More US Environmental destruction from the White boyz house
THE NATION
Wilderness Protections Rolled Back
In settling Utah lawsuit, White House reverses Clinton policy. New approach may alter how millions of acres are
treated across the West.
By Elizabeth Shogren, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration on Friday threw out the
handbook used by federal land managers to decide which areas deserve to be
protected as wilderness and held that many wilderness areas proposed after
1993 were invalid.
The new policy represents a reversal of the practice, established by the
Clinton administration, of encouraging the Bureau of Land Management to
assess land for its wilderness qualities before allowing it to be developed for
other uses.
The changes could
significantly alter how
millions of acres of land
are treated by land
managers across the
West and could increase
the likelihood that land
managers will allow
mining, drilling and road
building.
The Bush administration
made the changes in
response to a suit filed
last month by the state of
Utah. Land managers,
according to the suit, had been illegally rejecting projects to drill and mine
federal land that had been proposed as wilderness areas under the Clinton
administration but never designated for protection by Congress.
Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt said the departments of Interior and Justice approached him to settle the
lawsuit because "it was their view that the regulations in question, promulgated by the previous
administration, exceeded the law."
Leavitt said the changes agreed to by the Bush administration would take the process of designating
wilderness out of the hands of the Bureau of Land Management, where it did not belong, and back into
the hands of Congress, where it does. No longer, he said, will parcels of federal land be "managed as
de facto wilderness" by the BLM.
Neither Interior Department nor Justice Department officials returned calls to explain the policy
changes.
But conservationists were outraged that the Interior Department would make such sweeping changes
without seeking public comment.
"What it means is that vast amounts of wilderness-quality lands -- millions and millions of acres worth --
are likely to be degraded by extractive industries, and the BLM is going to allow that to happen," said
Jim Angell, an attorney for EarthJustice, an environmental law firm.
"It's a real blow to the wide-open spaces of the West," said Heidi McIntosh, conservation director for
the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, an environmental group. "These are landscapes that Americans
really cherish.
"It's going to force the BLM to pretend there is no wilderness out there," McIntosh added. "It will force
them to act like what they see with their own eyes doesn't exist."
In 1976, Congress asked the BLM to survey its 261 million acres of land for parcels that qualify for
wilderness protection -- areas bigger than 5,000 acres that had been largely untouched by human
activities and had interesting scientific features. For areas designated by Congress as wilderness, federal
land managers were charged with protecting those qualities forever.
The Clinton administration's Interior Department continued to review BLM land to see whether it met
the wilderness criteria, and directed land managers not to allow mineral development, road building or
other activities that might spoil the wild land.
But Utah argued that Congress' directive to the agency to conduct wilderness reviews and designate
wilderness study areas had expired. In the settlement, the Bush administration agreed that it had expired
no later than Oct. 21, 1993.
The central issue in the lawsuit was the fate of about 2.6 million acres of land that the Clinton
administration inventoried as potential wilderness areas in the late 1990s.
Utah charged that the BLM had illegally been managing those areas as if they had already been
wilderness study areas, stalling or killing many mineral development projects. It argued that until
Congress designated these areas as wilderness, the BLM should permit mining, drilling, use by off-road
vehicles and other development.
The settlement directs the bureau to stop managing those areas "as if they are or may become"
wilderness study areas.
Local and national conservationists argue that if the BLM permits development on these wild lands,
they will be disqualified from being designated as wilderness in the future.
"The wilderness landscapes in Utah are being nibbled away by roads, oil and gas drilling, off-road
vehicles and mining," McIntosh said. "We're going to wake up tomorrow and say, 'Where did our
wilderness go?' "
As part of the settlement, the government also agreed to discard the BLM's 2001 wilderness
handbook, which directed land managers how to identify wilderness and protect it pending a
congressional decision.
David Alberswerth of the Wilderness Society predicted the settlement would provoke a "world of
litigation" from environmental groups.
The struggle over the fate of federal lands in Utah -- especially the red rock canyon country of southern
Utah -- has long been heated. The state has less land designated as wilderness than any other in the
West -- 801,000 acres, the vast majority of it on national forest land. Only about 20,000 acres of
southern Utah's red rock canyon country, which draws tourists from around the globe, are protected as
wilderness.
In the BLM's first wilderness review of its land in Utah, the agency found 3.2 million acres that met the
criteria, and most of those areas are designated as wilderness study areas.
Leavitt said he would support permanent wilderness protection for some of those areas, if the people of
Utah agreed.
But local conservationists believed that early assessment left out huge swaths of land that met the
standards for wilderness. Various bills have been introduced in Congress since then that would set
aside as much as 9 million acres as wilderness.
Responding to the conservationists' concerns, President Clinton's Interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt,
ordered another inventory in 1996.
That inventory was halted temporarily by a lawsuit filed by Utah, but the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of
Appeals in Denver ruled in 1998 that Utah had no standing to challenge the inventory.
Utah resurrected the same lawsuit in March and it resulted in Friday's settlement.
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