USA TODAY -- May 28, 2003
Wilderness policy takes U-turn
By Tom Kenworthy, USA TODAY
SAN RAFAEL SWELL, Utah - From atop a cliff in an area of southeastern Utah known as the San Rafael Swell, Scott Groene looks out over thousands of acres of public land that the federal government once concluded deserved the greatest legal protection from development that the land could get.
At all points of the compass, the swell flaunts its gaudy geology: soaring rock castles, multihued sandstone cliffs, deep canyons, all shaped by a volcanic upheaval during the Jurassic Period.
Prodded by activists like Groene, who works for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, the Clinton administration spent several years in the 1990s reassessing potential wilderness areas like this one from among federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) holdings in Utah.
The bureau decided that vast areas - 2.6 million acres, including much of the swell - had mistakenly been overlooked and should receive interim protection from development pending a decision by Congress on whether they should be added to the national wilderness system.
But last month, with a few strokes of the pen, Interior Secretary Gale Norton removed the protection. In doing so, she opened the land to development, including oil and gas wells, mining and off-road vehicle trails. She also declared that the BLM will no longer continue to assess whether more than 200 million acres it manages in the West and Alaska should be wilderness shielded from development.
Norton's action, which she took April 11 in quietly settling a lawsuit and in letters to Republican lawmakers, is the latest move the Bush administration has made to open public land to energy development, mining, logging and motor vehicles. In earlier directives, Norton and her department invited local and state officials in the West to claim thousands of road rights of way across federal lands. That policy shift could open even more pristine areas - possibly even national parks and wildlife refuges - to traffic and development.
Taken together, these initiatives represent far-reaching change in federal land management. The initiatives also are a dramatic departure from the direction taken by the Clinton administration and from the path that began in 1964 when Congress established the wilderness system.
Environmentalists are aghast at the latest move. Outdoor industry leaders are threatening to take their annual $24 million trade show out of Utah to punish Gov. Mike Leavitt, a Republican, for his supporting role in Norton's efforts.
"It's a breathtaking step backwards," says Dave Alberswerth, a public lands analyst at The Wilderness Society.
Norton's actions also make it harder for future administrations to reverse the policy. Once land has had roads built on it and developed, it is unlikely to be seen as sufficiently pristine to qualify as wilderness. "You can't put the genie back in the bottle," says Heidi McIntosh, conservation director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
But Interior Department officials say they are just complying with the law and returning balance to federal land policy.
And advocates of opening the land to greater commercial use and motorized activity salute the changes. They argue that too much land has been locked up in violation of laws that say that federal land should be available for "multiple use."
"A good move, and a legal move," says Drew Sitterud, a county commissioner for the region that includes the San Rafael Swell. "We want to see the land used, but not abused. We can manage the land through managing people and not just locking it up."
Norton's shift on wilderness policy, taken while the nationwas consumed with the war in Iraq, received little attention at first. It came in the context of settling a lawsuit that was brought by the state of Utah against the Clinton administration's taking a new inventory of land suitable for wilderness designation.
A federal appeals court had ruled against Utah on all but one count of the complaint, and the issue had been essentially moribund since 1998. But in March, Utah amended its complaint, which gave the Bush administration an opening to settle.
To some extent, Norton's reversal reflects changing attitudes in the West on the issue of wilderness.
Defined by a pioneering act of Congress in 1964, wilderness areas are 5,000 acres and larger that offer "outstanding opportunities" for solitude and primitive recreation. They can be used by people to hike, camp, fish, hunt, ride horses and even graze livestock. But motorized transportation and man-made structures are prohibited, which rules out industrial activity and use by off-road vehicles.
The law was passed with only one dissenting vote, which was cast in the House of Representatives. Since then, Congress has added about 106 million acres to the national wilderness system, about half of it in Alaska.
But elected officials in the West have grown increasingly hostile to creating more wilderness. They complain that it limits opportunities for economic development and keeps out those who want to use off-road vehicles.
To side with wilderness opponents, Norton used a strict interpretation of the 1976 law that governs management of BLM lands, which total 262 million acres.
That law gave the executive branch a one-time opportunity, until 1993, to recommend wilderness areas to Congress. Until Congress added them to the wilderness system or released them for other use, the areas would be protected as wilderness study areas. Through that process, Congress eventually designated 6.5 million BLM acres as wilderness, and the executive branch protected 15.5 million more acres as wilderness study areas.
A second section of the law sets no deadline and gives the BLM discretion through its regular process of land management planning to conduct inventories of its land and recommend interim wilderness protection to the Interior secretary.
The Bush administration is saying essentially that the first section of the law takes precedence and that no more wilderness study areas can be created under the second section.
"What we are trying to do is bring BLM practice into conformity with the law," Assistant Interior Secretary Lynne Scarlett says.
Interior officials note that if Congress wants new wilderness areas, it still has the authority to create them from BLM holdings. And they say that the BLM can protect some land and make it like wilderness areas through its regular procedures for determining how land is used.
But environmentalists and conservationists such as Groene characterize it as a raid on some of the West's most precious land for the benefit of the administration's commercial allies. They have filed suit to challenge Norton's wilderness action.
"We are looking at the wilderness future of the West squarely in the cross hairs of a road-building, oil and gas-drilling juggernaut," says Ted Zukoski, an attorney with Earthjustice, the environmental movement's legal arm.
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Just three miles off of Interstate 80, 
