|
By TIMOTHY EGAN
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 Vermilion 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.
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. |
