[pct-l] Re: News: US To Open Public Wilderness Lands forDevelopment

[Lonetrail at aol.com (Lonetrail@xxxxxxx)]

> May 4, 2003
> Bah, Wilderness! Reopening a Frontier to Development
> By TIMOTHY EGAN
> 
> SEATTLE - More than a century after historians declared an end to the
> American Frontier, the Interior Department made a somewhat similar
> announcement last month, with no fanfare. On a Friday night, just after
> Congress had left for spring break, the government said it would no longer
> consider huge swaths of public land to be wilderness.
> 
> The administration declared that it would end reviews of Western
> landholdings for new wilderness protection. As long as the lands had been
> under consideration for the American wilderness system, they had temporary
> protection from development.
> 
> With a single order, the Bush administration removed more than 200 million
> acres from further wilderness study, including caribou stamping ground in
> Alaska, the red rock canyons and mesas of southern Utah, Case Mountain with
> its sequoia forests in California and a wall of rainbow-colored rock known
> as Vermillion Basin in Colorado.
> 
> By declaring an end to wild land surveys, the administration ruled out
> protection of these areas as formal wilderness ? which, by law, are 
> supposed
> to be places people can visit but not stay. Now, these areas, managed by 
> the
> Bureau of Land Management, could be opened to mining, drilling, logging or
> road-building.
> 
> The idea of designating an area as wilderness ? wild land left as is, for
> its own sake ? is an American construct. Artists and writers in the 
> mid-19th
> century led the charge for wilderness, with Henry David Thoreau arguing 
> from
> his pond-side home in Concord, Mass., that wilderness sanctuaries were a
> necessary complement to civilization.
> 
> In setting aside the first wildlife refuge in 1903, on Pelican Island in
> Florida, President Theodore Roosevelt protected a patch of America that is
> now the smallest of the formally protected lands ? a mere five acres. And
> since passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, 106 million acres have been
> given the wild lands designation, with more than half of that total in
> Alaska.
> 
> Over the years, the Bureau of Land Management, the nation's biggest
> landlord, with 262 million acres under its control, has continued to survey
> its vast holdings, trying to determine whether more land is suitable for
> wilderness. But the Bush administration says wilderness reviews should have
> ended 13 years ago, at the close of a study period mandated by Congress.
> This interpretation is challenged by conservationists who plan to appeal 
> the
> Bush order in court.
> 
> If the Friday night declaration represents the beginning of a broad new 
> land
> management policy, the Interior Department has not said so. There was not
> even an announcement of the end of the wilderness reviews on the
> department's Web site.
> 
> Instead, the change came about in a settlement of a 1996 lawsuit filed by
> the State of Utah against the Interior Department over a reinventory of
> three million acres conducted by Bruce Babbitt, the interior secretary at
> the time. Most of the lawsuit had been dismissed and sat dormant until the
> state amended its complaint in March.
> 
> "This does not mean that someday down the road we may still manage some of
> these lands as wilderness," said Patricia Lynn Scarlett, an assistant
> interior secretary.
> 
> The move follows a consistent pattern in the president's environmental
> policy: to change the way the land is managed, without changing the law.
> Whether the issue is allowing snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park or
> logging in the Pacific Northwest, the course has been to settle lawsuits by
> opponents of wild land protection, opening up the areas to wide use, 
> without
> going to Congress to rewrite the rules.
> 
> Oil and gas developers and others point out that the Clinton administration
> did the same thing ? making broad changes of policy by administrative order
> ? but on behalf of an environmental constituency. In their view, wilderness
> protection amounts to a land grab, putting potential timber or mining areas
> off limits. They say citizen groups were abusing the law by bringing land
> surveys to the government, which then managed the land as de facto
> wilderness. Leaders of some Western states have long complained that
> wilderness study essentially eliminates the chance to gain any economic
> value from the land, money that is needed for state coffers.
> 
> To many conservationists, the announcement was more than another setback.
> Wilderness, in the oft-quoted line of the writer Wallace Stegner, is "the
> geography of hope." To have that geography capped, they argue, has had the
> same effect on some outdoor lovers as the fencing of the public range had 
> on
> open-country cattle ranchers. "They are trying to declare, by fiat, that
> wilderness does not exist," said Heidi McIntosh of the Southern Utah
> Wilderness Alliance.
> 
> The interior secretary, Gale A. Norton, said that the policy reflected the
> administration's attempt to cooperate with local officials and heed 
> concerns
> of industries that rely on public lands' resources. "The Department of the
> Interior believes that we should manage these lands in a way that provides
> the greatest benefit to the public," Ms. Norton wrote in a letter to 
> Senator
> Robert F. Bennett, Republican of Utah.
> 
> In another letter, Ms. Norton said it seemed senseless to consider 
> declaring
> any more wilderness areas in Alaska because its elected officials are
> against expanding this protection. But critics say that in California, a
> majority of elected officials favor more wilderness. And in New Mexico, 
> Gov.
> Bill Richardson, a Democrat, has asked the government to prevent drilling 
> in
> 1.8 million acres of the Otero Mesa, an area that has all the qualities of
> wilderness.
> 
> The New Mexico land is the largest contiguous piece of Chihuahuan Desert
> grassland left in North America, Governor Richardson said. It may be wild,
> but for now, it can no longer be Wilderness.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
> 
> *** NOTICE:  In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
> is distributed, without profit, for research and educational purposes only.
> ***
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