The easy path is always to oversimplify the complex and controversial issues of the day. People are easily manipulated with oversimplifications. They want to feel engaged and involved in important topics but not take the time to scratch the surface. They don’t generally want to be bothered with a lot of details, or to get to the bottom of the big problems. Because that may reveal that there is not a quick, simple solution. Rather they want everything boiled down into one easy-to-remember phrase; for example, something catchy like “Protect Gold Butte.” Then they want that phrase printed on a sticker and pasted to the front of their shirt. Though such a phrase has almost no real meaning amid the complex nuances of the issue, people can flatter themselves that they are standing for something just in wearing it.
In the case of Gold Butte, this type of oversimplification has been used frequently by the enviro-wilderness lobby to create a facade of grassroots support for their agenda. Indeed, it is what caused 50-60 people to board a charter bus last week in Las Vegas and take a free ride to the Mesquite City Council meeting. With their bright orange stickers displayed they flooded the public comment section for more than 90 minutes with a simplistic message: “Protect Gold Butte.”
Of course, this was a message with which all were in agreement, No one at the meeting was advocating to allow the vast, treasured desert area to the south of Mesquite to be destroyed or left unprotected.
But the few local folks who possessed courage enough to stand and try to scratch the surface of this contentious issue were made to feel like they were doing just that. Though, no less intent upon the protection of the area than their orange sticker-clad opponents, these folks were booed and hissed by the sticker-affixed crowd when they advocated a deeper, more measured, and local approach to that protection.
The fact is, when it comes to Gold Butte, there is no simple solution. For the sticker-wearing crowd, the answer is to just slap another federal designation on it and rely on the federal land agencies to solve all the problems for us. But past experience has indicated that approach hasn’t worked well at Gold Butte. The real on-the-ground solutions are more complex than that. And it is the locals that have dealt with them best.
As with every simplistic solution, the devil shows up in the details. Every previous attempt at legislating a National Conservation Area (NCA) at Gold Butte in the past seven years has come thickly knotted in the strings of an enviro agenda. For example, each one has provided carefully detailed maps showing more than 300,000 acres to be locked up as new federal wilderness in the area. But none of them have ever bothered to go into the same specificity and micro-detail on maintaining existing access and codifying all the roads that will remain open in perpetuity, which is the main concern of locals who most use the area. None of them have explored the myriad of problems that might arise by the new wilderness designations. None have made provision for allowing the City to access its water rights located in the Virgin Range, well inside a proposed new wilderness area. None have addressed how springs and bubblers for wildlife management will be accessed and maintained in those areas. There are hundreds of similar details and problems posed by these previous efforts that simply can’t be addressed by touting a simplistic message on an orange shirt-sticker.
It was just those kinds of devilish details that the Mesquite City Council delved into last week at their meeting. For the first time since 2010, when a previous council quickly passed a resolution to support legislation for NCA designation with wilderness at Gold Butte, the council members were actually scratching the surface and starting to explore the really tough questions. Undeterred by the simplistic platitudes of the low-information crowd, the council brought some new depth to the ongoing discussion in their action last week. They explored a thoughtful middle path that could commence a more meaningful and in-depth discussion about the real thorny issues involved with protecting Gold Butte.
The council members should be commended for pushing beyond those orange stickers, and their meaningless platitudes, and seeking common ground to hopefully start bringing real, meaningful and locally-led protection to the area.
