Some of these organizations claim large memberships, such as the Blue Ribbon Coalition here in Pocatello which claims 600,000 members. They arrive at this astonishing figure by counting as members the members of all their affiliated organizations. My guess is they have a couple hundred members in the customary sense in which the word "member" is used.
Other wise-use organizations are obviously just a person or two with PC, fax, and stationery.
The wise-use movement likes to say there are three wings to their movement, "wise use" itself (mostly in the West), "property rights", and the "counties" movement.
The latter sprang from Catron County, New Mexico, and as far as I can tell, it espouses a version of the nullification doctrine, a doctrine that helped lead to the Civil War (in the current version it basically argues that counties are the fundamental unit of government and they have the right to set aside national [and maybe state] laws they don't like).
A number of rural western counties have passed "custom and culture" ordinances that require the federal government to make land use decisions that abide by the county's "custom and culture" as defined by county ordinance. Custom and culture always turns out to be logging, mining, ranching, and, maybe, farming. Counties passing such ordinances are often rural counties witnessing an influx of new residents, whose culture is clearly not mining, logging, or grazing. Catron County is one such case.
There have been tense confrontations in several western counties between county officials and state or federal officials who were trying to enforce the law (usually regarding grazing on public lands).
There has been one court test of the legality of such an ordinance (in Boundary County, Idaho in early 1994). The Idaho (state court) judge ruled that the Boundary County ordinance violated both the Idaho and the U.S. Constitution.
Still some counties pass them because of their intimidation value. Some counties such as Oneida County, Idaho, have passed what I guess I'd call "halfway" ordinances. They haven't gone through all the required steps, so they aren't really county ordinances, so, presumably, the county can't be sued by its residents or other governments.
These ordinances make little way in urban western counties (where the vast majority of westerners live).
It is commonly said that these movements are funded by large corporate interests. This is partly true, but I believe it will be shown that much of their support comes from smaller businesses, especially subdividers and land developers and traditional western extractive industry: timber, mining, grazing (although many of the mining companies are now foreign-owned).
It is often argued that this is a phony movement, just a creature of money. It don't think this is so. They have grassroots activists, but they are a movement that originated with rural elites, not the grassroots as did the labor movement or the environmental movement. I use the word "elite" in the tradition of political science, meaning those in a community who exercise the bulk of political power.
In Idaho and Utah many of the most extreme proponents of "wise use" or "custom and culture" ordinances have been county commissioners, rural state legislators, and some state officials. The average citizen of small western towns is not marching down the highway with a gun in his hand. But then in many rural counties, I believe, what the average person thinks doesn't count because of the existence of very unequal social/political hierarchies.
The names of their leading activists are well known among those who follow the matter even lightly.
The Wall Street Journal (around Jan. 3) ran a long story on the "counties" movement. It indicated that this part of the movement is the one most likely to result in violence.
I noticed that the text of the article had been posted to several newsgroups, including alt.conspiracy and alt.politics.usa.constitution.
In my view this movement is almost a classic example of a rural reactionary movement.