[Az-Geocaching] And Now for Something Completely Different...

[Jerry Nelson]

I believe there are a few folks who might want Mr. Bush to reconsider, and
they will likely let him know about it.

Jerry
Offtrail

----- Original Message -----
From: "Team Tierra Buena" <teamtierrabuena@earthlink.net>
To: "Arizona Geocaching" <az-geocaching@listserv.azgeocaching.com>
Sent: Monday, May 05, 2003 8:07 PM
Subject: [Az-Geocaching] And Now for Something Completely Different...


> The New York Times
> 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.
>
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