Environmentalists Say Bills to Protect a Million Acres Come With Too High a Price
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Congress is on the verge of approving half a dozen bills that would protect as much as 1 million acres of wilderness areas across the West, but the move has infuriated environmentalists who charge that lawmakers are giving away too much pristine public land to real estate developers and local communities in the process.
If lawmakers finish work on the legislation before adjourning -- several bills have passed the House already and a Senate hearing is scheduled for Wednesday -- it would amount to the largest designation of new wilderness areas in a decade. But advocates and critics are in a bitter fight over the trade-offs, with opponents saying the public is paying too high a price.
One pending bill would protect a 273,000-acre stretch of California's northern coast to preserve steelhead and salmon habitat -- but it would also guarantee that off-road vehicles could use an area nearby. Another measure would create a 300,000-acre wilderness area in Idaho while handing over 4,000 acres to state and local authorities to develop or manage on their own.
"For a public interest movement to succeed, it has to be supported by the public and it has to move [forward]," said Rick Johnson, Idaho Conservation League executive director, who teamed up with Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) to craft the Central Idaho Economic Development and Recreation Act. "This is not the time to let the perfect be the enemy of the good."
But several environmental activists, including singer-songwriter and Idaho resident Carole King and Janine Blaeloch, director of the Seattle-based Western Lands Project, said the bills would set a dangerous precedent.
"With some environmental groups supporting these bills, we are entrenching this trend and we're making it more difficult for wilderness advocates in the future to gain uncompromised wilderness designations," Blaeloch said. "When you're in a hostile political environment that requires these kinds of trade-offs, you need to stop."
The new legislative approach reflects a simple political reality: Republican congressional leaders will accept new wilderness areas only if they come with these kinds of trade-offs. Wilderness designations have often been difficult to push through Congress because they are more restrictive than national forest or park designations, and bar man-made structures or roads within their confines.
As House Resources Committee Chairman Richard W. Pombo (R-Calif.) said in an interview: "If I didn't want wilderness, I easily could have stopped all these bills."
Instead, Pombo let Simpson's bill and Rep. Mike Thompson's (D-Calif.) Northern California Coastal Wild Heritage Act pass his committee and the full House in late July after they made concessions to off-road vehicle buffs and local officials.
"By doing that, you've brought in groups who have been historically opposed and made them into supporters," Pombo said.
The battle over the Idaho bill, which would create the Boulder-White Clouds wilderness area northeast of Boise, is typical. The proposed site, which overlaps the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, includes trails that cut across boulder fields featuring gigantic granite rocks the size of railroad cars. The rocks were dragged by glaciers thousands of years ago and dropped into odd and seemingly precarious perches.
There are several emerald and turquoise alpine lakes in the area, as well as waterfalls that pour into local streams. In summer, the ground is a patchwork of brilliantly colored wildflowers -- including lupine, Indian paintbrush, columbines and lilies -- that grow in the sunny vales between patches of forest.
Simpson, who grew up visiting the area's Redfish Lake, calls Boulder-White Clouds "one of the most beautiful areas, and one of the most contentious areas," in his state. He has spent six years working on the issue, trying to reconcile environmentalists' priorities with those of ranchers embroiled in litigation over imperiled species, county officials who want to expand their tax bases and motorized-vehicle users.
"It's just something that needs to be done," he said, adding that when it comes to his bill, "wilderness is only one part of it."
That approach infuriates King, who has lived in Idaho for 29 years and owns a ranch and a condominium in the two counties affected by Simpson's bill. King estimates that she spends half her time lobbying to preserve the state's wild areas and has "probably met with a third of Congress at this point."
"I'm fighting for every possible area that can still be experienced as the Creator made it," she said in an interview. "You don't compromise what the Creator made."
Anticipating congressional action, a coalition of 80 environmental groups published an open letter to the conservation community this month urging their allies to reject wilderness bills that sell off public land.
Carl Pence, who served as the Sawtooth National Recreational Area's ranger between 1987 and 1993, criticized provisions of the bill that would designate trails for motorized vehicles, saying they run the risk of requiring federal officials to pay for relocating the routes if riders end up harassing wildlife.
"It's a second-class wilderness," Pence said.
But Johnson, of the Conservation League, called such complaints naive, saying off-road vehicle registrations in Idaho have tripled in the past three years and conservationists would be better off codifying the current trails in law to prevent them from encroaching elsewhere.
"People are buying these toys, and once they get into this country, it's hard to get them out," he said. "What we gain is a place that will be quiet forever."
Cliff Hansen, one of Custer County's three commissioners, said he decided to back the wilderness designation only when he became convinced that it would offer some revenue for the county and sufficient rights for off-road riders.
"Everybody's given a little, and I think it's a good bill," he said. "When it first came about, part of me thought we didn't need more wilderness in our area."
One of the most successful champions of these trade-offs has been Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who has written three bills in the past six years designating 2.1 million acres of wilderness in his state. To gain support, his two most recent bills -- both of which were co-sponsored by GOP Sen. John Ensign (Nev.) -- allowed Nevada authorities to pipe water to Las Vegas from hundreds of miles away and to auction off thousands of acres of federal land to the highest bidder.
"We've worked hard to tack on conservation components to what are essentially development bills," said John Wallin, director of the Nevada Wilderness Project.
Mike Matz, executive director of the Campaign for America's Wilderness, financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts and other foundations, said his group sees these proposals as the best way to add as much as 6 million acres of designated wilderness in the next six years. Other environmentalists "want to hold out for the whole enchilada, but the problem is Congress doesn't swallow the whole enchilada."
However, even Matz, along with many other environmentalists, balks at a bill being pushed by Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R) and Rep. Jim Matheson (D), both of Utah, that would sell as much as 40 square miles of federal land -- nearly twice the size of Manhattan -- and use the profits to pay for a water pipeline and other area projects.
Bennett, whose proposal would sell off as much as 25,000 acres of federal land in Utah's fast-growing Washington County while protecting other red-rock areas, said environmentalists would be wise to take the deal he is offering.
His advice to them, he said in an interview, is: "Take it and then keep arguing for more, that's your job. I don't object to you earning a salary for a hopeless cause."
Staff writer Rick Weiss contributed to this report from Idaho.
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