President Bush’s secretary of the interior, Gale Norton, has launched a potentially devastating, three-pronged attack on America’s last remaining wildlands.
First: With a stroke of a pen she removed special safeguards for millions of acres of pristine wildlands that had been recommended for protection as federally designated wilderness, the federal government’s highest level of protection.
In doing so, Secretary Norton expanded the use of a loophole in a repealed 19th century mining law. This loophole enables states, local governments and citizens throughout the west to claim that cow paths, foot trails and some waterways are roads which must be maintained within public lands. This could pave the way for corporate interest to drill and mine in these lands.
This new policy leaves open to road construction nearly 10 million acres on sensitive and currently roadless land in Utah, including the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Millions of acres of unspoiled public lands which Norton’s predecessor had planned to study for wilderness designation are now vulnerable. Once intrusive road building, messy drilling or destructive mining begins, these beautiful wildlands will no longer be eligible for wilderness protection — ever.
Even our national parks, wildlife refuges and wilderness areas are not fully protected from this dangerous new policy.
Secondly: Norton has basically set a new policy for this Administration which is to never again recommend any Bureau of Land Management (BLM) wildlands for federal protection as wilderness.
That means spectacular, sensitive lands that we Americans own and deserving wilderness protection could now be opened to oil and mining development as well as off-road use and road building. Once development begins on these public lands no administration can ever recommend them for wilderness protection.
In the third part of her attack on wilderness, Secretary Norton reinstated a 1981 order to end consideration of wilderness protection for millions of acres in Alaska. Under this policy, the BLM will only designate wilderness quality land when it has the "broad support" of state or federal elected officials. That means elected officials like the pro-oil governor of Alaska, Frank Murkowski.
Even more shameful than any of this, Norton’s three-pronged attack attempts to cut the American public out of the process, the Department of the Interior is trying to circumvent our rights to recommend public lands for wilderness protection.
Secretary Norton’s actions show a blatant disregard for the public lands she is sworn to protect.
In addition to her attack, her anti-environmental cronies in Congress have written a bill which would remove protection for millions more acres of wildlands that are presently eligible for wilderness designation.
While many of us have been focusing on national security and the economy, the Department of the Interior has been trying to give away our nation’s wildlands to Bush’s cronies in the oil, gas, lumber and mining industries.
Please let your representative know that the public lands belong to us and not special interest groups.
David Gross
Marlboro