February 25, 2001 Missoulian article by Michael Jamison: Air of accusation in the Flathead

KALISPELL — If you're going to put your money where your mouth is, you'd better be ready to eat some cash.

Flathead Valley businesses that contributed to environmental groups are finding themselves on the receiving end of a loosely organized economic boycott, victims of their own charity.

These days, environmentalists are not real popular in some corners of the Flathead, These days. loggers and miners and snowmobilers and off-road vehicle fans are feeling squeezed out of the woods, and some blame environmentalists for any number of social and economic ills.

Said Stokes, "Nobody elected the Fourth Reich, the green Nazis, the environmentalists,"

A couple of months ago, Stokes dropped by the Web page of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, a Missoula-based environmental group. To his delight, the group had posted a list of business contributors as a way of saying thanks.

If you support the agenda of the "green Nazis," Stokes says, by all means spend lots of money at businesses that contributed to the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. If you do not support the "Fourth Reich," he says, do what you feel is the right thing.

For many of his listeners, the right thing has been an economic boycott, bringing the pressure of the pocketbook to bear on the already-strapped Flathead economy.

The problem, say business leaders, is that Stokes only tells a small sliver of the whole story.

The picture of environmentalists as the enemy is simplistic, they say, and ignores factors such as global commodity markets, international finance, historical landuse practices, social shifts, demographics,

changing economies. For locals to hit locals economically because of differing beliefs is ill-advised, they say, and can only lead into an even darker fiscal future.

"If you want to talk about creating a strong local economy," said Greg Sullivan, "people have to start buying locally."

According to Sullivan, the brewery accepted an invitation to participate in an Alliance-sponsored micro-brew festival, seeing the event as a marketing opportunity. It provided some-cut-rate kegs and a few bucks in charitable contributions.

But what Stokes fails to mention, Sullivan says, is that the brewery has long been one of the most generous community contributors in the Flathead, giving what they can to anyone who asks.

In fact, not long after providing cheap kegs to the Alliance, Great Northern gave cheap kegs to the local chapter of the National Rifle Association.

Regardless of how you define community, it remains certain that the informal economic boycott is having an impact. At Great Northern Brewery, for instance, corporate citizenship is being reconsidered.

In short, a business that at one time gave to anyone and everyone who knocked on the door is tightening the purse strings on community involvement. And other businesses are following suit, curbing community charity in order not to jeopardize the bottom line.

"Maybe," Stokes said, "that's a pretty smart move."

But Trout, the local Chamber of Commerce president, doesn't see it that way. Neither does former Whitefish City Council member Jan Metzmaker.

"These businesses do great things for our town," Metzmaker said. "They support every dancea-thon, marathon, walk-a-thon, everything you can imagine. We have all benefited from their charity." Said Trout, "We've been able to do that other communities our size couldn't even dream of because our businesses have been so incredibly supportive and selfless."

But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Stokes believes those are certainly desperate times. No longer will he and his listeners sit down to hammer out consensus with environmentalists. No longer will they do business with people who support the enemy.

"I've heard all they have to say," Stokes said, "and I'm not interested anymore."

If the businesses on his list disavow their support of the Alliance in writing, he said, he'll applaud them publicly and give them free air time. Otherwise, they can sleep in the bed they made for themselves.

Dave Farr, for one, is feeling mighty comfortable in his bed. Owner of a sporting goods store in Whitefish, Farr also is a contributor to the Alliance, among other groups.

"I used to try to give a little something to anyone who asked," Farr said. "If these people want to politicize and polarize my contributions, then I'm just going to end up giving more and more to people I believe in and less and less to people John Stokes believes in. If they push it until I have to choose, until it has to be one or the other, then I'll choose." Said Farr: "If people have to let a conservative talk-show host make up their minds for them, if they can't even decide how to spend their own money, if they won't check the facts themselves, if they won't come in and talk with me about my views as a business person and as an individual, if they won't try to change my mind with reasoned argument, then I guess this valley's going to have an economic war."

Farr sees more than a bit of irony in the fact that he gives, generosity to the Flathead Search and Rescue outfit, which spends considerable time and resources each winter searching for and rescuing snowmobilers, among others. He also sees some irony in the fact that he belongs to conservative, pro-business groups.

But the biggest irony, accordiiig to Farr, is that even as Stokes named names on the radio station, his advertising agents were trying to sell Fan air time.

Stokes says that was an oversight, and insists his station will not accept advertising from known sympathizers of groups he calls environmental extremists,

The greatest irony, however, might be that the very methods employed by the anti-environmental activists were fine-tuned by none other than the environmentalists themselves, It is as if Stokes and his followers have torn a page straight from the how-to book on environmental activism.

For decades, economic boycotts have been a fundamental tool of many movements. Even giants like Exxon were hard-hit after disasters such as the oil spill in Valdez.

Every day, people make economic decisions based upon principle. They choose to shop downtown rather at the big box store because they dislike the, concentration cC corporate wealth or the treatment of employees or factory conditions in China. They buy American instead of Japanese because of philosophical concerns. They refuse to frequent certain stores because those stores support causes they oppose.

And according to Stokes, the West can expect more of the same as long as traditional industries are marginalized. Even auto giant Ford Motor Co. is not immune. A message distributed by an officer of Montanans for Multiple Use — a nonprofit group that seeks more public land development and access — takes Ford to task for giving a $5 million grant to the National Audubon Society.

Audubon Society members, the message says, are "extrethists to the core."

If the rhetoric seems hot that is because it is. and that is because it is. And according to Stokes, it is bound to get hotter. Every mill that closes, every acre set aside for conservation, every job that is lost brings it one degree closer to the boiling point.

— to known environmentalists, he said.

The anger he refers to stands out bold, in blocky red letters on a white background, plastered across the bumpers of trucks driving Flathead roads.

"Have you bitch-slapped an environmentalist today?" the bumper sticker asks.

Tired of feeling intimidated and disenfranchised, Whittaker tried an experiment last month, using his computer to make his own bumper sticker.

His bumper sticker read: "Have you smiled at an industry stooge today?

"But it proved what I suspected," Whittaker said. "Only one opinion will be tolerated in Flathead County."

And that has people like Metzmaker worried about the future of her remarkably diverse community.

Stokes, for one, is not concerned about dueling boycotts. He feels he is in a large majority, and that any other minority could not sustain a meaningful boycott of his advertisers.

never will.

But Clarence Taber, president of Montanans for Multiple Use, believes it may get worse before it gets better. His group is not officially backing any boycotts, he said, but he understands well of those carrying the banner.

But at least we are in it together, Trout countered.

"The sad thing about all this," Trout said, "is that if they all sat down at the table and talks they’d find that they all want pretty much the same thing."