©Range Magazine 8/16/13
Green Hucksters
Philosophers, poets and linguists from the Southwest stymie good land
management and attempt to destroy good producers. By Stephen L. Wilmeth
Suckling and the iconic Wolfman Jack, aka Robert Smith.
© JOHN BARDWELL [photo]
8/16/13 5:12 PM Page 28
Growing up in southwestern New
Mexico in the ’60s, nighttime radio
was limited. Listening to the
Louisiana Hayride with grandparents out on
the porch was losing its charm. By six p.m.,
local radio had either gone off the air or the
rheostat had been turned counterclockwise
to static, fade in, and, finally, frustration. By
the time the older folks were losing us to the
world, we were listening to KOMA, Oklahoma
City. That is what you’d hear on summer
evenings dragging Main in downtown
Silver City.
For the bilingual, there was the powerful
XERF thumping out of Ciudad Acuna,
Coahuila, Mexico, across the Rio Grande
from Del Rio, Texas. It’s said that the signal
from XERF could be heard as far away
as West Virginia when conditions were
right. Late at night, none other than
the original wolf man himself, Wolfman
Jack, would broadcast from that
big hummer. To stay awake long
enough to hear him, though, you had
to listen to nearly nonstop commercials
recorded in an echo chamber in
Mexican disc jockey style. One of the
great pleas in radio history came from
that chamber. It was XERF’s advertisement
that asked for money; in return,
it’d send you an original sandal worn
by Jesus Christ. If you doubled the
contribution, it’d mail the one that still
had blood on it!
We now know the hucksterism perfected
in Ciudad Acuna more than 50 years
ago is alive and well today in Tucson, Ariz.,
and it’s coming to a metropolitan area near
each and every one of you.
The Center
At an EarthFirst! rendezvous in northern
New Mexico in 1989, a young man from the
East surfaced. With all indications, the gathering
made a big impression on Kieran
Suckling, who got so caught up in the proceedings
that he wound up in jail after chaining
himself to a tree. While there, he met a
woman who told him about Peter Galvin,
who was surveying for spotted owls in the
Gila National Forest. On release, Suckling hit
Galvin up for a job and Galvin obliged.
One day, a member of Galvin’s survey
team got lost and, purportedly in his clueless
wandering, spotted one of the owls. Determining
that the Forest Service was on the
verge of letting a timber sale happen where
the bird was found, Suckling sought some
means to bar the action. Since he was under
a nondisclosure demand, somebody was
highly offended when the map detailing the
location of the bird was delivered to the Silver
City Daily Press. Suckling was fired.
That action set the stage for what would
become the Center for Biological Diversity
(CBD). If Suckling and his newly found colleagues—
Galvin, Todd Schulke, and emergency-
room-doctor Robin Silver—couldn’t
halt the Forest Service action indirectly, they
would seek to halt it directly. They became
professional green activists and Silver City
became the launching pad for CBD mayhem.
Targeting livestock grazing in the Gila,
CBD leveraged protection of a southwestern
flycatcher in seeking the removal of cattle
from hundreds of miles of streams. Its continued
owl campaign shut down scores of
timber operations throughout Arizona and
New Mexico. CBD’s first big success came in
1990 when it sued for endangered-species
status of the Mexican gray wolf. The U.S.
Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) had determined
it was “unrecoverable,” but wanted to
put some wolves in the Tularosa Basin east
from the Gila. The basin had extensive federal
holdings and was considered an enclave
where public outcry would be minimized.
Fort Bliss, White Sands Missile Range,
McGregor Range, Holloman Air Force
Base, San Andres Wildlife Refuge, the Jornada
Range, and White Sands National
Monument formed a contiguous federal
block of land that amounted to 4.48 million
acres. Added to that was the New Mexico
State University ranch, another 100 sections.
In all, the general public was shut out
of 4.6 million acres. The commanding general,
however, put the stop to any dream of
wolfdom. He declared, “Wolves and national
defense don’t mix.”
The suit continued and FWS was compelled
to conduct another wolf study. That
resulted in the release of wolves in 1998 into
the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area in 5,000
square miles of contiguous Apache and Gila
national forestlands on the Arizona-New
Mexico border. That became the epicenter of
the war zone of human and wolf conflict.
An arbitrary population of 100 wolves
was established. No comprehensive habitat
or prey studies were done to address
the release area and prey studies were
interpolated from Arizona and New Mexico
game-department census data for
broader areas. There was no science driv -
ing the population goal, but no CBD program
was ever hindered by science.
The Mission
The mission statement of the organization
has been “Protecting endangered
species and wild places of western North
America and the Pacific through science,
policy, education, and environmental
law.” There are reasons to suggest it is
time to alter that statement. The first is
the fact that CBD is outgrowing the West. It
is becoming global. In fact, the North and
South Poles are on the radar for CBD’s
brand of environmentalism.
Recognizing that quaint Silver City was a
good place to grow long hair and debate a
return to the Pleistocene, but not the center
of slush funds and blank checks, Suckling
and company kissed the environs of their
activist adolescence goodbye and headed to
the fashionable bastions of Phoenix, Tucson,
Albuquerque and Washington, D.C. It was in
those cities and similar places that the big
hitters of environmentalism lived and dabbled
in causes that could dramatically accelerate
the destruction of heritage industries
28 • RANGE MAGAZINE • FALL 2013
beyond the western states.
The group is now certified and approved
by the IRS to seek donations and support in
at least 39 states. Its current annual revenue is
about $9 million and is poised to grow. Indicators
of growth are the group’s intentions to
designate another 130 million acres of
unspecified critical habitat and its intent to
expand into other metropolitan areas. The
stage is being set for hundreds of new endangered-
species listings across the continent.
