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Even in the middle of a dreary, rain-soaked
November day, the northwest Arkansas county of Newton is stunningly
beautiful. Silver creeks wind through valleys reminiscent of those
in the American Rockies. Surprising vistas of gray mountains capped
by clouds and dotted with green spread out beneath cave-studded,
rocky bluffs. A stillness washes over the visitor who takes time
to stop and smell the spicy-sweet earthiness of the forest or
listen to the rustling of wildlife below the 
canopy
of leafless trees. Amazingly, only a few years ago this peaceful
countryside was rife with hostility, but the efforts of citizens,
community leaders, the University of Arkansas and the National
Forest and Parks services have introduced an atmosphere of cooperation
and, if not resolution, at least truce.
The cultural landscape of Newton County has always been varied. Isolated by inadequate roads and hilly terrain, the area didn't lend itself to farming or large-scale timber operations and it became a sort of haven for those who looked for personal freedom, or sometimes even freedom from justice. The 1880's and 90's saw a boom in the economy of Newton County, with Jasper and Marble City (later to be called Dogpatch) becoming stopping places for livestock drives on the way to the railroad at Harrison. Around the turn of the 20th century large timber companies bought the land that now holds the Buffalo River National Park and fairly exhausted the forests of usable timber by the late 1950's and the area remained fairly unknown outside of Arkansas until the dawning of the back-to-earth movement.
In the latter part of the 1960's an influx of people seeking to "drop out" came to Newton County. With them, they brought mostly urban conceptions about nature and preserving the earth. Their ideas about the proper way to live in this bucolic atmosphere were frequently in direct opposition with the locals who relied heavily on timber harvesting and livestock farming for their livelihoods. But when the Forest Service condemned the lands around the Buffalo River for the establishment of a National Forest in 1972, the chips really began to hit the fan.
Families and landowners were forced to sell their properties to the federal government for the establishment of the Buffalo River National Forest.
"Here you have this county, no one's really paid any attention to it, and then in '72 - bam - you've got a national river and all of the sudden the county has lost a portion of its individual lands," said Cindy McCauley, a graduate student in Rural Sociology at the University of Arkansas.
The economy, historically among the poorest in the state, plunged as more than half of the county's property taxes were eliminated and environmentally-minded "newcomers" lobbied to keep logging out of the national forest.
Battle lines were drawn and the conflict soon caught the ears of national lobbyists.
"[The environmentalists] were on the most part fairly educated. A lot of them had money to back them up and they had just real different ideas on how to do things," Jack Boles, Newton County Agriculture extension agent, said. "Not only their lifestyles, but they viewed the national forest as theirs as much as anybody's because it was a national forest and it belonged to everybody. They had their own ideas on how it should be managed, which flew right in the face of the local population who depended on those forests for their incomes.
"The Newton County Wildlife Association was formed as the local environmental group and the local logger interests were supported by the Society for the Preservation of Ozark Culture. The problem escalated because these issues were taken on by national organizations....The Sierra Club and the timber industry stepped in, so the battle lines grew until basically you had these national interests that had Newton County as their battleground and it just became very volatile."
In 1994, the Cooperative Extension Service of the UA Division of Agriculture, led by Don Voth, professor of rural sociology and Arkansas Extension Service community development specialist, designed a program called Building Common Ground. The project was developed to address divisions in communities whose economies are based in natural resources.
"We're trying to get public feedback, which will be the basis of forest management for the next 10 years, against which the Forest Service can be held responsible by the public," Voth said.
Goals include considering all possible uses for public forests - timber, recreation, watershed and wildlife issues, and the standards to be followed in their management.
He said that typically, when the Forest Service announces a public meeting for planning, "....there'll be 10 people who show up and throw rocks at each other and shrug off any local people."
Voth said the hope for the 4-year-old project is that it will help the affected communities manage their own resources in conjunction with the Forest Service.
"We wanted to link community planning with a larger planning force," he said, "We ran into a lot of places where the Forest Service said they couldn't work with the community because there's so much infighting."
