Declaring an End to New Wilderness Protection

The Bush administration has quietly ended any further analysis of potential wilderness protection for the 200 million acres of federal land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management that sprawl across the Western states. Although the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act requires the BLM to maintain an ongoing inventory of potential wilderness, the Bush administration has declared that all wilderness evaluation is to end immediately and that the results of such wilderness evaluations since 1991are to be ignored. No further wilderness evaluation is to take place unless Congress explicitly orders it in a particular location. If federal lands were not identified as qualified for wilderness by 1991, they are now open to mining, drilling, logging, road-building, and other commercial development.

There is an obvious asymmetry here. One of the reasons that Bush wants to end wilderness evaluation is so that mineral exploration, including oil and gas exploration, can charge ahead. If an environmental group were to suggest that if the oil and gas potential of an area had not been identified by 1991, we should henceforth assume the area has no mineral potential even if clear evidence of such potential was discovered in 1995, that group would be sneered at as promoting official ignorance in its single-minded protectionist pursuits. But Bush finds nothing strange about ordering a halt to further wilderness evaluation as of 1991. Apparently we know all we ever need to know about the unique natural characteristics of America’s Western public lands. We are officially told that we are to learn nothing more and are to throw away the results of studies already completed since 1991 which found that millions of acres of federal land qualified for wilderness protection.

This decision to close the door on wilderness evaluation but open it on the evaluation of potential commercial developments was not the result of any public process conducted by either Congress or the BLM. There was no notice that such a decision was on its way. There was no notice that such a decision had been made. The Bush administration privately negotiated this deal with Utah state officials and then quietly sent letters to other states declaring the new policy after Congress had left on its Easter recess. No comment from anyone else was solicited or obtained.

Part of the justification for the new policy, Bush officials say, is that federal agencies are trying to cooperate more closely with state officials who know better what local people want from federal lands. That may or may not be the case in Utah and Arizona. After all, when Utah officials took their proposals for very limited wilderness protection on the road to cities and towns in Utah several years ago, they heard the opposite, that citizens wanted much more extensive wilderness protection. There are active citizen wilderness efforts underway in both Utah and Arizona.

But the excuse of cooperating with state officials rings especially hollow when one considers New Mexico and California where the state governments support wilderness classification for large expanses of federal lands. New Mexico’s Governor Bill Richardson, for instance, has asked the federal government to prevent drilling in 1.8 million acres of the Otero Mesa in south central New Mexico, an area that he insists has all the qualities of wilderness besides being the largest contiguous piece of Chihuahuan Desert grassland left in North America. It may be wild, but under the Bush edict, it can no longer be Wilderness no matter what the Governor or people of the New Mexico think.

This is a strange and distorted public policy world we have entered. By government fiat the Bush administration has declared that unprotected wildlands and wilderness do not exist or, if they do, should not exist. Protected wild landscapes to these people are an affront to the economy and possibly even to God. After all, in Genesis, God is said to give human beings dominion over nature, and how else can you show who is boss than by destroying the wild characteristics of the land and putting an industrial stamp on it?

Some state and federal officials tell us that without commercial development of these wild western lands, the regional economy will continue to whither and die. They apparently do not have the foggiest idea of what they are talking about. During the 1990s the Mountain West region was the fastest growing region in the United States in terms of both job creation and population growth. During the very period during which mineral and other commercial development on public lands declined, the region boomed. That has continued into this decade too despite the Bush administration’s strangling of the national economy. Six of the ten fastest growing and 11 of the 20 fastest growing states were Western states that supposedly have been crippled by restrictive federal land management. That is 11 of the 14 Western states were among the fastest growing in the nation between 2000 and 2002. Even more telling, the larger the percentage of protected public land in a Western county, the faster the rate of growth has been.

The causal connection is the opposite of what the oilmen in control of the nation claim: The more carefully we protect the natural landscapes that define the West, the more economic vitality the local economy shows.

These economic facts, however, are unlikely to be convincing to those who accept as an article of faith that the only way to show respect for the natural wonders that God has given us is to destroy them in the pursuit of corporate profits.