Dear HCN:
Your cover story on the
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (HCN, 4/14/97) stated
that the challenge facing the Bureau of Land Management in planning
for the monument is “to protect the land and make it accessible.”
Wrong. The comment incorrectly assumes the BLM is confronted with
the same bedeviling mandate adopted by some national park managers:
to preserve natural values while accommodating rising visitation.
President Clinton’s proclamation establishing
the monument cuts short arguments for building tourist
infrastructure; rather, this monument was created solely for the
purpose of protecting natural and historic values. Clinton’s
proclamation recognized that “remoteness, limited travel corridors,
and low visitation have all helped to preserve intact the
monument’s important ecological values.” BLM’s management of the
region must perpetuate those conditions.
Conoco
Inc., a subsidiary of Dupont, has an application pending with BLM
to drill for oil in the heart of the monument, a region recently
determined by Car and Driver magazine to be the most remote in the
lower 48 states. The first indication of BLM’s capability as an
administrator will be its response to this effort to transform
quiet canyons into an oil field industrial zone. If the agency
allows oil drilling in the monument, we need a new
manager.
Under the president’s proclamation, the
BLM’s management plan should recognize and protect the 1.3 million
acres of proposed wilderness within the monument. Further, BLM’s
plan must prohibit the construction of tourist infrastructure
inside the area and disallow any improvement of existing dirt
roads.
The lesson learned from some of our
national parks is: Build a road and we will come, and come in great
numbers. The monument is likely to face enormous recreational
pressure, especially the Escalante region. Paving over now rutted
and rocky roads as some rural county commissioners have advocated
will speed the crowds into the canyons, threatening the natural
values the monument was established to protect. New highways would
encourage the off-road vehicle crowd to venture farther into the
backcountry, tracking over sensitive soil crusts and disturbing
wildlife.
Despite cries for development there is
common ground here between environmentalists and local communities.
If the towns surrounding the monument choose to make tourism a
component of their economy, the chambers of commerce should
encourage visitors to stay in their communities, rather than
advocate for roads to hasten tourists out of town and into the
monument.
Paving the Smoky Mountain dirt road
would create a bypass around Kanab; upgrading the dirt Cottonwood
Wash road would leave RVs parking in now lonely canyons, rather
than in campgrounds built adjacent to towns; slathering asphalt on
the Hole-in-the-Rock route will only pile more hikers into some of
the already overused Escalante side canyons, not add to motel
receipts.
If public funds are appropriated for
tourist facilities, the money should be directed to enhancing the
surrounding small communities, not developing the monument. The
president said protect it, not pave it.
Scott
Groene
Salt Lake City,
Utah
The writer is issues
coordinator for the Southern Utah Wilderness
Alliance.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Protect it, don’t pave it.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