In 1998 the program was presented in Fort Smith to people from Scott, Montgomery and Newton counties -- counties with historical contentions between environmentalists and citizens whose lifestyles have been mainly agrarian.
"We were hoping leadership representing the different perspectives would come," Voth said, "About 40 or 50 people showed up."
Unhappily, there was an abundance of distrust and anger among the various sides from each county, which resulted in several groups walking out of the meeting. Although everyone was encouraged to contribute their thoughts and feelings, Voth said that both sides felt the committee was prejudiced against them and there would be bias regarding whose ideas would be given weight.
Apparently, Newton County is the only county that has been able to effectively manage its conflict to date, and Boles has been credited by many as the catalyst for opening the dialogue. A plain-spoken man, his success appears to come from his empathy with both sides of the issues and his ability to include all members in the dialogue.
Boles said there was no overt conflict when he took his position in Newton County, but he was aware of an abundance of suspicion in the community.
"The local agricultural-based folks were
real leery of anything that the Newton County Resource Council
did because they were started by a group of hippies. They also
were real wary of anything the government did," he said.
"Folks in the Forest Service were real frustrated about anything
that the local residents did, be they environmentalists or property
rights people. And the environmentalists were real leery of anything
the government or the local people did."
Boles said that the Newton County Wildlife Association got information about the Building Common Ground program and because the Extension Service was involved, asked him to help get them involved in the Ft. Smith meetings.
"Eventually about 20 people from Newton County went, from all levels. Some from the environmentalist side, some from the property rights side and some from County government," Boles said, "And to be honest with you, a lot of them went for self-preservation and self-defense because they knew that the other group was going so they wanted to be there to make sure that they didn't get called something that they couldn't defend.
"It was a real interesting meeting," he said, laughing, "Several times people were laying money down who's gonna throw the first punch. There were a couple of shouting matches and when it was all said and done, we separated off into county groups and the folks in Newton County said, you know, we need to keep doing this.
"In fact one of them said, 'Every time we get up in a meeting, it just sends chills up my spine because I know you're going to open your mouth and just spew forth this horrible misinformation and all this, but you know, this is the first time I've ever had a chance to listen to what you really felt and why you're so passionate about this stuff''."
Boles said those who stayed through the entire meeting, about seven people, began to meet together monthly.
"The first thing we did was we said OK, we're going to go around the table and we're going to introduce ourselves, the group that we represent and we're going to talk about what our hopes and dreams are for the future and what we hope to get out of this process. There's got to be a reason to be here. So what's your reason for being here? And we went around the room and it was real neat because everybody basically had the same concerns.
"They wanted a sustainable economy, they wanted jobs here so their children wouldn't have to go to another state for 30 years before they could have retirement income to move back and support themselves. They wanted a natural environment. Everybody realized the treasure that we have, nobody wanted to spoil that."
Faye Knox, director of the Newton County Resources Center and long-time Jasper resident, described the group as "A set of people trying to come up with some venues that we can work together in to avoid potential conflict, knowing that we also bring different perspectives to the table."
She said an example of an issue that might come up could concern silviculture - the art of cultivating a forest.
"Like how is the best way to regenerate white oak so it will be a sustainable resource for the future. In terms of silviculture, I guess there's always a big disagreement, clear-cutting versus shelter wood versus regeneration for new sprouts....how much sunshine does [a tree] really need to regenerate itself," she said.
As the other group members, Knox emphasized the importance of their dialogue.
"The one thing that this group is really doing is that it's really valuing a lot the knowledge of the native people who live here. So those who have been working in the woods or living here for generations, they have as much validity as a silviculturist from the Forest service has. So it's really about, how do you respect the native knowledge and combine that native knowledge with your scientific knowledge to develop a synthesis of what's real. I really think it takes the honoring of both kinds of knowledge. A blending of both kinds of knowledge," she said.
