Rocky Barker of the Idaho Statesman writes a personality piece about WWP’s Jon Marvel:

Barker: Anti-grazing advocate comes with a rough edge (no longer available online)

One person’s response to Rocky’s piece:

Mr. Barker,

While I appreciate that your article on Jon Marvel took a moment to give credit where credit is due— it is most certainly true that Marvel has done more than any other conservation group in the state to fix the flawed public lands grazing program– the bulk of the article’s argument hinges on a demonstrably false premise: that Marvel would be more effective if he would just play “nice.”

First of all, as anyone who’s ever spoken out against this state’s obscenely powerful cattle industry (dairy or beef) can easily attest: the cattlemen most certainly don’t play nice themselves. Implicit intimidation and outright threats are common. I suspect that even those with saintly dispositions would find it difficult, if not impossible, to continue to show “mercy” and/or “understanding” in the face of such harassment.

Second, the fact is that cattle industry lobbyists stretch the truth and outright lie nearly every time they testify in front of the legislature or state agencies (witness Ken McClure’s misrepresentations of existing environmental regulations before the Senate agriculture committee several weeks ago, and Rick Stott’s melodramatic exaggerations about the sensitive nature of information in NMPs, also in front of senate agriculture committee, just last week) yet they never receive fines of the sort that Marvel was slapped with, or even warnings that they better shape up and start getting their facts straight, let alone personality pieces in the paper.

Additionally, those groups who do play nice with the cattlemen have been woefully ineffective in their efforts. The Idaho Conservation League’s (ICL) few tepid attempts to intervene on behalf of people impacted by beef CAFOs (notably the former Sunnyside Feedlot in Washington County) have failed miserably. In the case of Sunnyside Feedlot, ICL had what it needed to shut down an operation that had polluted 22 private domestic wells but they refused to do so because Seth Matthews (the operator) was “a nice guy.” ICL’s inaction meant that Matthews was allowed to continue polluting away, never once being fined by state agencies even as neighbors of the feedlot had their water running black on more than occasion. He ultimately shut down because he stopped making his mortgage payments. ICL does important conservation work, but they are not up to the task of taking on polluters, precisely because it’s more important for them to be perceived as “nice” than to actually be effective.

Mismanaged rangeland grazing is the number one source of water pollution in the state of Idaho (CAFOs are number two). Marvel deals in facts like this– it isn’t his job to be a therapist to the ranchers who’ve caused the problem. Those “ranchers and their families” were responsible for getting themselves into the situation, not Marvel. It was those ranchers and their families who exerted intense political pressure to put a stop to any and all efforts to fix the system before it was already too late to act on the matter without having an immense adverse impact on those ranchers–again, that’s not Jon Marvel’s fault or his problem. Ranchers whining about the welfare of their families after the fact stinks to me of the same hypocrisy exhibited by those “too big to fail” bankers asking to privatize gains and socialize losses: it was their own political agenda of deregulation at all cost that put them where they are; they can have no one to blame for that but themselves.

Another political fact of life in Idaho: this state’s politicians and agency heads have adopted a clear policy of ignoring anti-pollution advocates unless or until those advocates have either threatened to sue or filed suit in court (and then, of course, they dust off their predictable litany of how “mean,” “radical,” “crazy” or “irrational” we are). I (and I’m sure Jon Marvel too) am all for rational discussion and reasoned, fact-informed debate about these issues. The problem is that those in charge aren’t. Industry’s bottom-line is just more important to them. For evidence of this you need look no further than the recent dog-and-pony show at Idaho State Department of Agriculture on negotiated rule making on pathogen drift from dairies utilizing pressurized irrigation systems. You can listen to the first meeting here  and the second here. Even though DEQ experts made clear at the second meeting that (under certain PSIs and wind conditions) dairies using pivots to dispose of their waste are discharging up to 1200 gallons every 8 hours off property (a determination arrived at via basic physics), ISDA refused to take any action. Even though public health experts from Johns Hopkins explained that there are very real public health threats from this kind of drift (including the risk of infection with Livestock Associated MRSA– a form of MRSA resistant to more classes of antibiotics than Hospital Acquired MRSA) ISDA has yet to bring everyone back to the table to continue discussion.

In your article, you draw a portrait of Jon Marvel’s “callous[ness]” by way of a single example of your interaction with him outside a court room. I have another interpretation to offer of that incident: the cutting irony Jon had to offer you was the frustration of a man rightfully fed up with excuses being offered in defense of an indefensible status quo. Without experiencing and confronting the pressure, intimidation, willful ignorance, bigotry, short-sightedness, and truly ‘callous’ disregard for the welfare of anyone outside their immediate family regularly practiced by the cattle industry, it is unfair and unjust to judge Jon’s attitude. I’ve been fighting the CAFO fight for a considerably shorter period of time than Marvel’s been fighting irresponsible ranchers, but I can tell you this for certain: possessing a mean streak is not a choice in these battles, it’s matter of survival.