Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

GUEST COLUMN:

Will Reid be remembered as a party warrior or a bipartisan environmental pathfinder?

Reid

Joe Buglewicz / The New York Times

Former Sen. Harry Reid is shown at his office in Las Vegas on July 2, 2019.

Harry Reid, the former U.S. senator from Nevada, will be remembered for many things. In this overheated political season, even in retirement he has been close to the center of the presidential race, as a kingmaker and confidant.

But it is unfortunate that the political polarization of our times clouds over his most lasting accomplishment: Reid showed that a pragmatic environmental politics could achieve significant results in the American West, during a time when much of the region has been, to put it mildly, not friendly territory for environmentalists or the federal government.

The two of us have followed Reid’s career closely, as a journalist and historian on the one hand, and a practicing conservationist on the other. And we have just finished working on a documentary about this history, “The New West and the Politics of the Environment,” which will be released this fall.

Living and working in Nevada, we had reason to pay close attention to Reid, especially after he facilitated a negotiated settlement that ended a century-old water war between California and Nevada and saved Pyramid Lake, an iconic terminal desert lake that is home to the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe and endangered cui-ui, a fish that lives nowhere else in the world, as well as Lahontan cutthroat trout, a threatened inland salmon that can grow up to 40 pounds. The settlement became a model for Native American water settlements around the West.

At the beginning of his career in Congress, Reid was instrumental in creating Great Basin National Park, Nevada’s first and only national park. In a fitting tribute at the end of his career, President Barack Obama approved Reid’s proposal for Basin and Range National Monument, nearly a million acres protecting both mountaintops and desert valleys characteristic of the region, as well as City, a monumental sculpture the size of the National Mall constructed by renowned land artist Michael Heizer.

In between those bookends, during a career that spanned 34 years in Congress, Reid helped create a new, bipartisan model for growing cities in the American West, hemmed in by federal lands, to expand, while funding protection of important wild lands and habitat and access to the outdoors for city dwellers. He crafted compromises in conservative rural counties that designated more than 4 million acres of wilderness.

Reid helped speed the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, stopping the construction of new coal plants in Nevada, encouraging the expansion of solar, and enabling construction of new links in the regional energy grid. He brokered deals that enabled the first ever utility-scale solar power plant in the country to be built on a Native American reservation.

How did Reid get so much done in an era of open hostility toward environmental protection in the American West?

Political power is part of the story. Reid was not shy about wielding power. A boxer as a young man, he brings a pugnacious spirit to political fights. He is adept at exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents. Reid earned the undying hatred of farmers, who had been stealing water from Pyramid Lake, when he maneuvered them into a corner and made them stop. Environmentalists never got everything they wanted from him. Reid knew they needed him more than he needed them. Reid was also a friend to the mining industry, in part because of his own family history and because he knew rural economies needed more than just scenery to survive.

But compromise is the other side of the story. None of these deals could have been done without Reid’s hand guiding compromises between the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe and urban water purveyors on the Truckee River in Northern Nevada, between conservative rural county commissioners and environmentalists over which wilderness areas to protect in perpetuity and which to release for other uses, and between Democratic and Republican members of the Nevada congressional delegation.

Reid’s personal story has fueled his passion to protect the desert environment of the American West and, at the same time, provide pathways for communities and their economies to evolve in a new era.

Reid grew up in a busted-down mining town in Southern Nevada. Growing up, he liked to escape to an oasis in the nearby mountains. He often tells a story about returning to Piute Springs as an adult, to show his wife his childhood idyll, only to find it trashed. The desecration fires his devotion to protecting water and wildlands in the desert.

Some westerners revile the role Reid has played in the political polarization of our times. Others acknowledge, begrudgingly or admiringly, how the master tactician used Senate procedures to his advantage and the advantage of his party.

But it would be a shame if this other important part of his story is forgotten because of partisan politics. While Reid was a partisan fighter, the pragmatic environmental path that he forged is a lesson in compromise across fault lines between parties, between urban and rural, and between the old and new West.

Editor’s note: Sen. Reid will participate in a special virtual screening premiere of “The New West and the Politics of the Environment and a Q&A session from 4-5 p.m. Tues., Sept. 22. To register for the virtual event, visit: TheNewWest.eventbrite.com. The documentary will also stream on kcet.org/thenewwest and the PBS app.

Jon Christensen is an adjunct assistant professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and Luskin Center for Innovation at UCLA. Graham Chisholm is a senior policy adviser at the Conservation Strategy Group. “The New West and the Politics of the Environment” is part of the “Earth Focus” documentary series at kcet.org.