WILD BILL

Ending the War Over Wilderness

By Bill Schneider, 2-07-07

In the old days, before wolf reintroduction, Wilderness used to be the “W” word, so let’s leave Brother Wolf behind and go back to our roots, the fifty-year old controversy coming out of attempts to preserve the last blank spots on the map in the New West. All the howling over wolves of late has drowned out the debate over Wilderness, but that will change soon.

With the new BlueGreen Congress at work, Wilderness advocates will be dusting off proposed legislation shelved for years and introducing it. The resulting debate might challenge the decimal level we’ve heard lately from the fight over how many wolves we should allow in the New West.

Also, I fear, we’ll bloody ourselves in these fights and once again end up with nothing but bruises. Sadly, this has been the norm, ending up with no solution and making the controversy over the use of our last roadless lands seem endless.

But now, we have a way to quickly end the war for Wilderness and move on. Can we do it?

As announced in a companion article, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) will, with at least 187 co-sponsors, introduce the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act of 2007 (NREPA), which would designate as Wilderness most of the remaining roadless lands in the Northern Rockies, mostly in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, but edging into far eastern Oregon and Washington.

NREPA, or as named by its founders, “the wildest bill on the hill,” is more than a Wilderness bill. You can read a detailed explanation here, but briefly, in addition to designating 20,572,147 acres of Wilderness, it adds two units to our National Park System, protects 1,810 miles of Wild and Scenic Rivers, safeguards against habitat fragmentation by establishing a system of Biological Linkage Corridors to connect the region’s core wildlands and establishes 1,022,769 acres of Wildland Restoration Areas meant to create jobs by restoring damage caused by unwise resource extraction practices.

Sounds like a lot, right? And it is, but keep in mind that we have 193 million acres of national forests and 250 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land in this country, which means this bill covers about five percent of it. Or compared to the 315 million acres in the five-state region, this bill protects less than one percent of it. Setting aside one percent sounds like a reasonable price to pay to end the Wilderness debate.

When you hear politicos and industry reps on the podium talking about the “need for balance,” please keep these figures in mind. If we designate all remaining roadless land as Wilderness, we still wouldn’t be close to any definition of balance because at the end of the day, 95 percent or more of our federal lands will be non-wilderness.

We did it once before, back in 1980. It was called the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, and it ended the great debate over protecting wild Alaska. But that was 27 years ago, and that was Alaska. And of course, Jimmy Carter was President. Can we do it again under our current political climate?

I think we can. For starters, this five-state region is about 90 percent of the size of Alaska, so we aren’t dealing with too much difference in total land area, and the Alaska land bill protected three times as much acreage, a whooping 79.5 million acres, which makes NREPA almost seem like a conservative approach. Even if you pull out western Oregon and Washington (not included in the bill), the legislation doesn’t seem unreasonable.

The primary barrier, of course, will not be convincing Congress NREPA is a baby step toward achieving balance in use of federal lands, but getting it signed into law. George W. Bush and his key agency appointees are anti-Wilderness to the core, but we have one advantage we didn’t have in Alaska. Everybody is anxious to have the Wilderness debate over, even enviros who could lose their jobs, so perhaps that dynamic could be the tipping point.

Interestingly, the architects of the bill, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies (AWR) briefly re-named NREPA the Rockies Prosperity Act, but members bolted on that idea and wanted to stick to the original name to emphasize the original purpose--to preserve the “last great expanse of native biodiversity.” I can see their point, calling a rock a rock instead of a job-creating rock, but is this politically astute?

I understand the zeal and need to protect biodiversity, but let’s face it, selling biodiversity is a tough job. Perhaps we should take a page from the great Alaska victory and call it something like the Northern Rockies National Interest Lands Conservation Act. It fits.

But whatever it ends up being called, this bill is exactly the beacon Wilderness advocates need. They’ve been starved for decades, like an army without a flag.

And you would think that a bill with 187 co-sponsors (35 percent of the U.S. House of Representative) would easily pass, but take a look at the heavily democratic list. Not a single representative from Idaho, Montana or Wyoming. As close to the Northern Rockies we get are two reps from Oregon, one from Washington, and two from Colorado, all democrats, and all hailing from urban areas--Denver, Portland, Salem, and Seattle. No sponsor has one single acre of his or her district included in the bill.

But that’s another similarity with the Alaska lands bill, which was strongly opposed by all political leaders in that state, including some very powerful senators. Yet, it still passed, giving us a precedent.

In a telephone interview, Mike Garrity, executive director of AWR, said his group was working hard to get sponsors from the northern Rockies but no takers yet. This is what I call a sad commentary, and it means the legislation will have a hard time getting hearings, let alone a yes-or-no vote, especially if it passes to the Senate. And even if it squeaks through the Senate, it probably faces a veto when it reaches the White House, so the margin needs to be veto-proof. 

Let’s hope Congress can view these federal lands as truly being in the national interest and abandon its protocol of letting the local representative call the shots. Even better, of course, would be for one or two of our esteemed representatives in Idaho, Montana or Wyoming, or even eastern Oregon or Washington, to have an open mind on the Wilderness issue and the backbone to sponsor the bill so we can have a democratic process with hearings and a vote on this national interest legislation. Is this too much to ask? To stop using protocol to block fair consideration of an important issue facing all people in the New West?

And one more thing. I certainly hope all Wilderness advocates can get on board and support NREPA instead of getting competitive, as they have in the past. This only splits the constituency, which only plays into the hands of those who want “balance.”

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