal cultures and infinite variety of life experiences and different understandings of reality, all milling about in the rooms where democracy is practiced.

So how does this human nature of communications express itself in the forums where citizens participate in natural resource decisions?

In order to achieve a general agreement on a complex decision such as keeping sage grouse off the Endangered Species List, for example, citizens of western states will have to come to agreement on a single set of rules that saves the species but imposes differing cost effects on various human interests. People with widely diverse values will have to listen carefully and gain a real understanding of other perspectives. And they will have to explain their own interests in a way that different social tribes can translate into a scenario they can live with. In other words, they will have to employ good communications to strike a deal on sage grouse management.

Or! They can stonewall each other, fail to produce a successful state plan, and wait for the headsman’s axe to swing in the form of a federal listing. Ditto for bison, wolves, wilderness, climate change and a host of other matters requiring a democratically achieved management regime.  

And which path do we see most commonly followed in public affairs today?

Confront a person of any American social tribe with an external political threat and the first, perhaps only, person with whom they will consult will be a fellow tribesman. The threat may be bunny-hugger ridicule, anti-hunter opinion, a criticism on pesticide use, a blast at ‘trophy’ hunting or a rebuke of farm subsidies.  The public hunter, rural agriculturalist and urban nature lover, although members of very difference social tribes, all will respond by drawing their wagons into a defensive circle.

Shutting eyes and ears, closing ranks and turning a hostile face to a perceived enemy is our most common communication behavior.

{A new term comes into relevance at this point: ‘confirmation bias.’  We seek and readily accept ideas with which we already agree while shunning disagreeable ideas as if they are poisonous serpents.}

When differing social tribes convene in the same room to discuss a value-laden topic they most often start the conversation by displaying mutually exclusive definitions and understandings of what they are trying to talk about. They could settle in and work past that stage toward an apple-to-apple idea exchange - perhaps agree on a cost-benefit analysis for example.  But the most common outcome is that they throw up their hands in disgust and go home vowing never again to waste another moment trying to enlighten “those people” with another bit of scarce “common sense.”

And, typically, that’s that. The communication opportunity becomes institutionalized instead as an issue crevasse, and people will never show up again except to repulse attacks by their perceived “enemies” who are “waging war on ____ (insert your tribal value)”

I have observed people of all social tribes harming their own interests by such self-isolating defensiveness whose only utility is to protect their version of reality from penetration by outside ideas.

But there is reason for optimism that democracy’s invisible tyrant will be served. Here in Montana a number of efforts at consensual decision-making have borne fruit – and other efforts are underway as local people coming from differing social tribes recognize a common interest with people of other social tribes. Instead of deepening crevasses they are sitting down to the task of making democracy deliver good decisions.

Whether the locale is the Blackfoot Challenge program or the Devil’s Kitchen Working Group or the Rocky Mountain Front Task Force one lesson is demonstrated in all such efforts: Democratic decision-making is hard work. It also feels risky, and it usually takes a long, long time to make that first important decision, and the results are typically less than what any single tribe wanted from the decision.

Perhaps of equal importance is the lesson that silver-bullets and short-cuts are the pipe dreams of fools.

Communicating with others to make decisions about wild things and wild places is of one cloth with the communication challenges of all decisions taken by We-The-People as we operate the American Republic. Failure to properly serve the invisible tyrant of democracy could deliver our whole country to the mercies of a real tyrant.

At the end of the game let us not find the epitaph of democracy to be Cool Hand Luke’s requiem: “. . . what we have here is a failure to communicate.”

Ron Moody

January 23, 2014

Montana the ‘Wall Street’ of wildlife – and a crucible of conflict

If you want to see financial news on the front page of your local paper every day you should live in New York – the closer to Wall Street the better.

If, however, your passion is for wild animals and the wild places where they live, and you expect full front page reporting on the topic, then Montana should be your home.

The high level of public attention given by Montanans to what goes on over at Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department makes plain: elk and trout are to Montanans as stocks and bonds are to New Yorkers. Indeed, you can think of Montana as being the ‘Wall Street’ of America’s wildlife economy.

The New York Times is never going to devote as much front page space to deer numbers in the Adirondacks as the Billings Gazette gives to wolves in the Beartooths. But even there, among the metropolises of America, people care deeply about wild things and wild places – particularly in mythic precincts like Montana. 

