EVERYBODY’S A CRITIC

Chronicles in Public Land Management

By Headwaters News, 3-26-07

So long as we have public lands, the public debate regarding how best to manage them will never end. Here’s just the latest in the ongoing saga over wild lands, wildlife and wells.

In Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park, the elk population is eating itself out of house and home and the National Park Service is debating what to do. The agency’s preferred alternative is to literally bring in hired guns — sharpshooters who can take out about 1,000 cow elk at night with silencers. But other options include injection birth control for the elk, allowing hunters to cull the herd, and reintroducing wolves in the park.

Also in Colorado, the Western Colorado Congress, a nonprofit advocacy group for the Western Slope, is protesting management plans for three regional national forests. The Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests recently released their proposed management plans, which the group says don’t protect nearly enough acres of the land as wilderness, and allow too much energy development.

Another story out of Colorado illustrates another ongoing issue — the lack of funding for the National Wildlife Refuge System. Last Friday, the Denver Post ran a story about how so many of the individual units in the system have undergone such harsh budget cuts that many no longer have any staff, or have so few that their effects are negligible.

Sportsmen and women have in the past few years increased their objections to public lands management, and have been busy of late. In Montana, Montana Trout Unlimited, the Montana Wildlife Federation and other groups sent a letter to the Bureau of Land Management expressing disdain over energy leases up for auction this week on 27,000 acres in the Beaverhead River corridor. The groups say the area’s energy potential is not considered to be very high, that studies to determine the development’s effects on wildlife weren’t stringent enough and that anglers don’t want to cast for trout among wells.

Western sportsmen and women are also taking their concerns to the U.S. Congress this week, where they’ll testify before the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources about the effects of energy development on wildlife habitat and the conflicts between that development and hunters and anglers.

Regarding public lands and tourism, locals near Cody, Wyo., are calling for the National Park Service to maintain an open east entrance gate for Yellowstone National Park, instead of letting snow close the road into the park and over Sylvan Pass.

And in Idaho, the Forest Service says it’s closing several camping areas in the Rock Creek drainage because of overuse: too many campers have damaged riparian vegetation, which is silting in the waterway. The solution for the federal agency is to create new camping areas farther from the creek’s banks.

Back in Colorado, the Bureau of Land Management wants to limit the number of people that can camp in the Rabbit Valley because too many visitors are damaging areas there as well. In this case, campers are creating their own sites by driving cross-country and destroying desert landscapes. The BLM is seeking public input on a solution, and is entertaining the ideas of creating an official campsite and/or instituting fees for the area.

Expect all of these stories, and many others, to continue. 

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