Wilderness: The Next Step

By Christian Probasco, 8-05-09

A few weeks ago I received an e-mail from the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) crowing about its victory with the Omnibus lands bill.

“Future generations,” read the e-mail, “will be grateful as they splash through narrows in Doc’s Pass, watch a desert tortoise in Beaver Dam Wash or gaze open-mouthed at the view from Canaan Mountain.”

No false modesty here: SUWA takes credit for a narrows in the earth, a life form and a spectacular view. And they presume to speak for future generations, most of whom, I’m convinced, if SUWA had its way, would not be allowed anywhere near the narrows, the pass, the wash, the turtle or the mountain.

The next, inevitable step for the organization will be to try, again, to push the Red Rock Wilderness Act through Congress.

“Gains of this magnitude,” read the e-mail “will only come through bold action and extraordinary effort.  And with your help, we will prevail.”

Fortunately, they can’t count on my help. In fact, I’m opposed to the Red Rock Wilderness Act.

I drive a Jeep. To SUWA, I am a convenient enemy. To off-roaders and rural Utahans, and quite a few of the non-rural variety, SUWA is an inconvenient enema. They are tired of playing SUWA’s scapegoats. And they are tired of SUWA’s brand of B.S.

SUWA says most of the “proposed (?) RS 2477 ‘highways’ (in southern Utah) are not highways, but instead are remote jeep trails, dry desert streambeds, even cow paths. They do little, if anything, to meet reasonable transportation needs, yet wreak havoc on public and even private lands.” But the original meaning of “highway,” was any path, way or trail across the land. “Highway robbers” did not waylay automobile commuters; they robbed stagecoaches and travelers on horseback. Also, it’s not up to SUWA to decide what constitutes a “reasonable transportation need,” firstly because there’s nothing reasonable about SUWA and secondly because they have a bias against roads, even ancient roads, which traverse and/or dead-end into terrain possessing or even potentially possessing what they would consider “wilderness characteristics.” Four-wheelers might utilize them to reach a good view or a ghost town, Indian ruins, unique geological features or a panel of petroglyphs. SUWA, however, does not allow that off-roaders might be motivated by the same desire to explore southern Utah’s beautiful landscapes which is evinced by many of their own members.

On their website, SUWA says “Roads open adjacent lands to destructive off-road vehicle use, with losses of archaeological sites, wildlife habitat and water quality, not to mention lost peace, quiet and natural beauty.”

But “destructive” compared to what? The many-scales-of-magnitude-greater erosion of the landscape into forms eliciting the “open-mouthed” admiration of future SUWites? One gully-washer in southern Utah visits ten-thousand times more erosive “destruction” on the landscape than all the off-road traffic that has ever traversed it. And pedestrians have surely looted just as many archaeological sites, massacred just as much wildlife and pissed in as many rivers as the off-road crowd. What they are objecting to here is people having access to their own land. The argument could be applied equally well to hikers’ trails, and I don’t doubt it eventually will.

SUWA says, “Thousands of new roads across public lands create a management nightmare for BLM, Forest Service and National Park Service managers.” But the real nightmare for public lands managers is the constant threat of lawsuits from environmental groups like SUWA. It’s not much of a stretch to say “our” public lands are managed by environmentalist lawyers who don’t like the way ‘our’ government agencies operate, except when those agencies cave in to their demands. And there is no controversy over “new” roads because nobody is asking that recently constructed ATV trails be officially declared “roads.” What SUWA means by “new roads” are old roads, paths and Jeep trails recognized as legitimate under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (FLPMA).

Lest you believe that SUWA will be satisfied with the 9.4 million acres of land it is asking be locked up by the Red Rock Wilderness Act, here’s an excerpt from Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner’s introduction to Wilderness at the Edge, the 1989 Utah Wilderness Coalition’s compendium of “wilderness quality” land in our great state, which SUWA describes as “the definitive description of the original citizens’ proposal for Utah wilderness”:

“Once, in the 1930s, Harold Ickes and others were proposing that almost all of southern Utah be made into one vast national park. That never came to pass; if it had, I suspect that the southern Utah economy would be stronger than it is now, and the wilderness would be more intact. But the 5.7 million-acre proposal of the Utah Wilderness Coalition is the closest thing still available. It is not a wish-list concocted by insatiable environmentalists. It is actually a true inventory of what is left, the precise thing that the BLM was instructed to prepare.”

And now, 20 years later, when the number of off-road recreationists has increased four-fold by SUWA’s own reckoning, “scaring” the landscape with their tracks, they have somehow discovered 3.7 million more acres of land “with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable,” as required by the Wilderness Act. Huh?

The fact is, we are dealing with “insatiable environmentalists.” Or more properly, the pawns of billionaires with their own environmentally-unfriendly big-business agendas, posing as environmentalists. If they and their friends in Congress who want to punish Utah for being a red state got the 9.4 million acres they were after, they would want another 9.4 million and another after that. SUWA stays in business, and garners donations, both big and small, by manufacturing endangered wilderness. That’s their product.

(BTW, Wilderness at the Edge makes an excellent backcountry road guide, with dozens of cherry-stemmed routes through supposed wilderness areas. I heartily recommend off-road enthusiasts obtain a copy if they can get their hands on one.)

Now I’ll explain my own philosophy, again, just to head off lazy criticism. I’m a scofflaw. Though I drive an off-road vehicle, I don’t set out to build “new roads” and I try not to run over cryptogams (a term which a quick web search will show is actually cladistically polyphyletic; the proper scientific name is “living brown crud you shouldn’t step on”), archaeological sites, backpackers or endangered species. Except for the Kanab ambersnail. I would drive a hundred miles out of my way to squash a Kanab ambersnail. I don’t know why.

I’m tired of the simplistic argument that as an advocate of motorized travel, I’m somehow also representative of a right-wing conspiracy whose aim is to “pave every square inch” of undeveloped land in the nation. In fact, I’d prefer less pavement and less development. 

I recall during a book fair I attended a few years back at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, an environmentalist author pausing in his reading, leaning towards his small audience and confiding to us in a conspiratorial tone that he didn’t believe people should be allowed into the open country beyond the cities “unless they had the right attitude towards it.” And who, I wondered, would decide what the “right attitude” was? The government? 

My fear, again, is that at some point we the people who need (not just want) to escape the confines of their civilization, will have to pay for a permit and undergo a battery of psychological tests to qualify for the privilege of visiting the frontier lands they had once been told belonged to the public at large. It will be a sort of combination profiling-Fee-Demo right at the city’s edge. At which same point a certain segment of the population will go insane. There will be rioting in the streets. Fires will be set. There will be human sacrifices, dogs and cats lying together…mass hysteria.

Or maybe the nation’s undomesticated human population will have been imprisoned or killed off by then.

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