Back in the 1960's I joined environmental organizations like the Sierra Club because they were doing "Good Things" to protect the environment. But I became disillusioned after too many misleading "The Sky is Falling" articles in their publications. I was also a charter member of Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and lasted until I became disillusioned with their "Wilderness or Nothing" policy for all of the supposedly roadless BLM lands in Utah.
So I was peacefully enjoying not being involved with the BLM Wilderness dispute in Utah when I read a very interesting interview in the July 31 issue of High Country News. The following question by Ed Marston and its response by Steve Hinchman, a former editor of HCN and an environmental activist, inspired this essay.
Marston: "For better or worse, you've come a long way from 1968, when you arrived in Paonia as a hippie with long hair and all the answers."
Hinchman: "That was eco-rhetoric. The truth is, you get co-opted when you live in these small, rural towns and see the incompatibility of a one-size-fits-all wilderness strategy with needs on the ground. That's when you move to talking about a more integrated approach: loggers doing restoration, the BLM and Forest Service setting big fires, hunters working on habitat restoration, and putting private-land winter range into protection."
"A lot of my friends and compatriots will be very angry at me for saying this. And I know the penalty for traitors. But the wilderness movement has almost gotten intoxicated with the amount of money and power they are bringing in, so much so that they are willing to fight a scorched-earth political campaign in the rural West."
"No modern society has ever managed to simultaneously inhabit and preserve fully working ecosystems. The wilderness movement is a great and noble experiment, but it ignores the inhabit part and therefore it will fail, at least ecologically."
It is a thought-provoking interview. Most environmental organizations will disagree with most of what Steve Hinchman says, but it should stimulate interesting discussions among open minded environmentalists. The full text can be found at: www.hcn.org. It's in the July 31, 2000 issue.
I was busy writing letters supporting BLM wilderness in Utah back when the Utah Wilderness Coalition was being created by several environmental organizations, and I talked to several of the leaders of the coalition about how they were planning to go about convincing Congress to pass a wilderness bill. They made several decisions in those early days that, in my opinion, have doomed the effort to pass wilderness legislation in Utah for the foreseeable future. They decided:
1) The Utah BLM Wilderness campaign would be a major national campaign.
2) The people living in rural Utah near the proposed wilderness areas would not be included in the discussions.
3) Only one, all inclusive, wilderness bill would be acceptable. Multiple wilderness bills over a substantial period of time would not be acceptable.
4) A lot more acreage would be included in the proposal than would be necessary for an acceptable bill. This would allow a lot of the roadless areas with marginal values to be eliminated during discussions on a compromise bill.
As a result of the first two decisions, the people in rural Utah were ignored for years until it was too late to reverse the polarization that had taken place. In my opinion, the third decision is one that won't work in Utah; especially when the fourth decision was changed to an "all or nothing," "no compromise" approach. Call me deranged, call me irrational, or call me delusional; but, if I were planning a campaign to prevent wilderness from being designated in Utah, my plans would be remarkably similar to the campaign being waged by the Utah Wilderness Coalition. UWC has pursued a "scorched-earth political campaign" that has failed to result in any wilderness designations.
So what do I think should be done to eliminate the stalemate that exists so that wilderness legislation can be passed by Congress? I would start with the first decision that was made by UWC. As long as the major environmental organizations can use the Utah wilderness issue for raising significant amounts of money for their organizations, they have no incentive to see wilderness legislation passed. I would like to see a grass roots campaign within these environmental organizations demanding that UWC stop stalling and focus on passing a wilderness bill. Right now we just have UWC bragging about how many acres of supposedly roadless BLM land they have found in Utah. In my opinion, their 9.1 million acre wilderness proposal is a joke.
The second decision, to ignore the people in rural Utah, has resulted in an intractable situation that probably cannot be changed no matter how hard UWC now tries to convince those people that wilderness would be good for them. By starting with a "here's what we're going to do to you" attitude, UWC probably precluded any meaningful dialog with rural Utah.
The third decision, that only one wilderness bill would be acceptable, might have been driven from the fear that funding for the environmental organizations might dry up or that UWC would cease to exist after the first bill was passed. Leaders in these organizations condemned the wilderness legislation that Congress passed for Utah's National Forests in the 1980's, saying that the bill should have been delayed until all "deserving" areas had been added. If that attitude had prevailed, we probably still wouldn't have any National Forest wilderness areas. In my opinion, the only way Utah will have significant areas protected as wilderness is through the passage of multiple bills over several decades.
The fourth decision was changed to a "no compromise" position. This has prevented any meaningful discussions with Utah's politicians. But any wilderness bill will have to be a compromise. UWC convinced its membership that it won't accept anything less than a 5.4 million acre wilderness bill. (I can't take their 9.1 million acre proposal seriously.) But Utah's Congressional delegation will never support a bill that large. So I have concluded that Congress won't pass a Utah Wilderness Coalition sponsored Wilderness Bill for BLM land in Utah in my lifetime unless radical changes occur in the approach taken by the Sierra Club, SUWA and the other members of UWC.
The battle over wilderness designations on BLM lands in Utah has had a significant side effect. The wilderness legislation for Utah's National Forest lands stated that additional wilderness designations on National Forest lands couldn't be considered until 2001. Well, 2001 is almost here and several National Forests in Utah have started the process of updating their Forest Plans. Now is the time that environmental organizations should be starting a campaign to expand the existing wilderness areas and advocating new areas for wilderness designation. Unfortunately, because of the deadlock that exists over BLM wilderness designations, I see little hope for a successful campaign to add to the National Forest wilderness system. The BLM wilderness issue has to be settled first.
In my opinion, the only person who could break the wilderness deadlock is the Governor. But he has to do it with input from all sides in the debate. He hasn't done this, preferring to either work only with Utah's politicians or go behind closed doors with the Secretary of the Interior. All sides in the debate have to be at the table or any compromise is bound to fail. (I still hope that the UWC and the politicians will be willing to come to a compromise solution.) Come on Mike, show some leadership. How many decades are going to pass before you forge an agreement?
So now that I've had my say, I'll go back into hibernation on the wilderness issue and let the ideologues to continue with their demagoguery.