10-23-1999

ENVIRONMENT: Call of the Wild

STRAWBERRY PEAK, Calif.--Jim Schoedler rested in the shadow of a canyon
oak tree on this chaparral-covered crest in the San Gabriel Mountains and
pointed to a distant dry streambed, where off-road- vehicle enthusiasts
want to bulldoze a path for their big-wheeled buggies. If the path is
built, this portion of the Angeles National Forest, 20 miles east of Los
Angeles, will no longer be eligible for protection under the 1964
Wilderness Act, which bars all mechanized vehicles. So far, environmental
groups have used legal maneuvers to keep the bulldozers at bay. But time
is running out for these wildlands, lamented Schoedler, a Pasadena
engineer who is coordinating efforts by local volunteers to survey the
region.


"This is one of the most heavily used forests in the nation,"
Schoedler said, as a line of motorcycles buzzed around a narrow curve on
the nearby Crest Area Highway. "It's important for us to save it
while we can."


Schoedler is one of thousands of volunteers who have spent their weekends
mapping out the still-roadless regions of the nation's forests. Their aim
is to persuade Congress to protect large pieces of those lands under the
Wilderness Act. Over the next 10 years, the Pew Charitable Trust, which
underwrites many of the regional groups that are surveying the forests,
wants to add 50 million acres to the federal system of wilderness areas.
Currently, 104 million acres are protected as wilderness, which is the
federal government's most restrictive category of land use
control.


On Oct. 13, President Clinton announced an initiative that would bring Pew
close to that goal. Clinton vowed to ban road building and logging on at
least 40 million acres of national-forest wilderness. He's using an
administrative procedure to permanently protect roadless areas that were
temporarily closed to construction in February under a U.S. Forest Service
moratorium. Only Congress can formally protect lands under the Wilderness
Act, but federal regulators can restrict land use in the nation's
forests.


Standing at a scenic vista in Virginia's George Washington National
Forest, Clinton described his forest proposal as "one of the largest
land preservation efforts in America's history to protect these priceless,
backcountry lands."


Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Bruce E. Babbitt is crisscrossing the nation
to drum up support for President Clinton's lands legacy program, which
would provide $1 billion a year for local, state, and federal agencies to
preserve more open lands. In late September, Babbitt's road trip took him
to Virginia's Manassas National Battlefield Park, which is seeking
$400,000 to buy property adjoining the park. "I've been spending
eight to 10 months a year with suitcase in hand," Babbitt told
reporters at the park. "I know there is support for preservation out
there."


Babbitt is also on a personal crusade to protect more than a dozen sites
that he describes as the nation's "last, best places, the sacred
places that define who we are as Americans." To safeguard these
areas, Babbitt has hinted that he might ask Clinton to designate some of
the lands as monuments under the 1906 Antiquities Act. Clinton used that
law in 1996, when he created the 1.9 million-acre Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah's red-rock country. (For
more on Babbitt's priority sites, see box, p. 3042.)


The Clinton Administration and the environmental activists are trying to
make the most of what they see as a national resurgence of public support
for preserving open space and aggressively protecting the nation's
wildlands. They're pushing to buy up more land, and they're arguing for
new limits on real estate already owned by the federal government.
"The baby boom generation is raising its kids and saying, `This
sprawl is extending to the horizon. We're raising kids that don't have the
open space experiences that we had,' " Babbitt said in an interview.
"People want to preserve wilderness. They want to save Civil War
battlefields. They want to create urban parks."


Not since the turn of the century has the United States been on the brink
of preserving so many wildlands and open spaces. From 1901-09, President
Theodore Roosevelt created five national parks (including the Grand
Canyon), 50 wildlife reserves, and almost 99 million acres of forest
reserves. In the blossoming urban centers of Chicago, New York, and San
Francisco, city halls set aside huge tracts of prime real estate for urban
parks.


Babbitt sees the end of this millennium as "a similar moment in
history," an opportunity to conserve America's dwindling open spaces,
which are increasingly being overrun by urban sprawl, unchecked road
building, and logging and mining. To that end, he argues, Clinton has
protected more land than any President in modern history. Indeed, if the
Administration's preservation plans are realized, it would not be
surprising if one of Clinton's legacies is the conservation of open space.
That's not something anyone would have predicted when Clinton assumed the
presidency, but preservation could turn out to be one of his most
significant accomplishments.


The preservation ethic is embraced by environmental advocates, hunting and
fishing groups, outdoor outfitting and tourism companies--and a number of
Republicans. Clinton's lands legacy program, for example, has some
unlikely supporters on Capitol Hill: Senate Energy and Natural Resources
Committee Chairman Frank Murkowski and House Resources Committee Chairman
Don Young. Both Republicans from Alaska, they favor legislation that would
provide guaranteed funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Their
interest in the program is perhaps less aesthetic than Babbitt's--their
proposals would funnel $150 million annually to Alaska.


