There is an interesting timeline on the webpage that did not copy into this
message.
Forwarded by Jane Clark

http://pubs.acs.org/journals/esthag/index.html
Environment, Science and Technology Online
March 1, 2006, Vol. 40, Issue 5

Policy News -March 8, 2006

Hidden ties: Big environmental changes backed by big industry

Lobbyists and industry officials who once pushed for the president's Healthy
Forests legislation now collaborate with Rep. Pombo to alter the Endangered
Species Act.

Since President Bush took office, Republicans have successfully pushed
through major reforms that target regulations for power-plant emissions and
the management of federal forests. During his 2004 campaign for reelection,
the president praised his Healthy Forests initiative as "a good,
common-sense policy." This year, the Republican-led Congress is gearing up
for yet another "common-sense" reform to a major piece of environmental
legislation-the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

Timeline
 Critics of these reforms charge that they are little more than giveaways to
the affected industries and note that the changes enacted with the Healthy
Forests legislation limit citizens' ability to appeal logging sales on
federal lands and emphasize cutting trees to prevent fires. However, the
reformers point to support by "grassroots" groups as a sign that these
changes are popular with citizens and not just industry.

ES&T has examined in detail one short-lived "grassroots" environmental
organization that was based in Oregon-a state with vast forests and
species-rich ecosystems. The leading figures in this group played a key role
in passing President Bush's Healthy Forests legislation and are now
promoting changes to ESA. From dozens of interviews and reviews of thousands
of pages of documents, ES&T has found clear evidence that this "grassroots"
organization has clear ties to timber corporations-an industry likely to
benefit financially from legislative reforms.

Change-with help from your friends
The movement to alter ESA is being led in Congress by Rep. Richard Pombo
(R-CA), a rancher from California and the powerful chair of the House of
Representatives' Committee on Natural Resources. The effort to change ESA
cleared its first hurdle in September 2005 when the House approved Pombo's
bill (H.R. 3824). Major provisions in the bill would remove requirements to
designate critical habitat to protect endangered and threatened species and
would also add a new requirement for the government to compensate landowners
when the law impedes them from developing their land.

To write the bill, Pombo called on the help of Steve Quarles, a lobbyist who
works for the timber industry. "I spent a great deal of time with Pombo's
staff," Quarles told ES&T, and during that time he helped write the bill.

But Pombo, Quarles, and other reformers face an important obstacle. For well
over a decade, public opinion has run strongly against changes viewed as
weakening environmental laws. An October 2005 Harris Poll found that 74% of
Americans believe that "protecting the environment is so important that
requirements and standards cannot be too high, and continuing environmental
improvements must be made regardless of cost."

To counter possible negative opinion and shape a message that is palatable
to political moderates, Pombo and other ESA reformers have drawn on a new
form of grassroots environmentalism that sides with corporate causes. One
example is the Save Our Species Alliance (SOSA), which has become a
prominent voice in convincing voters that change to ESA is needed.

On its website, SOSA carries this message: "The Endangered Species Act is a
good law with good intentions. The Save Our Species Alliance will work
across the country to promote common sense, balanced, and scientifically
supported changes to the ESA." Pictured next to the statement is an
endangered reptile.

SOSA's campaign director is Tim Wigley [MS Word], who is also the executive
director of Pac/West Communications, a public-relations (PR) firm with
offices in Oregon, Alaska, and Washington, D.C. In an interview with ES&T,
Wigley stated that SOSA is a grassroots group of farmers, labor groups, and
others "who all care about modernizing the Endangered Species Act."

In January 2005, Wigley traveled to Washington, D.C., to address a group of
property-rights activists who also wanted to reform ESA. The gathering took
place in a committee meeting room at the House of Representatives. Democrats
contacted by ES&T said that they were not invited, but the participants
included staffers working for a number of Republicans including Pombo and
Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and
Public Works.

Wigley's presentation discussed how to best sell changes in ESA to the
American public and included results from focus groups and polls, said Chuck
Cushman, executive director of the American Land Rights Assoc., a
private-property-rights group, and a participant at in the meeting. Of
Wigley's talents at delivering a message, Cushman said, "He's very skilled,
more skilled than I am. He has the grassroots at heart." Cushman added that
he had even employed Wigley to help with various political causes.

Hidden roots, hidden money
Federal records show that SOSA's lobbyist is Steve Quarles, who told ES&T
that he filed the paperwork to incorporate the organization. Practically a
Washington, D.C., institution, Quarles has long worked to shape
environmental laws to favor corporations. During the debate over the
president's Healthy Forests legislation, Quarles lobbied for its passage on
behalf of the American Forest and Paper Assoc., the largest trade group for
the forest products industry. Previously, he represented the American Forest
Resource Council (AFRC), a group that lobbies for management of public lands
to favor industry.

