I flew into the sprawling city of
Phoenix the other day not expecting a nature experience or a
political revelation. My colleague and I rented a car and, after an
appointment in the city, fought through an hour of bumper-to-bumper
afternoon traffic on our way north to Flagstaff. What a relief it
was to finally see the city recede in the rearview mirror, and the
endless suburbs of the flat desert give way to a series of
unpopulated hills.
Eager to stretch our legs, we pulled
off the highway a half hour later and rolled half a mile down a
dirt road until we were stopped by a sign: Agua Fria National
Monument. Here was one of Bill Clinton’s last-minute land
grabs that so infuriated some Westerners and members of the
incoming Bush administration — one of the19 national
monuments and conservation areas on public lands that he declared
with executive powers.
The place didn’t look like a
hotbed of hostilities. A single car sat by the sign.
We
hiked down a coarse-sanded wash. With each step the ground grew
soggier, the hills closer. At a stunted willow tree a raucous
cackling suddenly surrounded us. In the fading light, several
robin-sized birds chased each other across the hillside: rock wrens
setting up nesting territories in February.
A few hundred
yards farther came the sound of water. Our little wash, which by
now had a trickle of water, spilled into the Agua Fria River. It
was a sweet spot. A giant slab of granite, its surface smoothed by
floodwaters, made a natural seat from which to view the
river’s meandering course. Other people had apparently sat
here over the years: On a rocky cliff face 20 feet above us, we
spotted a panel of petroglyphs — human and animal figures,
probably centuries old, etched into the reddish-brown rock.
The 70,000-acre Agua Fria National Monument may not be
much of a tourist attraction yet, but sitting just 40 miles from
the border of Phoenix, its subtle charms offer a welcome respite
from urbanity. Perhaps Clinton wasn’t a land grabber, but a
far-sighted leader who understood the needs of an urbanizing
population.
Well, not likely. Politics and ego were
Clinton’s game, and when Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt
presented him with the idea of creating a public lands legacy, he
was shrewd enough to latch on. Clinton knew he needed to do
something to earn the support of conservationists, especially given
the times he’d failed them in favor of big industry —
allowing salvage logging of old growth on national forests,
short-changing endangered species protection and caving in on
pesticides regulation. He also had a big-enough ego to want a place
in the history books, next to Teddy Roosevelt, as a conservation
hero.
These aren’t the most noble motivations, but
one can’t help but wish that George W. Bush would attune his
own political ego in a similar manner. The fact that people value
public lands more for their aesthetic and natural qualities than
they do for their minerals, logs or cattle fodder has been lost on
the current administration.
Unbridled energy development,
not conservation, has become the overriding mandate from on high.
Through a series of executive directives and industry-friendly
court settlements, the Bureau of Land Management — the agency
responsible for managing 270 million acres of public domain,
including the new national monuments — has been told to
accelerate oil and gas leasing and drilling with as little
environmental oversight as possible. Large swaths of New Mexico,
Colorado, Wyoming and Montana have become battlegrounds, pitting
environmental groups and even conservative Republican ranchers
against the energy companies and public agencies.
Bush’s abysmal record on the public lands has created a
climate of fear in the BLM and activated the environmental movement
to a degree not seen since the days of Ronald Reagan and his dam,
dig and drill Interior Secretary, James Watt. It has also handed
Bush’s Democratic challengers tremendous ammunition heading
into the election.
So, Mr. Bush, though I’d prefer
you went back to owning a baseball team next year, here’s
some advice: Take a page out of Clinton’s book and protect
some chunks of the public domain. You could start with Utah’s
San Rafael Swell. Then call off the oil and gas rigs heading toward
western Colorado’s Roan Plateau and New Mexico’s Otero
Mesa. You could pronounce that some places are so special and rare
that we must not let man’s short-term material needs despoil
them.
You would be right, whether you believe it or not.
Paul Larmer is the publisher of High Country
News (plarmer@hcn.org) and
editor of the new book: Give and Take: How the Clinton
Administration’s Public Lands Offensive Transformed the
American West.
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