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you have to be good on conservation issues. But then they get to D.C. and all of a sudden the focus shifts to re-election,” said Sisson, who recently bought prop- erty in Montana and met with Zinke at a Republican function in Michigan.
Sisson said he’ll keep close tabs on Zinke, and that, looking forward, it’s better for the conservation movement to support the freshman congressman on his strengths than to attack him for his missteps.
“I think it is far better to have a Ryan Zinke in Congress knocking heads in his caucus on something like LWCF than to try and take a guy like him out,” Sisson said. “The League of Conservation Vot- ers targets him because he doesn’t check off 100 percent of the boxes on their ques- tionnaire, but one party can’t accomplish all the policies we need. It has to be bipar- tisan. So to have some Republicans in the caucus who are working behind the scenes and who are sharing data, I think that is better for the overall good than trying to take someone like that out.”
Sisson spends a lot of time helping Republican lawmakers understand how supporting conservation and environ- mental protections can be politically expedient, a task that can often be some- thing of a lonely road. But he’s found measures of success in crafting the envi- ronmental argument as pro-business
– national parks and public lands draw scores of out-of-state visitors – and even pro-life – look at the number of babies born with neurological defects due to toxic mercury exposure.
“It’s amazing how many Republicans in Congress say, ‘we are not going to des- ignate one more acre of wilderness,’ and then you sit down and explain to them that this is sponsored by bipartisan groups of hunters and anglers and busi- ness leaders, and they’re like, ‘really?’” Sisson said. “Having conversations like that helps, especially if it’s coming from a right-of-center environmental group.”
Zinke, who owns a Toyota Prius, has adopted the increasingly mainstream argument that open spaces and protected land is good for the economy, which is well-documented and an easy sell for pro-business Republicans.
He’s gone as far as to say that “Montana is not for sale,” and this summer broke with a majority of Republicans to vote for an amendment prohibiting a large-scale transfer of federal public lands, which for a time was the issue-du-jour for far-right Republicans, but which Sisson says has passed out of vogue and now calls “polit- ical suicide.”
Zinke also is a proponent for “respon- sible” extraction of natural resources, which he says has been discouraged by environmental litigation, and his
“We live in Montana for a reason, because we enjoy clean water, clean air and the outdoors. But it has to be about multiple use and not single use,” Zinke said. “I think we have lost our way in a lot of ways. We can mine and drill and still be responsible stewards of the land we cher- ish. Coal, oil and natural gas are going to be part of our energy picture for a long time and there is no doubt when it comes to energy that Montana has an important role to play.”
Conservation advocates in Montana say they’d like to see more of the collab- oration-driven efforts that propelled the North Fork and Rocky Mountain Front measures through Congress, and less of the “top-down” approaches that don’t recognize Montana’s diverse interests, like Zinke’s Resilient Federal Forests Act.
They’d also like to see them avoid the political morass that bogged down the efforts for so many years.
“If Teddy (Roosevelt) were alive today, I think he’d applaud the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act and the North Fork Watershed Protection Act as examples of meaningful conservation. He would also say that these bills took way too long to pass and that our next conser- vation achievements need to come more quickly,” Brian Sybert, executive director of the Montana Wilderness Association, said. “There is certainly no shortage of great proposals in the backlog.”
Still, others in the conservation world view Montana’s delegation differently, and while a unified frustration over the political gridlock that often derails envi- ronmental legislation echoes Sybert’s, they note that all three members of Mon- tana’s congressional delegation recognize the intrinsic value of public lands.
Ben Long, a longtime conservation- ist and writer in Kalispell who’s been carefully tracking conservation issues in the region for more than 20 years, said it’s refreshing to see Daines and Zinke willing to explore issues that aren’t nec- essarily associated with the party’s cur- rent mainstream priorities or values. The “bottom line,” Long said, “is that clean air, clean water, good habitat, places to hunt, fish and camp are die-hard Montana val- ues that transcend party politics.”
“But when that gets into the Washing- ton, D.C., hyper-partisan atmosphere, that fact is a casualty of political war,” he added. “I think past controversies such as the wolf wars and timber wars clouded up the waters, but things have really started
arguably demonstrated the tenets of a “Theodore Roosevelt Republican” more earnestly than anyone, said his work on collaboration-driven land management solutions in Montana is proof it can work.
“Out of all these Theodore Roosevelt wanna-bes, I’m the real one,” he said.
As a state senator, Brown spawned a piece of state legislation called “long-arm jurisdiction,” which says that if a foreign company pollutes Montana, the state can reach through the labyrinth of parent companies, corporate connections and subsidiaries to go after any U.S. holdings and hold those interests accountable.
Brown considers himself a pretty good judge of character, and he’s had occasion to spend time with Daines on the North Fork, casting his signature Royal Wulff at the same riffles and engaging in lighting rounds of conversation about both fishing and politics.
That experience, he said, fostered a swelling confidence in Daines’ leader- ship, his personal values and his willing- ness to go out on a limb for Montana’s best interests.
“I think that Daines’ heart in the right place, that he is a sincere acolyte of nature and of Montana values, and a true son of Montana,” Brown said. “We just need to give him time.”
The distinction between Steve Daines the Montanan and Steve Daines the sen- ator, if there is one, isn’t clear from the back of a fishing boat, and while his vot- ing record will continue to serve as the best form of checks and balances against his political rhetoric, today on the North Fork it’s the fishing that’s most revealing.
His laser-focus on the task at hand – fly fishing – is testimony to his enchantment with the outdoors, and his eagerness to chatter about family backpacking trips in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, about which his knowledge is vast, is evi- dence of his understanding of and appre- ciation for the intrinsic value of wild, untrammeled places.
Even his concern for a rainbow trout that he plucks from the North Fork in the afternoon heat trumps his desire for a photo-op, and he chastises the reporter for scribbling in a soggy notebook instead of casting at an undercut bank holding fish.
“Let’s get him back in the water, cool him off,” he tells Heitz after admiring the catch. “That’s a nice looking fish.”
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LEFT: Republican Ryan
Zinke is serving his first
term in Congress.
BEACON FILE PHOTO
version of timber reform includes scal- ing back environmental measures that groups suing frequently rely upon.
oB
to clear lately. I give Daines and Zinke a lot of credit for being reasonable voices as a radical few congressmen try to gut the Land and Water Conservation Fund. So the partisan divide can be bridged, but it can also be blown up when partisans light
OB BROWN, A FORMER SECRETARY of state and longtime Republican legislator from Whitefish, who
ff a bunch of dynamite under it.”
OCTOBER 21, 2015 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM
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