Paving Mad

By Chip Ward, Tomdispatch.com. Posted January 28, 2004.

I like to climb canyon walls, see windswept desert vistas, sleep under a crystalline lattice of stars, drink from hidden sandstone pockets of rainwater and, from time to time, let a wild river have its way with me. Experiencing wilderness is how I stay whole and well. But even if you've never been closer to a slot canyon than a Nexium commercial, the fate of wild lands is compelling because it may be our own.

Wilderness is not just the stuff of scenery-slick calendars or articles in outdoor adventure magazines like Outside and Men's Journal . Wilderness and "roadless" (healthy and wild but not officially designated as wilderness) landscapes are the source of 80% of our nation's freshwater, our lifeblood. They are also storehouses of precious biodiversity, key to the viability and integrity of whole ecosystems. They provide critical habitat for endangered species and are the last places where we can experience the disappearing landscape that shaped our national character. And yes, they can provide spiritual solace.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration dealt the system of federally protected wilderness a crippling blow in a pair of out-of-court settlements with Utah Governor Michael Leavitt, now head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The deals brokered between Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Leavitt while he was still governor were a one-two punch delivered to conservationists in a dark alley behind a federal courthouse.

Left in critical condition: the Wilderness Act of 1964 which had for decades guided our collective decisions about how to identify, designate, and protect wilderness areas. After the mugging in the courthouse alley, the thieves made off with the means for turning millions of additional acres of "roadless" land into special-service areas for oil and gas, mineral, timber, and grazing interests. Cow tracks and dry washes can now officially be designated "roads" and paved over to get to the loot -- a clear case of identity theft that will rob us of irreplaceable reserves of wilderness so gas and oil corporations can party hearty.

Although most Americans may never get nearer to wilderness than a Discovery Channel documentary, millions have visited national parks and wilderness areas and millions more have seen the pictures, heard the stories, and dreamed of making their own pilgrimages one day. We are growing ever more eco-literate and understand the importance of healthy watersheds and biodiversity just as there is ever less to be eco-literate about.

Knowing that their deal would generate popular outrage, Norton and Leavitt conveniently confessed their crime the very week our troops invaded Iraq. As planned, the story was buried in the back pages of the papers and the public was blindsided. Ever since Bush replaced Clinton, this has been a familiar story. When unpopular corporate interests like the oil, gas, and timber industries can't work their will through an open, inclusive, and democratic political process or through the usual judicial contests, they simply sue the feds who then settle out of court and give them everything they want but can't get otherwise. That's what happened in April, 2003.

Behind the Zion Curtain

Once the Bush administration declared an all-out war on western public lands, the unique and spectacular mesas and canyons of southern Utah, America's redrock wilderness, became ground zero. Conservation activists from the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, the Sierra Club, and other groups have been struggling for years to designate 9 million acres of Bureau of Land Management landscape there as wilderness. The Redrock Wilderness Act, with 173 sponsors in Congress, would do that. The members of the Utah delegation, however, aren't on the list of sponsors even though it's in our backyard and polls show that a clear majority of Utahns want more wilderness, not less. Nonetheless, Utah's Republican governors, state legislators, and county commissioners have resisted the Act while attacking the very idea of wilderness designation every chance they get. Old-school patriarchs who believe land is not valuable unless mined, grazed, and drilled, Utah's politicians don't realize that the state's majestic mountains and a string of cherished national parks and monuments -- Zion, Bryce, Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Grand Staircase-Escalante, among others -- are now generating more dollars for the local economy and attracting more new economic activity than extractive industries ever will. Quality of life counts and, ecological considerations aside, wilderness pays. But good ol' cowboys, it seems, can't learn new tricks, so Utah's pols have continued to resist tenaciously.

In the mid-1990s, citizen volunteers conducted a thorough on-the-ground survey of Utah's back-o-beyond and revealed that there are three times as many acres qualifying for wilderness protection as a previous Bureau of Land Management (BLM) survey had shown. Even the BLM agreed that their survey was incomplete, but in 1996 the State of Utah filed a lawsuit challenging then-Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt's authority to re-inventory roughly 2.6 million acres of BLM lands in Utah for their wilderness character. The state also challenged the BLM's decision to protect some of these lands from interim degradation, calling it "de facto" wilderness management. A Utah Federal District Court granted the state's motion to immediately halt the BLM inventory, but in 1998 the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out all but the state's "de facto" wilderness management claim. Conservationists applauded, then the case languished for another four years.

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