By Michael Howell
Newspaper columnist and wilderness advocate George Ochenski came to Hamilton last week as the featured speaker at the annual banquet and membership meeting of Bitterrooters for Planning. The planning advocacy group is in a tough position politically, located as it is in a Republican dominated county that has eliminated its growth policy. Now, after the recent election, it is also facing a Republican President with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. The group asked Ochenski if he could offer “some encouraging words.” And he did.
He told them a story about “what it’s like to face these kinds of odds and still succeed.” First off, you need to learn to think and talk like a Republican, he said.
“I have a lot of Republican friends,” said Ochenski. “They helped me to think and talk like them.” He said you don’t try to talk to them about the environment. You talk to them about things that concern them, about money, about property values, about jobs. He gave as an example the ban on phosphates that was passed in the Flathead Lake area. It was a big battle against Procter and Gamble. So, the thing to do, according to Ochenski, was to talk to the local Republicans about their own self-interest, about their property values and how they were tied to keeping the lake’s waters unpolluted. He said the economy is often linked to the ecology of the place and good environmental stewardship goes hand in hand with good, sustainable economic development.
Ochenski was not overly optimistic about things, however. He said in his experience, when one party gains total control of the legislature and the executive branch, really bad things can happen. He pointed to the deregulation of the energy in Montana and the selling off of the dams when the Republicans dominated the state with no viable opposition.
“Now we are buying back the dams for $900 million,” he said. He said it was a good example of how dangerous single party rule can be.
Ochenski said that the Republicans are not going to be reaching across the aisle.
“They are going to pass whatever they want and we are going to have to live with it,” he said.
But he urged his audience not to despair. “You get more respect from them for fighting hard than you do for rolling over,” he said.
He also warned the group not to be on the defensive all the time. He said it was more important than ever to bring forth some good legislation and try as hard as you can to sell it.
He said it also helps to show some respect. He said, after all, these people were elected, they represent the people who put them in office, and need to be respected for that.
Ochenski urged the group to “fight on!”