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Show THE CANYON By Liz Thomas &6 Herb COUNTRY McHarg of the Southern WATCHDOG Utah Wilderness Alliance off-road vehicle use, until this inventory work is complete, and the plans amended. This will give our wilderness the protection it deserves, allow the BLM to start afresh ona path of ecologically and legally sound management, and go far to end disputes over public lands. The Clinton Administration, with the leadership of Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck, BLM Wilderness Across the West In the New Millennium: recently took a much needed and appreciated step toward protecting our National Forest roadless areas. Unfortunately, the Department of the Interior lacks similar leadership. At least forty million acres of BLM wilderness survived the last millennium. It is up to the Introduction: The Clinton administration has been an enormous disappointment when it comes to Bureau of Land Management wilderness. In 1992, the administration inherited an agency running on inadequate wilderness inventories and outdated management plans that failed to protect our public lands. During two terms, this democratic administration has done little to correct either of these failures that leave tens of millions of acres of BLM roadless areas unprotected. Instead, after seven years of general inactivity, Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt is pushing for a few national monuments, timid proposals that are grossly inadequate to remedy the situation. current generation of wilderness loving citizens to see they survive the next decade. For more information, check out WWW.BLMWILDERNESS.ORG. Scott Groene is the Director of the National BLM Wilderness Campaign. The Really Good Stuff At Risk: With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Bureau of Land Management controls more land than any other agency in the world, more than 170 million acres in the western United States. These public lands probably hold the greatest diversity of ecosystems found within any agency management, including 14,000 foot peaks in Colorado, Utah’s Redrock Canyons, the lonely Basin and Range country of Nevada, the high desert Owyhee Canyons in Oregon and Idaho, the north rim of the Grand Canyon, and the Georgia O'Keeffe desert of New Mexico. These lands form America’s outback, some of our nation’s roughest, wildest, and most beautiful lands. There is a revitalized citizens’ movement to protect America’s remaining wilderness, and the bulk of the effort is directed toward unprotected land managed by the BLM. Currently, less than two percent of these mountains, canyons, mesas, deserts and rivers are protected as wilderness. There are easily 40 million acres of additional qualifying BLM wilderness outside of Alaska, but no one knows the extent of the actual figure. Ongoing citizen inventories in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and New Mexico, added to the work already complete in Oregon, Utah and Wyoming, will give a final answer. An agency that fails to match the scenery: The BLM is saddled with a history of capitulating to the whims of the mining and livestock industries, and an antipathy for wilderness. There are numerous good employees within the agency, both in the field and in D.C., but they have not been provided the resources or political support necessary to do their jobs. The BLM has mismanaged our public lands in at least two major ways contrary to law. First, the agency has never conducted adequate wilderness inventories, or protected the lands that qualify as wilderness, as Congress directed. After years of stonewalling, the agency has admitted its inventories were flawed in Utah and Colorado, but it has far to go in these and other states to identify all the lands that qualify and protect these until Congress has passed wilderness legislation. Second, the agency operates under land management plans that are out of date and ignore the environmental damage caused by extractive industries, livestock grazing and off-road vehicle use. To compound these problems, the agency has decided it is fruitless to prepare new land management plans which resolve these violations. Instead, the agency is increasingly relinquishing its management role to local private "consensus" groups in a scheme that may ease the agency’s work load, but offers little other advantage. The consensus process ensures that commercial and off-road vehicle interests will protect the status quo by delaying any significant changes that might result in environmental protection. To resolve these problems the BLM must acknowledge its past wilderness inventories were flawed, and re-inventory all areas that citizens have documented qualify for wilderness. lans. Then these areas must be protected by amending existing land management : This process will be time consuming. To preserve planning opportunities, the Department of the Interior must close all areas citizens have identified as roadless from uses that may disqualify wilderness, such as oil and gas exploration, hard rock mining and TOMTILL 6 Palen Fight Hansen's Anti-Great Basin Wilderness Bill: In the spirit of this “retro” issue, we refer you back to last Zephyr “Millennium” edition for a complete explanation of Hansen's latest effort to prevent wilderness designation of " over 1.6 million acres of spectacular lands in the Great Basin country of western Utah, H.R. 3035. At a recent rural county meeting, Hansen touted that “this bill would resolve the wilderness issue in western Utah." Where did he get his cue cards? Leavitt? Certainly not the majority of Utahns and the national public that demand congressional designation for all remaining wilderness-quality lands (there are 2.6 million acres that fit this category in the Great Basin alone). Sorry Hansen, but the battle has just begun. The American public deserves better, and the issue of Wilderness in Utah will not be resolved until Congress considers a comprehensive bill for all 9.1 million acres of wilderness—not any inadequate, piecemeal, anti-wilderness excuse for legislation. In a new millennium spin on the words of the great Chief Seattle: “we will fight for more forever.” The bill will probably go to committee markup in February, and on the House floor in early spring. Please call the White House at (202) 456-1111 and tell the operator to ask President Clinton to stop Hansen's bad Utah wilderness bill, H.R. 3035. Bookcliffs “consensus” crashes: The old adage that history will repeat itself holds true for the consensus group formulated for the Bookcliffs Resource Management Plan Amendment-either that or the group was not Y2K compliant. As typical, the effort was programmed for disaster with the composition of the group stacked heavily in favor of off-road vehicle (ORV), grazing, oil and gas, and other tractive/develop interests. BLM puts these “consensus” groups together when it does not want to make a decision or cannot take the heat, and hopes the group will respond like a marionette to its suggestions. PAST LIFE EXPERIENCES, Volume #1 Before Tom took pictures, he was FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY IN them. ‘Till & Hardy?" 61N. Main St. Moab, UT 84532 (435) 259-9808 (888) 479-9808 E-MAIL: tillphot@lasal.net INTERNET: www.tomtill.com ae Se ty Se eeeeS a A he ee ee |