The group has no set agenda at the monthly meetings. Boles said the main objective is simply dialogue, which he and others believe is the key to avoiding violence and major contention. He said the lack of a specific program is a little odd because most of the group members feel they're not accomplishing anything. But the general feeling seems to be that positive things are being accomplished.
Boles related something that someone said at one of the meetings, "He said, 'The level of conflict and violence and everything that we faced just a couple of years ago, I don't think it's possible today. Just for the fact that we're talking to one another. Yeah we're going to disagree, we'll continue to disagree, but that level of animosity is not ever going to get back to what it was. Just because we're talking.'"
"Jack's done a remarkable job of holding this group together," Knox said, "At least it just gives a chance. We haven't done anything remarkable except that people who haven't traditionally had conversations with each other are talking and discovering how much common ground there is."
Three years ago, there was little enough common ground in Newton County. In 1996 Newton County was, as one resident put it, "poised on the brink of bloodshed." An environmentalist was physically attacked and his house was burned down. School children were engaging in fist fights over matters like whose family burned wood to heat their homes.
Tony Collins is Economic Development Coordinator for the Newton County Resource Council and his family has lived in Newton County for "five or seven generations, depending who you ask."
He sees his role in the conflict as that of a peacemaker. With personal and professional ties to members of both the logging and environmentalist factions, Collins put himself on the line to try to get communication going between both groups during the height of the conflict.
While most of Collins' 41 years have been spent in Jasper, he lived in Fayetteville on a couple of occasions. He said the majority of the time he's spent in Jasper, he has worked on a temporary, seasonal basis for the National Forest Service and the Park Service. He plans to go back to work for the Park Service in January as a hydrologic technician studying the water in the lakes, rivers and springs of Newton County.
"I first got exposed (to the environmental issue) from a book called "How to Be an Eco-Warrior" by Dave Foreman, the EarthFirst! founder. I went through this molting process as I call it," Collins said.
"I started out pretty much your average hillbilly, homegrown here in the hills, and in 1987 I had been living in Fayetteville and wanted to come back here to Newton County. I took a job working for the National Park Service here, spelunking. I had a little experience....they couldn't find anybody to go underground so they were desperate I guess.....and I got exposed to all this wonderful preservation of caves and the natural wildness of caves. With that I began to drift pretty extreme to the left," he said.
During that time, Collins had been dabbling in archeological surveying and was approached by the Forest Service. They are required to perform archaeological surveys before they cut timber, and they had few people at the time with experience.
"Well I didn't want to even talk to them, because I didn't want to be involved in the death of all those trees. You know, I was almost a bonafide tree hugger," Collins said, "Finally after the second or third attempt I went to work for them. I began to see what honest silviculture was. What they were actually doing to improve the timber and how it figured in with a gamut of things: wildlife management and that they were taking soils into consideration and water into consideration. After having been exposed to that I had a much better understanding and realized that I had been pretty much led too far to the left because of a lack of knowledge.
From there, Collins moved into wilderness management, an area in which he said he remains fairly liberal politically.
"The folks with the Park Service call me a John Muir purist because I am pretty intolerant of any activity in wilderness," Collins said laughing.
(Muir was a 19th century American conservationist and a crusader for national parks and reservations.)
"Being in the natural sciences I developed some pretty solid ties with the environmental community and since I'd worked in environmental management and that was part of my education, I got with the Forest Service and I was sort of serving as a go-between since I grew up with all those folks that were logging and the environmental folks, trying to ask them to keep it out of our community," Collins said.
He said
that his experiences as a mediator were pretty traumatic. At one
point he was told by a member of the logging community to take
a message to the environmentalists threatening them to back off
"or else." He was also told that if he didn't stay out
of the way after he delivered the message, his house would "burn
with the rest of them." That threat was effective and Collins
said it "pretty much quelched" him.
He said, however, that the most upsetting things to him were how the conflict was tearing up his community and how the children were being affected.
