It Must Be Getting Close to Election Time

On June 1st, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar sent a letter to the Director of the Bureau of Land Management reversing his December 2010 order to make millions of acres of public land eligible for wilderness protection. The December order had reversed the Bush administration’s 2003 policy which had opened up western federal land to commercial development.

Salazar’s memo stated that on April 14, 2011 the United States Congress passed an appropriations bill which included a provision prohibiting the use of appropriated funds designed to facilitate the December order.

As you might imagine, environmental groups are angry and upset over the Obama administration’s reversal. William Meadows, president of the Wilderness Society, expressed their anger by stating, “Without strong and decisive action from the Department of the Interior, wilderness will not be given the protection it is due, putting millions of acres of public lands at risk.”

In addition to Meadows’ comments, a letter was sent to Congress with signatures from more than 50 conservation and recreation representatives from six western states which stated in part, “Rural counties with wilderness or other protected federal lands experience greater economic and population growth than those without wilderness.”

The Outdoor Industry Association added that “A decision by the Department of the Interior today to not implement the Bureau of Land Management Wild Lands Policy threatens the very infrastructure supporting the nation’s recreation economy.”

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) probably said it best however. in a press release—their response to the Salazar memo, stated, “Repeal of the No More Wilderness policy should have been the Obama administration’s top priority for public lands when it won the 2008 election. Instead, the administration dithered for nearly two years before reversing the Bush policy—sort of. It issued new, weak guidance—the Wild Lands policy—which was better than nothing. Today, they’ve retreated to nothing.”

As every conservationist in this country would agree, Secretary Salazar took the right step in December 2010 when he affirmed the Obama administration’s regulatory obligation to protect millions of acres of lands with wilderness value that are found primarily in the western part of the United States. Secretarial Order 3310 was an important step towards committing the nation to preserve wilderness. Salazar was compelled to issue such an order because the previous Bush administration had literally turned its back on its responsibilities to protect these lands. Essentially, the Obama administration’s Interior Secretary attempted to restore the wilderness policy that Bush overturned, a bipartisan policy that was honored by the five preceding presidential administrations—including the Senior President Bush.

The Republican Congress however, emboldened by the same oil and gas interests that have always opposed any kind of conservation-driven Wild Lands Policy, along with the new phenomenon of everyone jumping to the drum beat of deficit reduction before anything else, passed a rider in this year’s budget that was designed to restrict protection. While the rider defunded certain aspects of the Wild Land policy, it did not however, change the fact that these lands were still required to be managed as wilderness as explicitly provided for under the law.

In his zeal to strike the pose of the compromiser, President Obama has also agreed to work with some of the most vocal Congressional opponents of wilderness as part of an effort to formulate a consensus driven report that will recommend future wilderness designations.

Consensus is a noble aspiration, but it is difficult to imagine that those in Congress, who have so vehemently opposed the concept of wilderness, are going to all of a sudden be evenhanded in partnering with the administration. Possibly worse, this effort will be ultimately designed to lock out public discourse. Instead, the Interior Department would only seek the opinion of “…members of Congress, state and local officials, tribes and Federal land managers.” Members of the general public would be visibly absent from the table which is totally different from the way current laws govern public lands, driven by regulations that typically require a robust public participation in the process of governing federal land.

The fact that there is so much effort going in to change the status quo of how federal lands are governed must mean that there is quite a bit at stake. So, what is at stake here? Currently there are 245 million acres of public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). A coherent wilderness policy would protect the last remaining unprotected wilderness lands, representing a sliver of the total lands managed by the BLM, but still totaling millions of acres of wilderness. Without such a policy, these lands would remain vulnerable to the earth moving equipment of the oil and gas industry as well as off-road vehicle recreation. For example, in Colorado alone, 85% of the BLM lands in Colorado are open to oil and gas development. In contrast, only 205,000 acres (or 1.7%) of BLM lands are currently protected as wilderness.

Why did we let this happen?