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In April, 2003, the Bush administration
suddenly rewrote the policy governing how public
land is preserved as wilderness in America. It was
done quietly, with next to no debate or public
comment. This is what it means for you.
It happened when no one was watching. A little
before 5 p.m. on Friday, April 11, three days after
coalition forces had entered Baghdad and just as
Congress was leaving for spring recess, Interior
Secretary Gale Norton's office in Washington, D.C.,
faxed a letter to a handful of Republican senators.
It announced a legal settlement with the state of
Utah that essentially voided the executive branch's
key wilderness-protection powers and reversed three
decades of environmental policy. Effective
immediately, oil, gas, and mineral concerns would
be granted access to more than 200 million acres of
public land, stretching from the Mexican border to
Alaska.
The about-face had been set in motion two weeks
earlier, when Mike Leavitt, the Republican governor
of Utah, revived a lawsuit that challenged the U.S.
Bureau of Land Management's authority to
periodically review its vast holdings and recommend
certain parcels to be set aside by Congress as
wilderness, protected from drilling, mining, and
other commercial activity. Under the old policy,
the first step in any development proposal was to
consider the land's wilderness potential - an
approach that Utah felt unfairly hurt its ability
to attract jobs and raise revenue. During the
Clinton administration, a judge rejected the
state's attempts to have the policy overturned, but
when lawyers for Bush's Department of the Interior
reviewed the state's amended complaint, they
concluded that Leavitt was right.
Conversationists call the decision one of the
biggest environmental catastrophes in the history
of the West. Administration officials insist
critics are being overly dramatic - it's not as if
bulldozers will raze all 200 million acres
tomorrow. In fact, much of that land is never seen
by the public, let alone hiked or camped on. But
even if the old BLM policy erred too heavily on the
side of conservation, as energy companies claim,
the new dispensation repudiates a core American
belief that wilderness has an inherent value that
can't be measured economically. Although
environmental groups are suing the Department of
the Interior to have the old policy reinstated,
time is not on their side. The way wilderness
designations work, for a parcel to quality it needs
to have 5,000 contiguous roadless and undeveloped
acres. In other words, drill one well or blaze one
road through any of these hiking, mountain-biking,
or fly-fishing treasures and the chance to preserve
them could be lost forever. Whatever your political
leanings, that should at least give you pause.
Source: David Case,
Men's
Journal, July, 2003
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