A lasting impact

On a mild and sunny Friday afternoon on the banks of the White River in tiny St. Charles in Arkansas County, they celebrated a happier time.

They hearkened to days when elected representatives worked largely free of resentment to make government a positive force.

Thus they were light years from Nevada.

There, people had taken up arms just days before to support a rancher who defied the federal government.

He grazed his cattle on government land, but hadn’t paid grazing fees for 20 years. Two courts had ordered him to remove his cows, but he asserted Nevada sovereignty and natural water rights and personal freedom.

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Here, near a bluff with the White River below, about a hundred people-bureaucrats, environmental preservationists and locals-celebrated that the federal government had long ago taken ownership and control of thousands of acres of surrounding wetlands and bottomland.

They celebrated the federal government’s protection of the natural habitat for black bears and migratory waterfowl, if not so much the feral hogs who are rooting out river banks and eating all the corn.

And on this occasion they formally celebrated the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s congressionally directed renaming of the White River National Wildlife Refuge as the Dale Bumpers White River National Wildlife Refuge.

In 1993, then-U.S. Sen. Bumpers engineered a land swap.

Potlatch would get federal government timberland in Idaho. In exchange, the federal government would get 41,000 more acres for the White River refuge.

That would connect it via a water corridor to the Cache River refuge, an area also preserved largely by Bumpers. His heroic efforts as governor in the early 1970s were pivotal in fending off the channelization of the Cache.

Together the White and Cache refuges compose the nation’s largest bottomland hardwood forest.

Bumpers, 88 and not so spry, couldn’t make it to the ceremony. But his second son, Bill, an environmental lawyer in Washington, spoke in his stead.

And he choked up, as well he should have.

The pause for him to regain composure as he attempted to relate how much attending the event would have meant to his ailing dad-it provided the soaring eloquence of the afternoon.

U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor was there to tell adoring stories about Bumpers and his dad, David, the former junior U.S. senator and Bumpers’ best friend.

Pryor’s Republican opponent for the U.S. Senate, Tom Cotton, was not there.

It was an appropriate absence. The event was not occurring in his congressional district and was not a campaign occasion.

Beyond that, Cotton voted in January against the prevailing compromise budget bill that Paul Ryan hammered out. Deep in the 1,500 pages was the provision to rename this refuge for Bumpers.

Cotton’s allegiances and themes are less about government’s valuable role than about service to economic libertarian ideals advanced by Wall Street’s Club for Growth and Koch-financed interests.

Those groups assail government as a choker of enterprise rather than provider of needs or solver of problems.

They tend to exalt the privatized commercial use of land for profit rather than the preservation of land for fish and fowl and future generations.

We could always convert these natural rivers to deep ditches so they wouldn’t flood.

We could always drain the swamps. Who likes alligators and water moccasins anyway?

We could always sell the land to profiteers and extol the supposed greater virtue of private property.

The profiteers could always go in with chain saws and take out the hardwoods and haul them to a mill.

And we could always reduce government’s role to the barest matters of public safety and convenience-to police work and prison guarding and highway construction so that taxpayers could subsidize the profiteers’ costs of transporting murdered trees to the mill.

Or we could ponder the occasional merit of public land for all instead of private land for a few.

That is to say we could consider the legacy of Dale Bumpers.

And we could consider that legacy well beyond wetland refuges in Arkansas. Bumpers was a national political figure as a senator, and, as such, he championed and defended public lands nationwide.

The famous Civil War battlefield of Manassas escaped prostitution by a shopping mall almost solely because Bumpers mounted a lone and triumphant vigil on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Some say it was the last time that actual and spontaneous floor debate, rather than pre-emptive money and blind partisanship, decided an issue in the Senate.

Former U.S. Rep. Marion Berry, Democrat from nearby Gillett, told me after the ceremony that the lesson of the day was that Senate elections can matter for a very long time.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 14 on 04/22/2014

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