Montana's Republican Gov. Marc Racicot agrees that the pendulum of public
opinion has swung in favor of land conservation. "This is not a
partisan issue," he said in a recent interview with Washington
reporters. "Americans recognize that there are special places in this
country that people agree deserve additional attention. We're sensing a
pivotal change in how we live and the quality of life that we
want."


Shifting Politics


When President Clinton announced plans on Oct. 13 to protect national
forest lands that have not yet been logged or cleared for construction,
his action reflected a remarkable shift in federal land use policy over
the past four years.


In 1995, the Republican-led, conservative Congress dominated the public
lands agenda, as lawmakers floated proposals to sell off little-used
national parks and to open more federal lands to logging, mining, and oil
drilling. Down Pennsylvania Avenue, Clinton went with the tide, signing a
budget deal that included a controversial rider permitting logging on
long-protected national forests in the Pacific Northwest.


During that era, Babbitt's ideas on land conservation came under heated
attack on Capitol Hill. "That was a dark time," he recalled. To
get out of the line of fire, Babbitt left town and tried to get his
message to the American public by paddling down rivers and hiking across
open lands.


Meanwhile, the environmental groups, galvanized by the conservative
Congress's proposals, put aside their internal conflicts and began a
counterattack. "We fought back rather successfully, and we gained a
lot of trust in each other," said Wilderness Society President
William Meadows. Efforts to re-energize the environmental community were
aided by the Pew trust, which focused its environmental funding on
creating grass-roots land preservation coalitions. Since 1991, Pew has
spent more than $35 million on preserving old-growth forests and
wilderness areas.


In late September, the trust also agreed to provide $875,000 over the next
15 months to help volunteers map potential wilderness areas on Bureau of
Land Management property in six states. The original government
inventories of those states were completed during the Reagan
Administration under then-Interior Secretary James Watt. Environmentalists
say that he vastly underestimated the amount of land eligible for
wilderness status.


In 1996, Clinton, running for a second term and eager to get back into the
environmental community's favor, created the Grand Staircase-Escalante
National Monument in Utah.


By 1998, the tide appeared to have turned. Voters across the nation passed
more than 170 ballot initiatives to limit regional growth or preserve
undeveloped regions of land. In the process, voters agreed to spend $7.5
billion for open spaces. A Republican Governor, Christine Todd Whitman,
supported one of the most ambitious initiatives--a 10-year, $1 billion
open space program in New Jersey.


Then in January, Clinton introduced his lands legacy program. Interior
Department officials say that the proposal, which is their top legislative
priority, is getting unusually strong support from the White
House.


More surprising has been the congressional coalition that's backing
legislation to reinvigorate the Land and Water Conservation Fund. In the
House, Young has become allies with liberal California Democrat George
Miller. Their staffs are trying to put together a compromise bill that
would give states and local communities a piece of the $4 billion in oil
royalties collected each year from companies drilling within U.S. coastal
waters. The bulk of that money would go to Alaska, California, and other
coastal states; it now flows directly into the federal Treasury. The
measure would also take the conservation fund off-budget. In the Senate,
Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Murkowski has been working
with Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., on similar legislation.


Pockets of Opposition


Not everyone is wild about the stepped-up efforts to put more land
off-limits to development. Many conservatives in Congress and
property-rights advocates are vowing to fight the Administration's
plans.


Western conservatives, for example, immediately attacked Clinton's recent
proposal to preserve roadless forest lands. Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah,
charged that by restricting logging and road building in the forests,
Clinton is inviting wildfires, insect infestation, and disease. Logging
industry officials contended that Clinton's plan would be a death sentence
for logging communities that depend on national-forest timber.


Meanwhile, Clinton's lands legacy program and Murkowski's and Young's
legislation are opposed by House and Senate Appropriations Committee
members who don't like provisions that would remove the Land and Water
Conservation Funds from their jurisdiction. And Western Republicans fear
that proposals to earmark $1 billion annually for open space preservation
could result in a federal buying spree in the West. They argue that the
federal government should limit its real estate holdings. "We believe
that the federal government already owns too much land," said G.
Chandler Keys, the vice president of public policy for the National
Cattlemen's Beef Association. "And they don't do a very good job
taking care of it."


Keys and representatives from several property-rights groups are pushing a
bill that


would prohibit regulators from buying more land until other federal
properties are put on the auction block. Currently, Uncle Sam owns almost
30 percent of the land in the United States, most of it located in Western
states and Alaska.


Western Republicans are also looking for ways to stop Clinton from
preserving lands by creating new national monuments under the Antiquities
Act. To that end, Rep. James V. Hansen, R-Utah, the chairman of the House
Resources National Parks and Public Lands Subcommittee, is promoting
legislation that would force the President to get state and local input
and notify state officials 60 days before naming a new monument.


