UTAH
The decades-old battle over
how much of Utah’s desert should be protected as wilderness
took a new turn in May, when Gov. Olene Walker, R, announced
county-by-county discussions to break the impasse.
Utah
has lagged behind other Western states in designating wilderness
areas on Bureau of Land Management land: Of nearly 23 million acres
of BLM land in Utah, only 22,600 acres are wilderness. The Southern
Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) wants 9.1 million acres, but such
large-scale protection isn’t popular among Utah’s
conservative congressional delegation, the state’s county
commissioners, or off-road vehicle riders.
“Both sides
have become polarized,” Walker says. “We should break down that
polarization.”
Walker now presides over a lame-duck
administration — she was eliminated from the governor’s
race in this year’s Republican convention — but she
says she still hopes to lay the groundwork for a future
breakthrough. She has proposed working groups of 20 to 30 community
representatives, including environmental and recreation activists,
politicians, ranchers, school administrators, and state and federal
agencies. These groups would work with the governor’s office
to craft land-use proposals for the state’s congressional
delegation.
Randy Johnson, the governor’s advisor
on public lands, says the governor’s plan is based on the
2002 wilderness compromise forged in Clark County, Nev., home to
Las Vegas, that set aside 452,000 acres of wilderness (HCN,
3/03/03: The Wild Card).
Washington County, in the
rapidly developing southwestern corner of the state, volunteered to
host the first working group in June. “Our concern is not their
goal of 9.1 million acres,” says County Commission Chairman James
Eardley. “Today it’s 9.1 and tomorrow it’s some other
number. But we need to get going on (the wilderness issue).”
SUWA will attend, says Scott Groene, the alliance’s
executive director. Preserving red-rock wilderness, he says, will
require an “accumulation of steps, including potentially this one.”
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Lame-duck governor moves deadlocked wilderness debate.
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