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 21st 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
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