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Article Excerpt
Introduction
Stories of conflict, values, and power underlie the spirit of political science work, and as Deborah Stone (2001) notes, these "causal stories" can help explain policy more so than our mainstream ideas and rational expectations for politics to be like a market place. (1) This is a story about the Grand Canyon, one of the most treasured natural areas in the world, let alone the United States.
Indisputable areas of wilderness exist within several crown jewel National Park Service (NPS) units in the continental United States. In particular the Grand Canyon National Park (GCNP), Glacier National Park, and Yellowstone National Park contain large, relatively undisturbed ecosystems. These "indisputable" areas give reason for pause--why are they not protected under the 1964 Wilderness Act? (2) Specifically, why does GCNP, as one of the most pristine and important natural sites in the world, lack the highest degree of protection that United States environmental policy affords? As Stone would suspect, different individuals each have a story that exposes a different purpose. Preferences and preclusions about what kind of relationship the public should have with the Grand Canyon are embedded in these stories, and the structure of conflict has determined which stories became dominant.
The rest of the article will describe our theoretical approach to the story of conflict in the Canyon structured within Schattschneider's model of conflict. We then present the GCNP case study based on historical documentary and interview-based research. We conclude with a discussion of what the case demonstrates about United States Wilderness politics.
Theoretical Framework
Schlager and Blomquist (1996) survey the field of policy studies and note that three frameworks have promise in explaining policy processes--advocacy coalitions (Jenkins-Smith & Sabatier, 1993), institutional rational choice (Ostrum, 1991), and the politics of structural choice (Moe, 1990). While these are undoubtedly important contributions, we suggest here, consistent with Stone's constructivist perspective, that the logic of policy inquiry needs to include an appreciation for how a public interest is constructed. This is essential to public policymaking and political conflict provides critical insight into how this may occur. Stone (2001) asserts that the public interest is constructed in the political community, the polls, by establishing stories that tell cause and effect, relationship, and imply right action--and that policy conflicts are essentially about establishing the story of each public interest. Land management is no exception. Wilderness policy in the GCNP has changed from a consensual plan to one of conflict that favors opponents. Early plans for the GCNP were guided by a story of preservation of pristine habitat and primitive recreational opportunities that was largely guided by the NPS and local/regional actors. However, Cawley (1993) argues that consumptive users, including recreationists who use motorized vehicles, felt that a conservation ethic that obstructed their interests had been institutionalized within the federal land management agencies by the 1970s. (3) Thus, they felt they had to introduce higher levels of conflict into the policy process. This was done to challenge the meaning of conservation where they hoped to turn the causal story of wilderness from that of preservation, to that of a "protest against industrial society" (Cawley, p. 45).
Few scholars provide a better way to organize the elements of this conflict and its influence on governance and policymaking than E.E. Schattschneider (1960). Therefore, we employ Schattschneider's model to draw out the influence of conflict relevant to the context of GCNP Wilderness politics. This framework has been used in wildlife and land management analyses providing notable advances (Cawley, 1993; Nie, 1999, 2004), which all emphasize that the nature of conflict has a deep influence in the construction of meaning in environmental policy.
Schattschneider's (1960) approach uses the key concepts of scope, visibility, and socialization. Scope is probably the most important aspect to the model. Schattschneider writes, "At the nub of all politics are: first, the way in which the public participates in the spread of the conflict and, second, the processes by which the unstable relation of the public to the conflict is controlled" (p. 3). Further, "The scope of conflict is an aspect of the scale of political organization and the extent of political competition. The size of the constituencies being mobilized, the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of conflicts people expect to develop have a bearing on all theories about how politics is or should be organized" (p. 20). Thus, who is in the fight and who has been excluded are key elements of the conflict. Agents in a conflict want to control the scope of the conflict in order to win the struggle. A group winning a conflict wants to limit the scope of conflict, to keep others from aiding the losing side. Thus, scope is one indication of how conflict biases a specific outcome.
Schattschneider's second concept is visibility, or the purposeful management of conflict issues. "Dominance [in politics] is related to intensity and visibility, the capacity to blot out other issues. It is related also to the fact that some issues are able to relate themselves easily to clusters of parallel cleavages in the same general dimension" (p. 74).
Sometimes an idea gains currency because of what Schattschneider calls a parallel cleavage. That is, the specific struggle reflects and is affected by an important and larger division or movement in society.
Schattschneider's third concept, socialization, is about determining the correct level of government (i.e., the role of the state). There are two important points to the socialization of conflict. One is that a conflict is organized within the sphere of visibility and then defined in a way that will expand the legitimacy of actors. Thus, he believed the expansion and organization of conflict is generally done in the name of justice, equality, consistency, and equal protection, which are essential in building the image of a public interest, even when it is a thinly veiled private interest (Mileur, 1992). Importantly, Schattschneider believed that "the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power" (p. 68, emphasis in original), and that because opponents in a conflict do not usually agree on how to define an issue, "He who determines what politics is about runs the country" (p. 68).
Wilderness in the National Park Service?
Why is Wilderness designation an issue at all in a federal agency that affords the highest level of protection to resources? One reason is that in 1964 Congress reserved its prerogative to protect some lands "In order to assure that an increasing population accompanied by expanding settlements and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all area within the United States" (Wilderness Act of 1964). Even though NPS land is highly protected for some ecological values, these values are in competition with other values, such as development pressures to aid or increase visitation. The Wilderness Act of 1964 defines Wilderness as a place that retains its "primeval" qualities and where "the earth and its community of life is untrammeled by man." More specifically, Wilderness,
(1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces...
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