So Montanans frequently see the nation’s ‘newspaper of record’ reporting on what we are up to out here among the elk and antelope, grizzly bears and wolves.

This national spotlight is hard to grasp for a western people who live amid open landscapes and never see themselves as featured actors on the national stage; but the whole world watches every move Montana makes in caring for its wild treasury.

The actions taken by Montanans in regard to how we care for wild things and wild places set the conservation agenda and frame the public debate to a degree unparalleled in other, tamer states.  Because of this, Montana FWP breaks the front pages at home and abroad more often than any other single agency of state government.

 

Human nature is such that everybody looks at a topic like wildlife management through the lens of their own personal benefit.  That makes it hard to see the big picture of how wildlife management, along with the recreational management that conjoins it, are not political islands isolated apart from the whole cloth of our civil body politic.

Some hunters routinely demand that management exclusively produce abundant game for them to hunt. Simultaneously, wildlife watchers demand that management produce happy, healthy critters for them to see and photograph.

Everything we do about wildlife management is woven into the fabric of people’s personal economic, health, social, and political well-being.

Be too poor and you can’t afford to recreate in the wild.  Be uninformed and you will not understand values beyond your immediate desire - or how to benefit from those seemingly alien values held by persons with different desires.

My point here is that a single state wildlife management program must produce and preserve the wildlife resource valued by ALL the people. But it must do that within the often conflicting paradigms of the both the individual values of self-interested citizens and the holistic realities of a complex, largely urban society.

The simple truth is that we human wildlife lovers have long since plowed under a planet Earth were wild things and wild places can exist apart from human influence.  The only chance of survival for the wild in the 21^st Century is in a beneficial interactive relationship with dynamic humanity.

Wildlife can no longer exist in this human-dominated world without a human support system strong enough and supportive enough to give wild things a wild place in which to live. Accepting this truth is particularly hard for urban folks who still believe there is a wild frontier somewhere outside the city limits where nature can be left alone to ‘balance’ itself.

How we preserve our wildlife is another of those telling metrics that reveal the quality of our civilization - just as other observers measure us by the way we treat the poor, or care for children. 

So how is all this playing out in our public arena today?

The lines of conflict among factions of our society have become starkly polarized between different culturally driven views of wildlife management. In the eyes of an objective anthropologist, Montanans fighting over wildlife appear more tribal in their behavior than political.

To illustrate this point, here are four big crevasses dividing Montanans, and Americans, on management of wildlife:

-        Urban versus Rural  (a huge social-economic divide in Montana often argued as altruism versus economics, or public interest versus private property rights)

-        Preservation philosophy versus Conservation (save wildlife versus wisely use wildlife)

-        Abundance management versus ecological management (breeding lots of elk and deer versus sustaining a healthy biotic community)

-        European-style privatized management versus American-style public management (democratic public hunting versus pay-to-play hunting)

Reflecting the Montana cultural priorities I describe above, every session of the Montana Legislature devotes about 20 percent of its work load to fish and game legislation. Every session the legislature will introduce 250 or more game and fish bills addressing all of these four social divides.

Here are some examples of perennial hot topics that put these tribal crevasses on glaring display:

Bison - very much an Urban – Rural argument. Since rural interests dominate both legislative houses bills to further limit bison restoration are certain to stay on the front page.

Large Carnivores, wolves, lions and bears, intersect three of these crevasses – urban-rural, preservation-conservation and abundance-ecology.  So this topic will stand at the top of the legislative agenda for the foreseeable future.

Money is to be made in wildlife both in controlling and selling access to wildlife and in providing support services like guiding. Commercial interests will forever try to tip the scales of law in their favor to the disadvantage of the public. Just like in all of society money permeates wildlife politics and connects to all four crevasses.

Access, both to private land and to public land, is the single most volatile fracture at play in the Legislature and on Main Street. Control of access is the single most powerful fulcrum point for having one’s way on any resource conflict.  So this is the most hotly contested point on the battlefield. Expect more ditch bills, privatized license bills, property rights bills.

A hundred years from now our descendants will judge us for how we resolve these conflicts. I wonder how important that prospect is to a ‘selfie’ generation obsessed with its own gratifications. One thing is for sure, everything we do is on the record and we will not escape history.

If there can be a ‘Greatest Generation’ then, logically, there can be a ‘Worst Generation.’