Nevertheless, I felt the way Hatfield set it up was to allow the people who were the problem in the first place to control the process. Initially it [the group] was not federally funded, but it’s now a federal advisory group. It was doubtfully legal, in the context that there was federal participation, yet it [the meetings] were closed to the general public–which is a violation of federal laws allowing public participation. The first meeting of the committee–I was invited by virtue of the fact I was in the Klamath Basin, and it was promoted as all sides being represented–they couldn’t very well not invite me or that facade would have fallen quickly. I felt the whole thing was being set up in a [skewed] way. We’ve dealt with so-called consensus groups in various capacities in the past and basically felt that environmentalists are there as token representation. It’s an attempt to play on people’s sense of fairness, and then works to ignore environmental concerns. There’s a lot of psychology that plays on people to go along with the group. The Forest Service, for example, has liked to put mill owners and environmentalists in the same room, and it’s kind of like “We all love little children and Junior needs a few logs for his mill. Peter over here likes to hike in the forest and can’t we both accommodate each other?” It basically lets the agency off the hook, and in this case, the Senator off the hook, if you can get everybody to agree. I would argue the Senator and the Forest Service don’t care what we do to the land if everybody agrees, they’ll do what everybody agrees to. That’s just the path of least resistance to them.
At the first meeting of the Hatfield Working Group everybody was told that anything we talked about in this room could go no further. I didn’t announce it there at the meeting, but I knew I was leaving. Later on, when people asked why I was leaving, I told them “I’m sorry, but I work for a public interest organization. What I do is make public what is being done, not agree to negotiating in secret.” I could also see that there were 20 people and me, and could see the set up coming. If I hadn’t left, it [the charges] would have been “Well, look, you sat in the meetings like everybody else, and you were heard [the] same as everybody else, and the group decided this and you were outvoted.”
Either way, whether I participated or not, I was going to be vilified.
