When I was working for a former employer as a market and product manager, I was involved with some joint projects to bundle the company’s products with promotional material from a prominent outdoor sports organization. The organization was not one that I had any personal connection to and of which I had not even heard prior to my employment with the firm; however within certain circles, it possessed considerable influence and prestige.
While reviewing copy for the various printed publicity materials, I kept seeing a phrase repeated that made me vaguely uneasy – “wise use.” I knew I’d heard it somewhere before but I couldn’t quite put my finger on where or in what context. I never really gave it much thought at the time beyond that odd sense of déjà vu but I clearly recall that I felt it was a term loaded with far greater implication, meaning, and reference than what it seemed to indicate in the promotional copy.
I have long since left that position and company, but the memory remained; mostly quiet in my mind until this morning. While listening to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mike Papantonio on their Air America radio program Ring of Fire, I found myself absorbed in the two hosts’ discussion of the “Wise Use Movement.” Was this, shall we say, reportedly right of center political (and apparently theological) ideology connected to the repeated references to “wise use” I had seen years earlier? Almost everyone I had met in the industry in which I was then working was quite openly politically “right of center” and most were rather vocal in their profession of a version of Christianity that links that faith with American nationalism. The thought that it might be so and that I had been a party to promoting it left me decidedly uneasy.
What the specific goals of the Wise Use Movement were, or are, is a bit of a mystery to me. I have been sifting through Internet articles for a good part of the afternoon but I don’t feel sufficiently comfortable to define it in more specific terms than those I have already used here. I hope to come to a greater understanding of it in days to come; however from what I have read thus far, getting to the true heart of it requires the untangling of knots deserving of the appellation Gordian. It doesn’t help that with every article I read, I keep getting the feeling that the closer one might get to the center, the less it is desired by those who either created it or still hold directional authority for it that its core thesis be disclosed.
So why bother? Because as part of my ongoing “born again” experience (clarification for any new readers: “born again” is an earnest, if somewhat playfully ironic when viewed in juxtaposition to dominionist and other fundamentalist sects of Christianity, phrase I adopted to describe my self-discovery and “re-birth” as a bird watcher, naturalist, and evangelist for the appreciation of nature) I find it necessary not only to lift rocks and peer into thickets in search of nature’s otherwise hidden wonders but to lift public relations veils and peer into euphemistic linguistic constructions when they pertain to anything connected to the way human beings interact with nature. For example, such as when a dramatic relaxation of the environment-protecting Clean Air Act is packaged for public consumption as the Clear Skies Initiative.
I hope to be able to report soon that I have made some sense of the matter and come to a better understanding of it. If it is entirely benign and simply an alternative interpretation of public policy goals, I will happily report it as such. If it be otherwise, I will share what I have found so that others who may have unwittingly played their own role might begin to balance their respective karma as I will need to do myself.
Peace and good bird watching.