Wigley, too, has a long history with the timber industry. Before joining
Pac/West, he worked for the Oregon Forest Industries Council (OFIC), a trade
organization that represents forest-products companies. Internal Revenue
Service (IRS) records show that his work for OFIC included raising large
sums of cash. For the 2002 elections, Wigley raised $327,100 from timber
companies, such as Weyerhaueser and Boise Cascade. This money was then
handed out to Republicans running for state offices in Oregon. Before
joining OFIC, Wigley worked as a press officer for Georgia Pacific, one of
the world's largest forest-products corporations. His biography also states
that he is a graduate of the American Campaign Academy, a group created by
advisers to former Rep. Newt Gingrich to train Republican political
operatives.

Wigley and Pac/West are no strangers to environmental reform movements.
Several years ago, Wigley led Project Protect, which helped pass the Healthy
Forests legislation by lobbying Congress and running advertisements and
opinion pieces to influence the public in timber-rich states.

One example of this work was an opinion piece that ran in July 2003 in the
Reno Gazette, a Nevada newspaper. Pac/West's community outreach associate,
Liz Arnold, wrote, "[M]anaging our forests and rangelands instead of
spending . . . time responding to litigation and special interest politics
is now an environmental necessity." She encouraged residents to support
"scientific management" of our forests, adding, "Passage of the Healthy
Forests Restoration Act is critical." The piece describes her as a "Project
Protect grassroots coordinator."

When asked, Wigley shied away from disclosing who financially backs SOSA and
who funded Project Protect, saying Project Protect "was a grassroots
organization." He added, "I am not a lobbyist. I think this line of
questioning is misleading."

Project Protect was registered as a nonprofit in April 2003 by Wigley at
Pac/West Communications. According to federal records, Wigley became the
group's lobbyist and coordinated his work with the Bush Administration until
the project disbanded in 2004, after the 2004 presidential race. In 2003,
the address for Project Protect was a MailBoxes Etc. store in Portland,
Ore., but the following year, the address changed to the offices of American
Forest Resource Council (AFRC).

AFRC's president, Tom Partin, said the council's members weren't really
involved in Project Protect, which he said was just a PR campaign
coordinated by Wigley to pass the Healthy Forests legislation.

Project Protect's now-defunct website (www.landsense.us) billed the
organization as a "grassroots coalition of western communities, natural
resource groups, labor organizations, and conservationists" whose mission
was "to protect our over-populated, dense forests from catastrophic wildfire
and disease."

Critics say that the tactics detailed in this email sent by Wigley are now
commonly employed to persuade the public to support laws that favor large
corporations.

View the email [168KB PDF]Until now, Project Protect has hidden its ties to
industry and sources of funding. The first public mention of Project Protect
was in the industry magazine International Wood Fiber Report [184KB PDF] in
May 2003. In an article that month, Jim Peterson of the industry-funded
Evergreen Foundation was quoted calling Project Protect a "hardball
 approach" to get the president's bill signed. "It's not a warm, fuzzy PR
campaign," he said. "It's a fight to the finish. We intend to work behind
the scenes with industry associations with much of the PR off the radar
screen by design."

In an email obtained by ES&T that Wigley wrote in February 2005, he revealed
his own views on Project Protect. "When I directed the healthy forests
battle two years ago, I had to change the way the forest products industry
talked," he wrote. "We didn't change our goals-just the way we
 communicated."

The Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania
estimated that Project Protect bought $10,000 in advertising in 2004.
However, ES&T has learned that the organization actually spent $2.9 million
on media and lobbying during its 2-year existence before evaporating after
the 2004 elections, according to copies of Project Protect's 2003 and 2004
tax statements. The documents do not list the donors.

IRS Forms
Secretly funded and staffed by industry, Project Protect was a $2.9 million
media campaign to persuade the public to support President Bush's Healthy
Forests legislation.

From newspapers and radio stations in Oregon, ES&T learned how some of this
money was spent. In 2004, two full-page ads for Project Protect ran in The
Oregonian; a salesperson with the newspaper said they cost more than $10,000
each. And a salesperson at Oregon radio station KEZI said that ads for
Project Protect totaled more than $70,000 between August and November of
2004. "They made a real statement," said the salesperson. Tax forms for SOSA
are not yet available.

In November 2004, Pombo recognized Wigley's work with Project Protect by
sending a letter [117KB PDF] to the Forest Resources Assoc. recommending
Wigley for an award. "Tim's efforts in leading the grassroots campaign
'Project Protect' without question helped position the Healthy Forests
Restoration Act for successful passage in the U.S. Congress," Pombo wrote.
Wigley received the award and a cash prize from the association a few months
later.

Think tank or lobby shop?
The January 2005 meeting in Washington, D.C., at which Tim Wigley spoke to
activists in the property-rights movement about changing the Endangered
Species Act was attended by representatives from several libertarian think
tanks, including Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)
and David Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research
(NCPPR). Ebell, Ridenour, and other "scholars" from these think tanks have
been central to the advance of conservative policy and efforts at
deregulation, say many observers.

