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

[Team Tierra Buena]

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.