Jim Chilton is one of hundreds of ranchers targeted by environmental groups for allegedly allowing cattle to despoil the West's backcountry. Now Mr. Chilton is showing ranchers how to turn the tables on the green groups by using their own playbook.
The Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson is known for its lawsuits against ranching practices -- and for its methods of posting photos on the Internet that it says depict land destruction. So when the Center came after Mr. Chilton, he struck back with a defamation suit in Arizona Superior Court in Tucson last year.
He produced his own photos of lands the group claimed he spoiled in order to argue that their photos had exaggerated the damage. He snapped one photo, for example, of a hillside featured on the Center's Web site to show that what looked like barren earth was just a tiny patch surrounded by lush grass.
After a jury trial this year, Mr. Chilton was awarded $600,000, including $500,000 in punitive damages against the environmental group. "I had to decide whether I was a cowboy or a wimp," Mr. Chilton says. "I decided to be a cowboy...and not ignore people saying bad things about my ranch." The Center denies wrongdoing and has appealed the decision.
Good for him. BTW, an interesting wrinkle is raised by this observation in the article:
A third of the Center's $3 million in income in 2003 mainly came from court awards and settlements. Center officials say much of the money from those awards covers the group's legal costs. Much of its other money comes from such things as membership dues, donations and foundation grants.
Note that the Center only claims that much of their legal fees and awards goes to pay legal expenses, which perhaps implies that at least some goes to other purposes. Like, maybe, salaries? Maybe these public interest law firms aren't just in it to go good; maybe they're in it to make money for themselves and their organizations? After all, Birkenstocks are getting pretty pricey.
Update: Well, maybe it's not the profit motive. In a long feature on this story, the Phoenix New Times reports:
The Center's members truly believe in their mission. (Even Chilton admits this.) None of them is getting rich; not even close. They're fighting to protect endangered species and preserve wild places, and on the latter front, at least, they've been wildly successful.
But the New Times story has some unsettling other details: Like Forest Service employees contibuting to the Center's litigious environmentalists:
The Forest Service biologist who supervised the chub studies [on Chilton's land], Stefferud, has donated money to the Center over the years, as he admits. (New Times found records indicating he gave at least $200 in 2002 alone.) "There's nothing wrong with contributing to the Center," he says. "For a long time it was on the United Way form and you could contribute as part of your paycheck. A lot of employees did it that way." His wife Sally also worked on the case as a senior fish biologist for U.S. Fish and Wildlife.
Meanwhile, another Forest Service employee penned a report claiming that the Chiltons' ranching was likely to harm the Lesser Long-Nosed Bat, another endangered species. That employee is married to a biologist who also donated to the Center -- a man who even co-authored a research paper on ponderosa pine with one of the Center's founders, Kieran Suckling. (Since no one has ever been able to prove that the bat in question lives on the Chiltons' allotment, that issue eventually went away.)
To the Chiltons, those ties were clear evidence that the government was not a neutral party, simply acting as mediator between their interests and those of the environmentalists. Instead, the government and the environmentalists were one and the same.
Like the New Times story says, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Having a government employee giving money to a litigious environmental group suing the same guy the government scientist is investigating sure looks like a conflict of interest and potential for prejudgment to me.
