Wilderness Act: unspoiled political territory

By JOHN HEILPRIN
The Associated Press

STACIA SPRAGG / AP Petroglyphs spill over a cliff at Ojito Mesa in New Mexico. An 11,000-acre area proposed for wilderness protection also includes fossils, unique mineral formations and rare plants and animals.

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Even President Bush has signed off on adding 529,604 acres at a time environmentalists are attempting to use the Wilderness Act to block his pursuit of more oil and gas drilling and timbering on federal land.

Only Congress can designate wilderness, though the president has to sign laws doing so. The acreage added so far in Bush's tenure is the least of any president since Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act on Sept. 3, 1964.

Motorized vehicles and equipment, such as chain saws, are prohibited in wilderness areas. Camping, hiking, climbing, fishing, hunting, canoeing and horseback riding are allowed; grazing of livestock is generally allowed. Off-limits are mountain biking, commercial logging, road-building, oil-and-gas leasing and mining, except for pre-existing claims.

Rep. Richard Pombo, chairman of the House Resources Committee, sends a form letter to colleagues who propose new areas.

"Wilderness designations often result in lasting controversy and a sense of resentment" if they don't have widespread local support, cautions Pombo, R-Calif.

Wilderness law facts Under the 1964 Wilderness Act: There are 106 million acres protected as wilderness. Alaska accounts for more than half of them, 58 million acres, which is 16 percent of the state. California has 14 million acres, or 14 percent of the state. Washington state has 4.3 million acres, or 10 percent of the state. President Bush has signed four wilderness bills passed by Congress, adding 529,604 acres, nearly all in Nevada; 14,000 acres are in Colorado. The most acreage was added during Jimmy Carter's years in the White House. Carter signed 14 wilderness bills covering a total of 66.3 million acres, mostly in Alaska. Four federal agencies manage the areas: the National Park Service, 43.6 million acres; the U.S. Forest Service, 35 million acres; the Fish and Wildlife Service, 20.7 million acres; and the Bureau of Land Management, 6.5 million acres. California has the most wilderness areas, 130; Washington has 30. Sources: Interior Department; The Wilderness Society; Wilderness.net The Associated Press

Another California Republican, Rep. George Radanovich, who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees wilderness, says the pace of adding to it "needs to be slowed down to keep some people from ... abusing the intent of the law by keeping the public off public lands."

"We may be slowing it down, but I don't think there's the interest in cutting them off completely," Radanovich said yesterday. "Where there's the interest, I think they [wilderness areas] can be designated as long as they're appropriate."

Last year, the Bush administration directed the Interior Department to quit barring oil-and-gas drilling on land proposed for wilderness but not yet designated by Congress. Since then, the department has issued oil-and-gas leases on tens of thousands of those acres, mainly in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming.

During the fall, Congress might pass two proposals for new wilderness, Radanovich said. Those would create protections for nearly 770,000 acres around Lincoln County, Nev., and 11,000 acres dubbed the Ojito Wilderness near Albuquerque, N.M.

Nearly 5 percent of the nation is protected as wilderness, in what author Wallace Stegner, an admirer of Western landscapes, famously described as "the geography of hope."

Wildernesses range in size from 5-acre Pelican Island in Florida to the 9 million-acre Wrangell-Saint Elias area in Alaska. Only six states — Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland and Rhode Island — have none.

"It isn't a lockup forever, but these areas do have a padlock on them and Congress has the key," said Doug Scott, a Seattle environmentalist who wrote a history of the law. Part of the law's staying power, he said, is that "it was designed, most of all, to put the Congress in the driver's seat."

Few of the 114 bills signed by Johnson and successive presidents creating 663 wilderness areas around the nation have been tinkered with, and there never has been an attempt to undo a wilderness designation.

"The magic is it requires Congress, which in turn requires the citizenry, to be engaged. That's where it gets its power," said William Meadows, president of The Wilderness Society.

His group believes an additional 200 million acres, largely in Alaska, should be considered for wilderness protections.

Alaska contains more than half of the nation's designated wilderness, 58 million acres, about 16 percent of the state. Nearly all of the wilderness added during Bush's presidency is in Nevada; 14,000 acres are in Colorado.

Supporters credit the law's success to the power of a revolutionary, uniquely American idea: leaving future generations some of the last remaining wild areas, free from human design. Other countries have since mimicked it.

Utah author and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams sees poetry in a law that defines wilderness as "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."

"Those who wrote this legislation into being understood the crucial and subtle relationship between language and landscape," Williams said. "How we speak about wild, open country is closely aligned with how we treat it. Open lands open minds."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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