Wise Use Movement Founded as Industry-Funded Anti-Environmental Grassroots Campaign

In August 1988, Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb convened the Multiple Use Strategy Conference in Reno, Nevada, launching the “Wise Use” movement. The conference brought together 250 representatives from timber, mining, ranching, and oil interests to coordinate an industry-funded campaign against environmental regulation disguised as grassroots activism.

The conference produced a “Wise Use Agenda” demanding the opening of all public lands to resource extraction, weakening of the Endangered Species Act, elimination of wilderness designations, and legal protections for corporations against environmental lawsuits. Arnold explicitly described the strategy as creating the appearance of popular opposition to environmentalism while serving industry interests.

Major funders included the American Petroleum Institute, coal and mining companies, timber corporations, and right-wing foundations including Olin, Scaife, and Bradley. The movement created hundreds of front groups with names designed to sound like citizen organizations: People for the West, Alliance for America, Blue Ribbon Coalition. These groups organized public hearings, filed lawsuits, and lobbied Congress while obscuring their corporate backing.

Arnold, a former public relations consultant for the timber industry, was explicit about the movement’s tactics in interviews: “We created a citizen movement to support an industry position.” He advocated for making environmentalism “socially unacceptable” through aggressive media campaigns and legal harassment.

The Wise Use movement pioneered tactics later adopted by climate denial campaigns: creating doubt about scientific consensus, attacking environmental organizations as “extremists,” and framing corporate exploitation of natural resources as defending ordinary Americans’ livelihoods. Many Wise Use leaders and organizations would later become central to climate denial efforts, funded by the same fossil fuel interests. The movement demonstrated how industry could manufacture the appearance of grassroots opposition to regulation.