For what it is worth, I object to the last purpose in the SCOT policy statement: "Cooperate with all organizations or agencies with similar purposes."
SCOT itself may be fine, but the practice of throwing support automatically to "all organizations or agencies with similar purposes" is indiscriminate and single issue fascist.
The problem is there are all kinds of crooks and corruption in the environmental movement, and no police or politician dares stand up to them because the crooks can activate the networks of organizations with a knee jerk appeal. As long as groups like SCOT, and now ours, are committed to cooperate with "ALL ORGANIZATIONS AND AGENCIES," no one even has to check out the causes, organizations, policies or issues in any particular case.
I know of a couple particular examples from Sacramento, California, where my family owns a little land.
In one case, an environmental group opposed allowing a farmer to build homes on some farm land southeast of Sacramento. A well funded developer bought the farm land at farm land prices, and paid a large amount of money to the environmental group (who had no right or legal standing at all in the case) in return for their consent to build a shopping mall on the land. The developer also made a large contribution to the election campaign of a former governor, and built his mall. Later, when another developer proposed to build another shopping mall on the Southwest side of Sacramento, the first developer objected to the competition. The environmental group he bought objected to the land use, and the governor's State environmental agency (which is not supposed to get involved in local zoning) blocked development.
In another more recent case, the Nature Conservancy has used its real or perceived clout to protect an endangered species of snake that once lived under the runway and in the surrounding floodplane of the Sacramanto Airport. The Sacramento City Council and the Sutter County Board of Supervisors has somehow made the Nature Conservancy the official arbiter of development in the entire area (which is probably unconstitutional). What has happened is the Nature Conservancy has extorted $250,000,000 from two developers, plus a multimillion dollar annual management fee to allow really intense development (I mean intense, like you haven't seen in Austin) in exactly the area where the marsh was and the snake lived, while virtually condemning land owned by others (who haven't paid the extortion) as mitigation... potential snake habitat.
My family's land is on a hill, above the flood plane, where the snake never lived, but the Nature Conservancy says it might become snake habitat as long as we grow rice there. In order for my family to develop the land my family bought and has farmed for a hundred years, we have to sell to a developer with enough money to pay the Conservancy extortion, so he can develop it as intensely as he needs to make a profit after paying the extortion.
My point is not just personal or even especially critical in our little case. As long as the government has appropriated the power to micromanage details of our lives that they were never supposed to mess with, we will have political special interest groups go to government with demands to micromanage something the interest group has no right to control. I suppose we now must fight those battles in the hope that the people being imposed on can fight back. I think that squabbling is at the root of the nasty, divisive bitterness in our government today.
The problem is that interest groups are now forming networks of interest groups that raise funds under misleading causes (I've seen my breast cancer research donations spread to other groups that lobby on school curriculum on nutrition and in Kerry Campaign ads). The organizations in the network log roll their lobbyists to form these huge coalition movements that are far to big to investigate, debate or act responsibly in individual cases. In fact their power is greater if there is no internal debate or decision process; they become a huge, terrible, unresponsive monster no one will even consider opposing.
I agree with most SCOT activities, I just object to the last line. Since we are SCOT members, maybe we should suggest they be careful who they support. I hope our support doesn't go through SCOT to PITA or GREENPEACE.
I sent the following reply:
Gary,
Thanks for the response. I share your passion 100% but don't have any personal examples that I can relate.
I have known of SCOT for many years. They are a highly respected and very conservative organization that has significant clout with TPWD and the state legislators. The key words in that bullet point are "having similar objectives." PETA, Green Peace and the like don't have similar objectives (they oppose the use of wildlife and the use of land as you well know), therefore I am 99.9 % sure that SCOT would never cooperate with them. I will forward your e-mail to Jack King of SCOT to see if he would like to address your concern in more detail. I will guarantee you that even on the very slim chance that SCOT cooperates with such groups FCS will never cooperate with them as long as I am the President. As no one has run against me in the last two elections it looks like I'll hold that post for some time to come.
Fifteen months or so ago, when we choose to support a larger organization a couple of members voiced concerns that we would be controlled by the larger organization. At the time we choose to support the NRA by a narrow majority. I'll be the first to say that I don't approve of everything that the NRA does but they have a much greater chance of making an impact with our $35 donation than we would on our own. They certainly have made no attempt to control us. They send me the same stuff for FCS that they send to me as a regular member.
I pushed for supporting a larger organization because I felt (and still feel) that it was important that we be known for more than just a Christian hunting and fishing club. True we have devotionals at some events and prayer at most events but I felt that it was important that we have some outward focus. We used to have "Service Projects" such as roofing a house, installing a water heater, helping people move, and donating wild game but we rarely had good participation at those events and I got tired of beating my head against the wall trying to badger guys to help. I eventually removed it from the FCS In Action (what we do) section of the main page on our Website and from our brochure as something that we are known for (although it is still detailed on our Club History page).
In about 10 months, when it comes time to renew our NRA membership, I will put out a discussion and vote on supporting a single organization (NRA, SCOT, or some other organization). We never meant to support two but because we collected an excess of chili money we were able to support SCOT without dipping into the Club's kitty. When the time comes to vote, my vote will again be for an organization other than the NRA.
Thanks again for your interest in this matter.
Following His trail,
Randy