Tuesday, 4 May 1999

SALT LAKE CITY

The battle on the ground to defend these places grinds on daily. While volunteers, mostly, spent the last two years identifying every patch of the Bureau of Land Management’s 23 million acres that qualifies for wilderness under the definition of the 1964 Wilderness Act, it now falls upon the shoulders of our field staff to make sure all these places remain viable for eventual inclusion in the National Wilderness Preservation System. At our weekly staff meeting we run through the litany of proposed actions that threaten wilderness we hope to protect in the new and improved citizens’ proposal.

Photo: Ray Wheeler.

Herb McHarg, in our Moab office, and Liz Thomas, in our Cedar City office, lawyers both, spend a good chunk of their time going toe-to-toe with BLM. The agency is a lumbering opponent, but doggedly persistent all the same. It has its fans, like the oil and gas industry, cheering it on.

The Resource Development Group, an oil consortium, wants to drill 969 wells and build 267 miles of new roads in the Book Cliffs, a plan that would ruin the Lower Bitter Creek proposed wilderness. BLM magically found that no significant impact would result if it granted permits to drill, thanks to the agency’s imperial wisdom that four wells per square mile (instead of the usual eight) would mitigate impacts in critical elk and mule deer wintering range adequately enough.

Legacy Oil, a wildcatter out of Colorado, wants to drill for oil in Lockhart Basin, which was originally included inside the boundaries of Canyonlands National Park until political wrangling in the 1970s excised it. But Lockhart Basin is deserving of protected status, and we’re proposing it be designated wilderness, just as others hope to see it added back into the park.

For both of these proposed projects, BLM thought quick and simple environmental assessments would suffice, though to us these projects seem to qualify as major federal actions with serious ramifications. We’re insisting it draw up more thorough environmental impact statements, which at least require the agency to include a “no action” alternative.

Local water boards and state government agencies are also on the sidelines, urging BLM on — more often than not to do the wrong thing. BLM finds it hard to resist.

In Escalante, the water conservancy district wants to build a new reservoir, just up from an existing one in Wide Hollow, that would drain water away from places we think ought to be designated wilderness. In the desert, water is the lifeblood of the ecosystem. We had to go above local heads, but we prevailed upon BLM in Washington, D.C., to yank the project.

Because water is so vital to wildlife, the state Division of Wildlife Resources wants to install a slew of water guzzlers in proposed wilderness to boost numbers of non-endemic game like the chukar (Eurasian birds). Such developments would disqualify places from becoming wilderness, which is part of the aim of the state, and BLM has been more than willing to oblige. We took the decision to the Interior Board of Land Appeals, which agreed that guzzlers don’t belong in proposed wilderness.

These myriad skirmishes and tussles don’t grab the spotlight. Occasionally, they make the paper. They’re not particularly exciting or sexy. It’s a lonely task for Herb and Liz, who know more about what’s happening on the ground than do agency personnel, who get paid a lot more. It’s tough to feel like the constant fighting is making any headway.

But it’s so critical. Mixing it up with BLM, swinging a right here and an unseen uppercut there, lets agency staff know we’re there watching them intently. They know they have to do their jobs — they know somebody’s making sure they follow the law and abide by their own regulations. It’s what distinguishes SUWA and other groups like us that have a presence in the field. We do what we do because it’s what’s best for the land. And we celebrate every little decision we win, every minor but deleterious action we block.