Dear HCN,
Within hours of the
announcement by Utah counties of their 1 million-acre wilderness
recommendation (HCN, 4/17/95), I visited a special place touted in
rural county tourist brochures as “Utah’s Little Grand Canyon.”
As the sun fell upon the western horizon, the
Colorado Plateau light played its technicolor magic upon a
slickrock face; to the southeast, clear as a bell though more than
100 miles distance, the La Sal Mountains towered above
Moab.
Despite the splendor, all 200,000 wild
acres of the northern San Rafael Swell were denied a wilderness
recommendation by Emery County commissioners precisely because they
want to keep open future options to ruin the air with nearby power
plant emissions.
Like almost 5 million other
acres not recommended for wilderness the lands’ greatest values had
become the death knell for for their permanent protection: Utah
environmentalists have been demonized as being “extremist” because
of our unwillingness to “compromise.” But Utah’s county
commissioners recommended just 2 percent of the land in Utah for
BLM wilderness designation. The citizens’ proposal for 5.7 million
acres would designate 10 percent. The commissioners’ proposal would
result in a net loss of roughly 70 percent of the currently
protected BLM land in Utah.
I considered just
some of the places left out of their recommendation and the
rationale: King Top (proposed cyanide heap-leach gold mine),
Parunuweap Canyon (dam construction), the entire Kaiparowits (coal
development for export to Pacific Rim nations by a Dutch-owned coal
company), the entire Henry Mountains (piûon and juniper
chaining), the entire Dirty Devil River system (tar sands
development), Grand Gulch and all of Cedar Mesa (who knows why …
does it matter?).
Just who is an
extremist?
Where 16 million acres of roadless
country existed just 60 years ago, just one-third that amount
remains today. The history of southern Utah’s rainbow-chasing has
yielded little more than busted county economies interspersed with
short booms, extensive federal handouts for grazing and logging,
hatred of anything federal except for these handouts, and an
atmosphere of resentment of protection-minded “outsiders.”
Exploitation-minded outsiders are welcomed as “insiders.”
Fed by the rhetoric of the Utah Association of
Counties, Utah Mining Association, Utah Petroleum Association, Utah
Farm Bureau Federation and now Utah State University’s
chicken-little voodoo-economists, rural counties view wilderness as
the boogey-man for all their unrelated
problems.
Under the guise of the 1964 Wilderness
Act, the commissioners did all they could to disqualify lands from
their wilderness proposals. Horse trails and other substantially
unnoticeable human impacts were used by the commissioners as
excuses for excluding huge chunks of land from their proposals.
The commissioners never really considered “why
wilderness,” but instead were fixated with “why not wilderness,”
thereby missing the entire point of the act.
With
their paltry recommendation, commissioners sealed the fate of their
role in this debate as self-serving, short-sighted and
inconsequential. Self-serving because they want to “deprotect”
public lands to continue a history of rainbow-chasing.
Short-sighted because they do not understand wilderness in reducing
the discussion to dollars and cents. And inconsequential because
their uncompromising positions will be viewed only with scorn as
the battle becomes increasingly nationalized.
Ken
Rait
Salt Lake City,
Utah
Ken Rait is issues
director of the Southern Utah Wilderness
Alliance.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline In Utah, the extremists are against wilderness.
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