Wed
nesday, 5 May 1999

SALT LAKE CITY

Shaking the money tree comes with the turf. We’re a little better off than most groups because 71 percent of our annual budget comes from our 20,000 members‚ dues and donations, so I maybe don’t have to spend as much time as some of my counterparts in any one week hustling foundations and major donors. But the job’s still right up there at the top of my list. Saving wilderness takes money, in addition to legions of volunteers and a watchful staff. This morning I have a conference call with a couple of program officers for a foundation that’s interested in funding a project to help advance the BLM wilderness cause nationally.

Photo: James Kay.

Outside magazine says SUWA “has a reputation as a sort of fighting Johnny Appleseed, coaching other regional groups in the art of grassroots galvanizing.” The inventory and mapping work we coordinated for the new Utah wilderness citizens’ proposal is something a lot of groups are interested in emulating, so we’ve sent our guru, Kevin Walker, around to talk to folks about how to set up similar work and get it done. People are curious about different aspects of our campaign: how we elevated it to the national level and got the Clintonites to establish a new national monument, or how we keep all-terrain vehicles from trashing Wilderness Study Areas (which entails browbeating the agency to set up barriers).

Others of us have gone around to conferences and workshops to show and tell. Heidi McIntosh returned last weekend from a wilderness gathering in Albuquerque. I head out this weekend to another one in Reno. We’re thrilled to help in any way we can — so long as it doesn’t unduly detract us from our focus on Utah wilderness. We need to maintain our steady progress toward inclusion of more spectacular canyons in the National Wilderness Preservation System. Fortunately, there’s a new kid on the block to shoulder some of the galvanizing — the Wilderness Support Project.

In a new and encouraging groundswell, people are jump-starting the wilderness movement again like the conservation community did in the 1970s and into the early 1980s. (Ronald Reagan, of all people, signed bills that added more than 8 million acres into the system). Since 1993 when the California Desert Act passed, tucking another 3.5 million acres away, not much more than a trickle has gone into the system and efforts to change that were languishing. That’s changing. Put your ear to the ground, and you can hear the conservation community rumbling. Folks in the Colorado Wilderness Network have pushed to introduce a bill in this Congress reflecting their citizens’ proposal, which would protect 1.4 million acres of public land. A new group in Nevada, the Nevada Wilderness Alliance, is beginning to look at public lands in the state to determine which could qualify as wilderness; the same is true of the revitalized New Mexico Wilderness Coalition. In Oregon, people have a plan for protecting the eastern sagebrush plains, and Wyoming also has a citizens’ proposal on the table.

Across the West, we’re seeing a resurgence in protecting wilderness, and in the middle of the maelstrom, at the center of the vortex, is a the newly established Wilderness Support Project. Headed by Brian O’Donnell and Melyssa Watson, this project aims to find resources for the incipient activities of groups mentioned above and others. Giving them guidance, it’s helping move activities down the same path SUWA has moved its campaign — getting bills introduced and supported in Congress.

The trick is to prompt decisionmakers in Congress and the administration to sit up and take notice — to goad them into action. The concept behind the Wilderness Support Project is a solid one, and that is to set up various states’ wilderness bills in Congress like a line of dominoes, so that when one succeeds, say, Colorado or Utah, the rest are right behind ready to be enacted.

The National Wilderness Preservation System now holds 104 million acres of public land — yours and mine — in a pristine trust for future generations. So far, BLM lands have received scant attention, but nowhere else does such significant potential exist to add acreage to the system. BLM manages 264 million acres on our behalf. After being required by law in 1976 to look at its holdings for wilderness, BLM found less than 10 percent suitable, a shoddy stab at the matter to be sure. The White House Council of Environmental Quality at that time estimated roughly 90 to 120 million acres could be suitable for wilderness protection, though a fraction has undoubtedly lost its wilderness character in the intervening years.

To give these numbers perspective, the Alaska Lands Act added 57 million acres to the National Wilderness Preservation System. The potential for BLM wilderness in the West rivals this figure. The domino game is on. It’ll be fun to see the pieces line up.

To contact the Wilderness Support Project for more information, call 801.420.4109 or send an email.