For example, Chuck Cushman, executive director of the American Land Rights
Assoc., told ES&T that he had employed both Wigley and Ebell to help with
various political causes in the property-rights movement. And when Wigley's
Save Our Species Alliance sent out press releases in the summer of 2005,
journalists were asked to contact Tom Randall with the consulting firm
Winningreen. Before he started Winningreen, Randall and his wife Gretchen
were employed by NCPPR, where they wrote environmental policy papers that
supported corporate positions on topics such as forest policy and global
warming.

Ebell, in particular, has emerged as a major force in shaping public
opinion. At CEI, Ebell refashioned himself from a property rights adovocate
to become a leading global-warming skeptic. He is now often quoted by media
outlets such as the Washington Post as a counter to researchers whose
studies point out the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

Larry Noble of the Center on Responsive Politics said he wasn't too
surprised to hear that a network of lobbyists, industry officials, and
scholars from libertarian think tanks jump from one issue to the next in an
effort to change environmental laws. "It's known that this is going on, just
not all the exact details," he said. "It makes me think of the early 70s in
rock, where all these music groups formed and then quickly died. But when
you really looked at it, it was just the same musicians moving from band to
band."

NCPPR's current senior fellow on environmental policy is Bonner R. Cohen. A
check of Internal Revenue Service documents showed that Cohen is also the
director of TASSC, a science lobbying group which was started in 1993 by the
communications firm APCO Associates to promote "sound science" on behalf of
tobacco companies. As reported by ES&T in May 2005, TASSC is now run from
the home of Steven Milloy, a FoxNews.com columnist, climate-change skeptic,
self-described basher of "junk science", and an adjunct "scholar" at
CEI. -PDT

In August 2005, Pac/West returned the favor by hosting a fund-raiser [1.2MB
PDF] for Pombo in Wilsonville, Ore., where the firm is headquartered. Around
this time, the Pac/West CEO Paul Phillips, a former Oregon state senator,
donated $1000 to Pombo's campaign. Members listed on IRS documents as
directors for Project Protect donated an additional $3000.

ES&T contacted Pombo's office on numerous occasions seeking comment about
his ties to SOSA and to various officials who created the group. After a
brief exchange, Pombo's office stopped returning calls and would no longer
respond to inquiries.

Creating a synthetic movement
Larry Noble at the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that
tracks money in politics, said this type of corporate-funded countermovement
only came to fruition in the 1990s after businesses suffered decades of poor
public perception and lost numerous political battles to environmental
groups.

In the sixties, people heard the corporate message, "Better living through
chemistry" but then discovered that this same industry was making napalm.
The widespread disillusionment of the era led to a cynical attitude toward
large companies. "People just began to discount them," Noble said. Industry
responded, he added, by putting more resources into PR and lobbying groups
that know how to get an industry message out to the media and to the public
in an appealing way.

"There is this issue of balance in the media," he said. "So, a journalist
will go out and interview someone from an environmental group and then
someone from an industry [funded] environmental group."

And another payoff exists, Noble said, when it comes to advertising and
shaping public perception. "When one of these groups takes out an ad, most
people will not look to see who's behind it" or whether the sponsoring group
is funded by industry or by a public-interest group, he said.

Noble said that it is shocking that Project Protect spent $2.9 million in
advertising to pass Bush's Healthy Forests legislation. "It gives you some
sense of what the real grassroots [organizations] are up against."

"Some people call it Astroturf," said Ken Gross, a lawyer who specializes in
ethics and campaign-finance cases. Unlike traditional grassroots groups that
may consist of local activists meeting in someone's living room, these new
operations are backed by corporate money and run like professional political
campaigns. "It's not mom-and-pop; it's highly sophisticated, with
well-compensated people. [But] there's nothing unholy about it."

With a grant from the National Science Foundation, Drexel University
associate professor of sociology Robert Brulle is analyzing the nearly 8000
U.S. environmental organizations that operated between 1900 and 2000. He
found that while some groups prospered with large memberships, broad
community support, and elected leaders, some of the newer groups consisted
of an appointed board and had unknown financial sources. The new groups
labeled themselves as grassroots, but they also had strong financial ties to
corporations and leaders drawn from industry groups or PR firms.

The word grassroots "implies broad representation, but when you ask
questions, you'll find that some groups get [mad]," said Brulle, especially
when you ask them where they get their money. "I have yet to find one of
these industry groups that was authentic. They are mostly top-down,
short-term groups."

Douglas G. Pinkham, president of the Public Affairs Council, an educational
group for lobbyists, said that current scandals in the U.S. involving
disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, may lead to greater
transparency in politics and lobbying.

"Most companies I talk with shy away from these tactics," he says, referring
to PR firms creating industry-funded environmental advocacy groups. "They
realize in the long run that it hurts their reputation." -PAUL D. THACKER

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