Despite these concerns, however, property-rights advocates have been slow
to respond to the challenge, says Myron Ebell, a policy analyst with the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. "A lot
of people in the property-rights movement have never known what it is like
to have the government buying up a lot of lands," he said. "But
people are starting to get the message, and they don't want
this."


New Approaches


In the summer of 1994, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service inadvertently
helped Texas Republican George W. Bush sprint to the Governor's Mansion,
when it announced plans to designate 33 counties in central Texas as
critical habitat for the nearly extinct golden-cheeked warbler. Bush, who
at the time was lagging in the polls behind Democratic Gov. Ann W.
Richards, immediately attacked the federal action by arguing that it would
restrict economic activity and property use. Bush hammered Richards on the
issue, running ads accusing her of putting "birds above our families
and jobs." Three weeks later, Richards came out against the federal
controls. But the damage was done.


Ebell points to that race as an indication of how Bush would handle land
preservation issues if he were President. "Texas is a very
pro-private property state," he says. "Bush is part of that
culture."


Ebell and other conservatives argue that environmental activists are
rushing to preserve huge swatches of wildlands because they fear that
their campaigns would come to an abrupt end in a Republican
Administration, particularly if the GOP retains control of both chambers
of Congress. "Let's see what it looks like in a year-and-a-half if we
have a Republican Administration," Ebell said. "Let's see how
far they get on land acquisition."


Land preservation advocates, however, don't agree that the success or
longevity of their campaign depends on who wins


the 2000 presidential election. The Wilderness Society's Meadows maintains
that the Republican leadership in Congress is more conservative than many
rank-and-file members. "There are plenty of moderate Republicans who
honestly believe that this is the right position for the Republican Party
to take on open space," Meadows said.


Then, too, Republicans learned a lesson during the 104th Congress, when
the American public resoundingly rejected conservative attempts to
overturn federal environmental protections. "The leaders in the party
recognize the political price they would pay if they challenge the
long-standing environmental and conservation accomplishments,"
Meadows said.


Even so, if Bush makes it to the Oval Office, he's likely to pursue an
approach different from Clinton's. In Texas, the Governor worked with
private companies and land trust organizations to increase state-protected
coastal marshes and woodlands. On Sept. 28, for example, the state teamed
with Dow Chemical Co. to buy a 3,200-acre stretch of swamp for a migratory
bird habitat.


To develop his presidential campaign's environmental agenda, Bush has also
sought the help of such free-market environmentalists as Terry L.
Anderson, the executive director of an environmental think tank in
Bozeman, Mont. Anderson released a paper recently recommending that Utah's
Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument be managed through a private trust,
rather than by federal regulators. Anderson said, however, that Bush's
campaign staffers are closely watching the polls and are unlikely to back
any radical changes in federal land use policy.


Some Westerners support such new approaches to land conservation. Montana
Gov. Racicot said that his state has created a heritage commission, made
up of ranchers and conservationists, that is using state and private money
to purchase development rights while allowing ranchers to retain grazing
privileges on their lands.


Keys, of the cattlemen's association, favors such approaches. "Rather
than have the lands legacy bills, which would give the government a whole
bunch of money to go on a land buying spree, we should be looking for a
new way to manage these open lands," he said. "We believe the
new way should allow ranchers out West to form partnerships with local
environmental groups and national groups like the Nature Conservancy and
the American Farmland Trust." His members also want Washington to
eliminate the federal estate tax, which makes it financially difficult for
ranchers to pass property on to the next generation.


Babbitt has responded to some of the Westerners' complaints. In Montana,
for example, local government officials objected when Babbitt proposed
restricting the use of land along the Missouri River, where Lewis and
Clark explored nearly 200 years ago. The officials decried Babbitt's
unilateral decision, and said it would limit recreation and grazing
in


the area. To assuage those concerns, Babbitt turned for advice to a
regional advisory panel of local business owners, ranchers, and
environmental activists, which is expected to complete its recommendations
on protecting those lands by December of this year.


The environmentalists are also trying to work with a wider range of groups
that regularly use federal lands, such as hunting and fishing
organizations and recreational outfitting companies. The Pew trust, for
example, recently helped create the Theodore Roosevelt Wildlife Alliance,
which represents hunters and anglers who support land preservation
efforts.


"These coalitions and partnerships are part of what we think of as
the original environmental movement in the U.S.," said Joshua
Reichert, the head of Pew's environmental program. "It hearkens back
to the roots of the conservation movement in America. The people who were
responsible for creating the national parks and wildlife refuges were
centrists. They held values that are still held deeply by many Americans.
What we're trying to do is reconnect those groups and return to a
nonpartisan American tradition of conservation."


Pew's vision of building long-term support for preserving wilderness areas
is shared by California environmental volunteer Schoedler, as he maps out
California's potential wilderness areas. Schoedler said he remembers
working on the 1993 California Desert Protection Act, which took a decade
to get through Congress. "If this effort takes 20 years, that's
fine," Schoedler said. "This area needs to be
protected."


Margaret Kriz

National Journal