The next reason for a change in mission
statement is the concentration of environmental
law and the bastardized applications
of science, policy and education. Its central
arsenal employs legal action and bad press.
Since 2000, CBD has filed 577 federal and
district court cases. Between January 2010
and February 2013, CBD filed 108 cases in
federal district court. That doesn’t include circuit
and administrative court appeals. Thirtysix
of the cases since 2010 challenged the
adequacy of the NEPA process by federal
land-management agencies; 22 cases dealt
with challenges to the Endangered Species
Act section 7 consultations; and 33 dealt with
ESA time frames for species listings or critical-
habitat designations.
With that appetite for litigation, how
good are these radicals in their environmental
assaults? Suckling claims his “unparalleled
record of legal successes” is a cool 93 percent.
With that success he doesn’t need solid science,
and his own words reflect that. The
Arizonan columnist Hugh Holub once asked
Suckling if CBD activities suffer from the
absence of a science-based approach in its
litigious demands for endangered-species
listings. “No,” Suckling responded. “Kids with
science degrees are hindered by [taught]
resource management values.” He added that
he preferred philosophers, linguists, and
poets who tended to be in front of the curve
and were not handicapped by unproductive,
traditional thinking.
His philosophy has worked. CBD has
sued successfully for the listing of at least
380 species. The organization claims another
victory in forcing the designation of 110
million acres of critical habitat across the
West. In recent fund-raising efforts, Suckling
has elevated that success to centerpiece
status. He claims CBD has developed a
unique negotiating position with both government
agencies and private corporations.
The approach “enables [CBD]...to secure
broad protections for species and habitat
without the threat of litigation.”
CBD has elevated sue-and-settle tactics,
injunctions, new species listings, and bad
press surrounding legal action to modern art
forms. Consent decrees more often than not
result in closed-door sessions with concessions
or demands made on agency policy
formulation. CBD wants to win, but it also
wants the combination of legal tactics to take
its toll on agency morale. “They [the feds]
feel like their careers are being mocked and
destroyed, and…they are! As a result,” Suckling
says, “they become more willing to play
by the rules.” In CBD speak, the suggestion of
playing by the rules equates to its rules of
manipulating and mandating positive outcomes
for its mission. And, speaking of mission,
the conclusion for adjusting the group’s
mission statement must be assessed.
The scope of the original mission is far
too narrow. Endangered species and wild
places are now almost innocent first-generation
concepts because CBD is starting to
tackle the universe. It is dealing with national
and worldwide threats in unsustainable
human population growth, climate change,
energy discrimination, and off-road-vehicle
abuses. It has also signaled that it will be the
leading force in declaring plastic the next
hazardous waste product. Since environmental
justice seems to be a dynamic and
growing trade, all things environmental
must be added to its mission statement...that
has always been its core underpinning.
Wolf Man Returns
In 2011, Suckling said, “Psychological warfare
is a very underappreciated aspect of
environmental campaigns.” It could well be,
but showmanship also plays into CBD’s
game. In April, FWS signaled its intent to
delist the gray wolf from endangered status
in all lower 48 states except Arizona and New
Mexico. On May 17, CBD sent an appeal for
funds. It was right out of the archives of
XERF: “Save wolves now. Double your gift,”
the message proclaimed. The plea promised
to lead the fight for the continued protection
of most of America’s wolves “before this antiwolf
proposal is announced.”
In a court filing on May 21, the FWS
announced it was pushing back its decision
on removing the wolf from protected status.
Perplexed federal attorneys who announced
the change indicated that “a recent unexpected
delay” would hold the action up indefinitely.
No other explanation was given. Does
anybody believe that CBD’s psychological
warfare doesn’t have real-life consequences?
Those program directors in Acuna in the
’60s had nothing on this gang from Tucson.
In fact, the change of heart by FWS should
make everybody look seriously at the headlines
from other recent CBD newsletters.
Assessing its appeals, CBD intends to save
the wolf, fill its pockets, and spread its abundant
influence to the world as follows:
“The more you give today, the faster we’ll
be able to dig out the full truth about federal
agents to save wolves in the Southwest.”
“Just three [Mexican gray wolf] pairs left
in the wilds.”
“Use the EPA to protect species from pesticides.”
“Earth Day—Help save the planet with
Endangered Species Condoms.”
“Men with hairy backs will be the first to
die in global warming.”
Last generation’s wolf man lent his fame
to a cause that rewarded the donor with
Christ’s sandal. This generation’s wolf man
offers species dominion from a much
grander echo chamber.
If there is a flaw, though, it hinges on science.
Among the seven percent of unsuccessful
cases, the name Chilton looms. The
Chilton family, ranchers from south-central
Arizona, found themselves squarely in the
crosshairs of a CBD action. In a suit filed
against the Forest Service in 2002 to deny the
renewal of the family’s grazing permit, the
CBD got caught in a con game, with evidence.
In pictures represented as overgrazing
results, the family and their expert witnesses
employed real science against the CBD poets
and philosophers who faked photographs
and lied. The jury found actual malice in
CBD’s actions. A $600,000 judgment in favor
of the Chilton family was awarded.
Truth and diligent science do matter, and
it is a lesson that every rancher and every
heritage industry in this nation must recognize
and uphold. Like mastodons, echo
chambers will fade away.
Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern
New Mexico. “If we are being subjected to
psychological warfare, there exists a true
enemy.”
This generation of
wolf man offers species
dominion from a much
grander echo chamber.
FA13 7.20 FI 8/16/13 5:12 PM Page 29
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