In early 1981, Secretary of the Interior Jim Watt telephoned me in my office at the other end of the two-square block U.S. Department of the Interior building in Washington, D.C. Ron Arnold was headed my way to research his book “about what we’re doing here,” Jim reported. “Tell him everything you know.”
For a couple of hours, I spoke with Ron, a bespectacled man with prematurely white hair, a matching beard, and a ready smile. In the months that followed, I answered lengthy telephone calls as he conducted his research, and I saw him often in meetings with Watt presiding.
In January 1982, At the Eye of the Storm: James Watt and the Environmentalists was published by Regnery. It was a comprehensive and in-depth examination of why Watt’s commitment to implement President Ronald Reagan’s policies caused such a furor and made Watt a lightning rod. In Arnold’s view, it was nothing short of a “religious war.” It came as a surprise to Watt, whose born-again Christian bona fides were well known and the subject of ridicule inside the D.C. Beltway. “I did not know that,” Watt told me, “not until I read Ron’s book.”
It was the first of many books that Arnold, who died recently at 84 years old, authored, co-authored, or edited for publication. All reflected his insistence on getting the facts precisely right by using primary sources and documenting the most minor or obscure detail. All demonstrated his keen analytical mind. In the process, he became the leader of what he dubbed the “Wise Use Movement,” the sponsor of scores of coalition-building conferences, and the friend, mentor, and ally to those across the country who found themselves, like Watt, “at the eye of the storm” brought by radical environmental groups, their corporate and foundation sponsors, and federal bureaucrats.
Ronald Henri Arnold, born in Houston on Aug. 8, 1937, was adopted by his grandparents and grew up in San Antonio. He studied music at the University of Texas at Austin and played the French horn in the San Antonio Symphony. After traveling the country to find “the perfect place to live,” he selected Seattle and began his career as a technical illustrator for Boeing Airplane Company in 1961 while matriculating at the University of Washington. A decade later, he founded a photojournalism publishing company, Northwoods Studio, freelancing for outdoor and natural resource industry magazines. He befriended loggers, miners, oilmen, ranchers, and others whose lives in the rural West were disrupted by the environmental juggernaut that led to the election of President Jimmy Carter in 1976. He wrote a regular column for the Bellevue Journal-American. And from 1976 to 1981, he was a contributing editor of Western Conservation Journal and Logging Management Journal, where his 1979 magazine series, “The Environmental Battle,” won the American Business Press 1980 Editorial Achievement Award. That award brought him to Washington in 1981.
At the Eye of the Storm catapulted Arnold into a three-decades-long career as a featured speaker throughout much of the English-speaking world regarding the increasingly powerful environmental movement and its impact on ordinary Americans. In 1984, he assumed leadership of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise in Bellevue. In 1987, he authored Ecology Wars: Environmentalism as if People Mattered, and in 1988, he founded the Wise Use Movement, derived from the definition of Teddy Roosevelt’s “conservation,” meaning “wise use,” to advocate “productive harmony between people and nature.” A former Sierra Club member, Arnold thought himself a “strong conservationist” but believed environmental groups exaggerated or invented environmental threats to advance narrow political goals that had little to do with safeguarding natural resources. He prophetically warned, “public hysteria is going to destroy industrial civilization.”
In 1994, he authored Trashing the Economy: How Runaway Environmentalism is Wrecking America, and then in 1997, in response to what the FBI considered the most significant domestic terror threat, he published EcoTerror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature: The World of the Unabomber. That environmental groups were funded massively by wealthy corporations and foundations was thoroughly and meticulously documented by Arnold’s 1999 magnum opus Undue Influence: Wealthy Foundations, Grant-Driven Environmental Groups, and Zealous Bureaucrats That Control Your Future. In 2007, his Freezing in the Dark: Money, Power, Politics and The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy further documented how environmental groups were not part of a grassroots movement but were, in today’s vernacular, astroturf.
Arnold’s efforts spurred congressional hearings and reports and earned him appearances on ABC News, Nightline, CBS News, 60 Minutes, TBS Network Earth, the evening news on all television networks, and over a thousand radio and television talk shows, as well as coverage by Time, People, U.S. News & World Report, Outside, the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Examiner, and Los Angeles Times. His nearly five hundred op-eds were placed in a host of national magazines and newspapers. Later, he was a frequent commentator for the Washington Examiner and other publications. His fame brought him proffers of university honorary degrees, but, proud to be a self-educated man, he declined them all.
Arnold ensured that it was not just his voice that was heard on the matters that had captured his professional life. He sought out, in his words, “new and rising nonfiction authors with politically incorrect views who could not find a brave publisher.” I was the beneficiary of his largess when, in 1994, he edited and published my first book, It Takes A Hero: The Grassroots Battle Against Environmental Oppression, which profiled fifty ordinary people forced into political activism to defend their rural way of life. Arnold urged that I do more by writing a “Credo” to define “the men and women of these pages … the true environmentalists.” As amazing as were the people featured, that Credo was the book’s singular element.
Arnold’s role as a visionary Paul Revere, builder of coalitions, and mentor was revealed best by his editing and publishing, in 1994, of Storm Over Rangelands: Private Rights in Federal Lands by Nevada cattle rancher Wayne Hage. According to Hage’s daughter, Ramona Morrison, “Ron was courageous, generous, and honest” and “a meticulous editor tenaciously requiring documentation for every assertion in the book.” That tenacity “paid off because the U.S. Supreme Court law library [purchased] nine copies [of Storm Over Rangelands].”
Arnold was preceded in death by his wife Janet and survived by his daughters and grandchildren. He is mourned by all in the Wise Use Movement who knew him, benefited from his friendship and sage counsel, called him friend, and now stand on his shoulders. Those who did not know him can only marvel that he foresaw a time when radical environmentalists, driven by a religious fervor, would take over the country and put it on a path toward the destruction of our modern industrial civilization.
William Perry Pendley, a Wyoming lawyer, served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump and, for three decades, provided pro bono representation to rural Americans, including before the U.S. Supreme Court.