"Children have enough problems growing up they shouldn't have to put up with those kind of conflicts," he said, "Plus it wasn't a local issue that was being fought over either, I felt like big business timber and big business environmentalism came to our small county to fight. It was the battleground and we ended up taking most of the hits and they walked off whistling, both sides. "
He said the people whose livelihood and culture was involved in timber felt the actions of the environmentalist groups were very personal attacks.
"They realized big business environmentalism was leading the way - the Sierra Club and EarthFirst!," Collins said, "But they couldn't see the signs and lobbying support and bumper stickers [that supported their views] as being supplied by big business timber. They just saw that as somebody trying to support a local movement and they were helping save them.
Both Boles and Collins said they felt the conflict was aggravated by the involvement of the government and interest groups, and Collins opined that locals from both sides were used by the groups for political leverage.
In this ages-old type of conflict, information from the Newton County group is broadcast in the same way it was before the advent of telephones or the Internet -- by word-of-mouth.
"Most of the information from the meetings [is disseminated] indirectly," Boles said, "We try to avoid going back to our individual groups, cliques, whatever it may be, and directly saying he said, she said, this is what we did."
Boles said the members of the discussion group are well-known in the community and people know which side of the issue each of them is on, which lends more credence to their input regarding the opposite side's opinions.
"What generally happens," Boles said, "Is you go back and you're among the group of your peers, and the discussion starts up something like, those dadblasted environmentalists! Did you see what they're doing now? And it's a matter of, well, you know, that's not exactly what they're doing. Now the reason they're doing that is this and this. And it kind of quells stuff before it ever starts."
"One of the people we have used to be active in Take Back Arkansas (a grass-roots property-rights movement.) I don't know if he is anymore, but now he's chairman of the County Land Use Plan committee (an entity that prepares zoning ordinances for unincorporated portions of the county) and he's very strong and vocal in property rights issues," Boles said, "People know him and identify him with that. Now he's not officially accepted as the leader of that movement but he's kind of accepted as the mouthpiece so to speak.
"Folks from the environmental community can go back, and the heated discussions that they have among themselves about policy and what to do and how to do it, they say, well you know, the rest of the community has some real legitimate concerns. You know we probably want to keep this in mind when we're coming up with our own policy. That's the kind of way that it's diffused throughout the community. Because it's just individuals understanding more about everybody else. And in that process helping other people and it has a kind of multiplying effect like those realizations themselves."
The dialogue has gone on for more than a year and the result seems to be that Newton County is living a peace that residents are trying hard to maintain. And both sides seem to have come to at least one other collective conclusion.
"It's grown to the point that the common enemy is seen as the federal government," Boles said, "The environmentalists feel like they haven't been done right because they were told one thing and then the government does something else, and the property rights people feel basically the same way, so they don't feel like their input means anything." Boles said.
Some Newton County residents believe the establishment of the Buffalo River as a national park laid the foundations for the strife that erupted two decades later. Hard feelings cropped up between those who saw it as a boon to the economy, and those whose lands were taken away because of it.
"The establishment of the park underlines basically all of the conflict you have in this county. Because of the animosity that was generated, it continues to affect attitudes to this very day," Boles said, "I've tried to explain this to people that I work with and people that I know in Little Rock. They all kind of get the impression that people up here are a bunch of conspiracy kooks, that they're always looking for the government to come take their land away. And I always try to get them to understand, it's not theory to them.
"They've had their land taken away. 
They've had their families run
off of property and declared it's not theirs anymore. They've
lived through it, they've seen and experienced the government
taking their property away. So it's different than what the rest
of the state actually interprets. People are gun-shy here now.
They take anything that's told to them with a grain of salt, and
they have learned to be wary of anything that the government tells
them."
Another point of confusion may be regarding the differences between national parks and national forests.
"The whole mandate, the very existence of the Forest Service, was to provide timber for the United States," Boles said. "That was their mandate. The preservation of the trees would have been a park. They would have established a park and put it under the authority of the National Park Service. But a Forest Service forest, the whole purpose originally was to grow trees for timber. And policies have changed to now it's more of a multi-use concept, but timber is always part of that. Multi-use does not mean that it's going to be an actual park, multi-use means that not only are we going to grow these trees for timber, but we're also going to use it for recreation and for environmental protection and things like that.
