Last week as we heard the final strains of "Jingle Bells" for this season, Sen. Orrin Hatch and some other GOP Congresspeople could be heard in the background screeching about "radical extremists" in the environmental movement running roughshod over the wishes and values of Westerners with the "brazen" assistance of the Obama administration. Said Rep. Rob Bishop, the Utah Congressman soon to be chairman of the House public lands subcommittee, "This is little more than an early Christmas present to the far left extremists who oppose the multiple use of our nation's public lands.”
These ridiculous outbursts stemmed from Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar's very welcome announcement Thursday that the Bureau of Land Management has overturned what environmental groups rightly called the "No More Wilderness" policy established by the Bush administration in 2003. That policy nixed citizen-organized proposals for designating protected wilderness areas and opened up huge areas for the Bush administration's first priority on public land: oil and gas development.
At a press conference in Denver, Salazar said the Bush policy, "frankly never should have happened and was wrong in the first place.” Consequently, the Obama administration has restored the BLM's ability to curtail development on more than 200 million publicly owned back-country acres by inventorying them and setting them aside as "Wild Lands." This will protect the chosen acres until Congress decides whether to designate them as Wilderness areas, a process that can take decades. Unprotected lands are subject to all manner of energy development, mining, road building and motorized recreation. All these can degrade the land and reduce its potential for getting Wilderness status. Once it's degraded, it's lost.
One of the typical arguments against both Wilderness and Wild Lands set-asides is that they cost jobs. But. on hand at the press conference was not just Salazar and BLM Director Bob Abbey, but Peter Metcalf, CEO of Black Diamond Outdoor Equipment, who said: “For years those of us who are part of the outdoor industry have recognized that the tired old sound bite debate of jobs versus preservation was an insult to the 6.5 million Americans whose jobs were dependent on this active outdoor recreation economy. It’s as if we and the $730 billion we contribute to the economy didn’t exist.”
Although all the details have not yet been decided, the new policy will allow the BLM to give the same no-development protections to publicly owned "Wild Lands" as are provided to congressionally designated Wilderness areas. The inventory of BLM lands eligible for such protection runs to more 200 million acres, although only a small fraction of such lands would likely wind up in the Wild Lands category.
Only Congress can give an area the full protection of a Wilderness designation, something it has done to just under 110 million acres in 756 areas of 44 states and Puerto Rico since the Wilderness Act of 1964 was passed. The most recent addition was made in March 2009 when President Obama signed the Omnibus Public Land Management Act that set aside 2 million acres, the most added in 25 years. While foes of additional Wilderness set-asides claim the current acreage is more than enough, it's only 4.73 percent of the total land of the United States, slightly larger than California. Forty-six percent of designated Wilderness is in Alaska. Currently, the BLM manages about 8.7 million of these designated Wilderness acres.
Rather than being some outrageous Obama administration distortion of previous policy, as Hatch and others declared, the change announced Thursday is far closer to what Congress had in mind when it passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) in 1976. That law expanded the Wilderness Act to cover BLM lands. It gave the bureau 15 years, until 1991, to recommend lands that should be set aside as wilderness. In the 1990s, several acts were passed based on those recommendations, including the Arizona Desert Wilderness Act. But that wasn't all, as Matt Jenkins wrote in the January 2004 issue of High Country News:
FLPMA did something else that was significant: It opened the door for continuing, citizen-initiated efforts to protect more BLM wilderness. The law required the BLM to continuously inventory "resource and other values" on public lands, and to protect those values. That allowed citizens’ groups to find lands that met the BLM’s own criteria for wilderness — areas larger than 5,000 acres that were roadless and free from human disturbance — and to ask the agency to protect those lands until Congress could decide.
These are not "wilderness study areas," which, for the most part, the BLM itself identified and must manage as wilderness until Congress has the opportunity to grant — or deny — them formal protection. Instead, they’re more like proposed wilderness study areas: wilderness-quality lands that the agency missed during its own inventories.
During the Clinton administration, the BLM agreed to take another look before permitting potentially damaging activities on these lands. According to Dave Alberswerth, who served as a special assistant to the Interior Department’s head of land and mineral management during the Clinton administration, and now works for The Wilderness Society, "The idea was to try to protect — within the secretary of the Interior’s discretion — the wilderness, roadless, undeveloped character of lands proposed for wilderness designation. For a while, it became known as the ‘take-care’ policy."
The BLM wasn’t required to protect these areas as wilderness, but it could impose stipulations on development projects, to minimize their impacts on wilderness character, or recommend postponing such projects. And in practice, the BLM frequently denied mineral leases on these lands.
That was the policy the Bush administration erased, bringing an end to citizen-initiated Wilderness proposals as well as the deluge of oil and gas leases.
Which shows Hatch's statement to be the typical upsidedownism he's so well known for:
"The decision to withdraw from the agreement is an insult to the people of Utah,” Hatch said. “Changing the wildlands-designation policy will destroy the balance and clarity that comes from allowing Congress to work with the public to develop and pass land-use bills. Today’s announcement is proof – if any more was required – of this Administration’s radical environmentalist agenda that threatens to devastate our Western way of life. The fact that Salazar waited until Congress had adjourned and members had left Washington for the holidays before announcing this shows that he knows this is bad policy. …
“It is time for this Administration to put the needs of Utahns and other Americans above those of a few radical special interest groups who want to make the nation’s public lands their own personal playgrounds,” Hatch said. “I will continue to do everything I can to ensure that it does and that the authority to designate wilderness stays where it belongs – with Congress.”
It's not the new policy that violates the values and ignores the wishes of people who live and make a living on or near public lands. It's the one Hatch and his cronies applauded seven years ago. His kind of talk and that of Bishop about the new BLM policy has its origins in the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement in many Western states to take over federal lands that began around the same time FLPMA was passed. Interior secretaries James Watt in the Reagan administration and Gale Norton in the Bush administration were big fans of the Sagebrush Rebellion and its successor, the so-called Wise Use Movement.
The BLM will now take 60 days to come up with the details of its new guidance policy. Oil and gas development may not be barred from all acreage designated "Wild Lands." That's yet to be decided and is likely to be a contentious issue among competing groups. But now, at least, unlike during the past seven years, wilderness-quality lands under BLM control will have a guidance policy that actually allows some competition instead of continuing the unfettered grab of public lands the Bush policy engendered. Public groups will again have a voice. And that's what really irks Hatch and his pals.
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A Q & A on the BLM's new policy can be found at the Interior Department's website here.
Wilderness.net has a terrific overview and set of maps here.