Whatever Happened to Wilderness for Wilderness’ Sake?

By Headwaters News, 5-18-06

Designation of big "W" Wilderness is not what it used to be.

In the past, large swaths of undeveloped land were designated for their wild and pristine nature — championed first by progressive public land managers (Gila Wilderness in New Mexico) or citizens' groups (Great Bear Wilderness in Montana), and then handed off to influential politicians who brought them to Congress for approval.

Battles ensued aplenty over these designations and compromise was a main tool in making them happen. But in almost every case, that compromise surrounded the land in question and not much else.

In many cases that has changed.

The president still has to sign off on every wilderness designation, and he usually does. But by the time the bill is ready for the president's signature, the fighting is over and most everybody between his desk and the trailhead has approved it. The path to the president is now much more complicated, convoluted and twisted between politics and economics.

Take, for instance, the proposal to designate about 300,000 acres in the Boulder-White Cloud Mountains of the Sawtooth range in central Idaho, which Eric Segalstad writes about in a column for Headwaters News.

Wilderness activists have been clamoring for decades for some wilderness designation in central Idaho, he writes, but it took a new kind of plan, one that included a good deal of economic development, for the notion of wilderness designation to again take hold there.

What's changed is not the desire to protect land as wilderness, but the motivation for doing so.

This change in motivation isn't present in every new wilderness designation, but it is increasingly becoming part of the process.

In southern Utah's Washington County, for example, Wilderness designation has become part of a grander scheme to zone large swaths of this desert region. The general idea is to sell about 25,000 acres of public land and use the proceeds for watershed and rangeland protection, habitat preservation, education and outreach, and to preserve more than 220,000 acres as Wilderness.

Like the land bill in central Idaho, this one has attracted much scorn for wilderness purists who claim it is nothing but a land giveaway.

Perhaps more contentious than either of these wilderness plans was a recent one on the Utah-Nevada border, in the Cedar Mountains.

Utah lawmakers who pushed for wilderness designation there admit that the Cedar Mountains might not be the most scenic or pristine wilderness area, but they sought designation because the federal protection would make it all but impossible for the Goshute Indians and private Fuel Storage Co. to operate a nuclear waste storage facility on tribal land.

Designation would block a main travel route to the reservation, and without that route, nuclear waste can't make its way to a proposed facility that Utah lawmakers don't want in their state.

The issue was never really about land preservation, and has become even more political.

Both the House and Senate passed Legislation to create the 100,000-acre Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area, and President Bush signed it into law on Jan. 6, as part of a huge defense bill.

Many wilderness advocates are split on whether compromise is a worthy way of acquiring wilderness in an increasingly anti-wilderness political climate.

Some see these kinds of compromises as a threat to the idea of wilderness, which was created and approved by Congress four decades ago.

Others are willing to accept that the world has changed, and that economic development can accompany land preservation, if it allows for that preservation to happen.

The compromises do beg the questions: Is it still wilderness if we allow a motorized recreation corridor to bisect it? Or if we give away other undeveloped federal land to acquire it? What about the case of the Cedar Mountains, where the land up for designation has become a pawn in a game over nuclear waste that no one wants to store?

In Montana's Lincoln County and Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, wilderness advocates and environmentalists have teamed up with logging and mining interests and snowmobile users to craft land use plans that allows for certain activities in some areas while restricting activities in other areas – creating either big "W" Wilderness or at least de-facto wilderness.

Yet in both cases, even when representatives from a diversity of interests crafted and agreed on a plan together, many remain frustrated with the details and are willing to continue to fight for what they believe is right.

If nothing else, the wilderness debate today should remind us that wilderness is an idea America invented, primarily for the West, and which is still evolving, as all social ideas do.

It's also worth remembering that the idea of wilderness remains one of America's largest exports to the rest of the world. Our model has become the model on which all others are based, from Canada to Africa.

As Wilderness pioneer Aldo Leopold once said "The rich values of wilderness lies not in the days of Daniel Boone nor even in the present, but rather in the future." How we designate our wilderness today, he was saying, has everything to do with what we want our West to look like tomorrow. [End of article]