Collins said the Forest Service is in an unenviable position, having to meet the expectations of both environmentalists and those who live off the natural resources in those forests.
"It's really hard because you say manage the recreation while you're cutting trees, and so that really stirs people's emotions. Because if you have a hiking trail and you do a timber prescription, even if it's what's best for the timber and even though it's like the third time it's been cut, the people that hike that trail will say, 'They wrecked my favorite hollow here' or 'my favorite mountain top.'"
"There's two ways to look at it," Collins said. "First of all I'll tell you a story. When I was with the Forest Service I was on the State Wilderness Steering Committee. There were four or five of us, and we'd get our backpacks and go walking into the wilderness and we'd sit around the fire at night and drink whiskey and discuss wilderness management.
"One day after one of these, we were hiking
out and we climbed up on a hill and were at an overlook on the
edge of the wilderness, and you could see a clear-cut in the distance.
The chair of the committee said, 'Man I hate that.' We stood there
a minute and we looked at it, and he said, 'You know what? If
the price of toilet paper starts going up, I'm gonna hate that
too.'
"So its a fact that the wood resources out of our national forests are needed and primary to our existence in the United States. So you can take this and twist it any way you want to. Some of the figures I read from the environmental community say that
3 percent of the nation's wood products come from national forests. I don't know if that's true but that's what I read. With that argument you could say, well, 3 percent, it would benefit more people recreationally than it does resource-wise.
"You gotta understand I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth but that's because it just depends on how you look at it and I'm pretty middle ground. Less than 200 years ago we began developing a continent that was totally wilderness. Now, somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of the continental United States has been developed. Altered by man to some extent. So with that argument......it depends on which way you want to push someone's emotions."
Collins contends that this is where the crux of the conflict lies -- in the ability of a handful of smart people to manipulate the figures and use them to shove people in a given emotional direction.
"Actually, probably in the middle somewhere is where we can preserve some wilderness and respect the forest for its intended values of solitude and solitary recreation and have other areas utilized for the resources which we as a nation need," Collins said. "But a lot of people never make it past that emotional barrier of seeing that clear-cut out there. Especially that first experience, it looks pretty bad. Some things are hard to justify."
Collins said the surface of the controversy is smooth right now because of the dialogue between the groups and a greater understanding on both sides of the argument, and these advances at least partially result from the conflict resolution programs.
"It's still there beneath the surface though," Collins said. "The forest industry folks feel like the environmentalists won the battle because (logging) activity has declined, or at least that's the perception, I'm not sure how much that's actually true.
"The environmentalists however, don't feel like they've won any battle because there's still activity going on in the headwaters of the Buffalo River so there's still potential there for conflict. I think what we have now is less volatile than what we had before. Like I said there has been some dialogue and I think there is a little broader understanding among some folks. But also it's not a focus of the political lobbies of both movements now. They're not here stirring the pot.
"I don't personally see any total resolution to this among all groups. Particularly the Sierra Club because if they get there wish, for zero cut, this local timber community sees it as a cultural mainstay and economic mainstay, which can all be debatable.
"There's a constant struggle, there is no absolute pleasing every sector of the public regarding public lands management. Even if you went to zero cut and then went to manage the forest for recreational values, then you'd have some folks more (interested) in the wilderness spectrum of things and other folks who think that maybe you need more campgrounds so it's really impossible," he said. "Those of us who can sort of see both sides of it, all we can do is continue to speak calmly about the benefits of both sides and maintain balance."
Boles retains confidence in Newton County residents' ability to preserve the current peace and their diginity.
"Newton County is full of very progressive people," he said, "very independent-minded people that are not easily swayed by promos or government programs or things like this. But there are certain conditions that we have that don't make it as simple an answer as a lot of people in the state or nation want it to be."