New wilderness gains protection even in the Bush era

After almost 6-1/2 years of the Bush administration, arguably the worst presidency ever, wilderness bills are cropping up in state after state, and the president is signing them! How can that be? Surely George Bush has not become a fan of preserving wild places suddenly?

The answer is partly in the broad popular support for these efforts and partly in political strategy. Our congressional champions have drafted modest wilderness bills, area by area. The Bush administration, focused on other priorities, has no reason to expend energy opposing such uncontroversial efforts and has, with considerable geniality, gone along with them.

California wilderness

California is the ideal example. Sen. Barbara Boxer has reintroduced several times (including this year) her visionary statewide bill for 2.5 million acres, but knowing the difficulty of passing such a bill the representatives of several affected districts are opposed, and they have the ear of the president she, other congressional champions, and activists have concentrated on more limited wilderness bills.

First, in 2002, we worked with Rep. Sam Farr to pass a bill for 60,000 acres of wilderness additions in his district around Santa Cruz and Monterey. Farr, our volunteers, and the strong local Ventana Wilderness Alliance did their homework of organizing well: the bill had broad support and no real opposition, and President Bush had no excuse not to approve it. He signed the bill. Okay, so he didn't make a big press event out of it; never mind, the preservation it assures for the land is no less.

Next we worked with Rep. Mike Thompson, whose district encompasses the coast and coastal mountains from Sonoma north to the Oregon border. His bill, for his district's portion of the Boxer bill, covered about 300,000 acres, considerably more than the Farr bill. Again, the homework was done with flying colors, through intensive grassroots effort. Most local elected officials and numerous businesses and civic organizations in the district endorsed the bill.

With an important assist from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the bill easily passed the Senate two Congresses in a row, but anti-environmentalist Rep. Richard Pombo, then chair of the House Resources Committee, stalled the bill. The second time around, Thompson applied all the pressure he could on other Resources Committee members, allowing deletion of some minimal areas from the bill and allowing one area (Cow Mountain) already used as an off-road-vehicle area to be formally designated as such. Thompson thus got past the Pombo hurdle, and in December 2006 the president signed a bill for 270,000 acres of new wilderness, including the King Range, where the popular "Lost Coast" trail is often hiked by Bay Area backpackers.

Wilderness achieved in other states

Elsewhere, the Bush years have added significant wilderness in Nevada, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Puerto Rico. Twelve separate bills gave us 2,346,102 acres of wilderness, bringing our National Wilderness Preservation System to 107,405,123 acres.

Nevada claims almost 3/4 of the new wilderness: 1.756 million acres in three bills. Sen. Harry Reid, a senior Democrat, knew that he needed the assent of the state's other senator, John Ensign, a Republican closely connected to Pres. Bush. He therefore fashioned multi-purpose public-lands bills for Clark, Lincoln, and White Pine Counties. They included certain development provisions that Ensign desired, such as rights-of-way for water and power developments. Such authorizations, promoted by developers, were likely to go through anyway without legislation, but their inclusion in a bill greased the skids.

The last two bills contained provisions promoting sprawl for fast-growing Las Vegas, and threatening to deplete groundwater and surface water in much of central and eastern Nevada. Thus, in spite of the major wilderness gains, the Sierra Club withheld its support for these bills, instead suggesting some changes. In White Pine County several of our proposed changes were incorporated at the last minute. Even while they worry about development promoted, Nevada wilderness activists still cheer the outstanding new land preservation.

Even Utah, with a notoriously anti-environmental Congressional delegation, achieved a modest wilderness bill in 2006! Since 1989 the Sierra Club and others have promoted the visionary America's Redrock Wilderness Act for nearly 9.5 million acres of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands in Utah. Due to the opposition of Utah Sens. Hatch and Bennett, and despite 160 - 170 co-sponsors in the House as well as 15 - 18 in the Senate, the bill has not moved.

Utahns, however, strongly opposed a proposed above-ground nuclear-waste site on a Goshute Indian Reservation at the edge of the BLM's Cedar Mountains Wilderness Study Area, less than two hours west of Salt Lake City. The only feasible railroad route to bring waste to the dump passed through the Cedar Mountains, and so the delegation, other Utah public officials, and environmentalists united to establish a new wilderness area there.

The recent wilderness bill for New England is especially interesting, being a two-state bill for New Hamsphire and Vermont. This achievement gives hope for a bi-state bill for several BLM Wilderness Study Areas on the California/Nevada border northeast of Susanville.

The California Desert and Mountain Heritage Act

So what's next for wilderness in the 100th Congress?

Last October, Republican Rep. Mary Bono introduced a new bill, the California Desert and Mountain Heritage Act (H.R. 6270), to set aside 78,000 acres in Joshua Tree National Park as wilderness, as well as additional lands in the Cleveland and San Bernardino National Forests and BLM lands in Riverside County. It would add 31.5 miles of wild rivers in Riverside County. When Bono reintroduces it, it could well be the major push for California wilderness activists in the 110th Congress.

The bill would also add lands to the Agua Tibia Wilderness and designate new Cahuilla Mountain, South Fork San Jacinto, and Beauty Mountain Wildernesses. It would designate 31 miles of the North Fork of the San Jacinto River, Bautista Creek, and dazzling Palm Canyon as wild-and-scenic rivers. The present San Jacinto/Santa Rosa National Monument would be expanded in two areas.

San Gorgonio Chapter Sierra Club activists are urging Bono to include other richly deserving areas when she reintroduces her legislation. One such area starts on the Pacific Crest Trail at the famed "Desert Divide". There a vast landscape sweeps thousands of feet down the rugged eastern slope of the San Jacinto Mountains into the lush stream gorge of Palm Canyon and across into the Santa Rosa Mountains. This outstanding pristine area has been a repeated target of Sierra Club preservation efforts. "This San Jacinto Wilderness Addition is really the crown jewel of the National Monument," said Joan Taylor, long-time wilderness activist for the Club. "We hope the time has finally come to protect this wildland of more than 20,000 acres."

Other California prospects

Back from last Congress is a bill for a national recreation area along the Sacramento River, introduced by both Sens. Feinstein and Boxer and in the House by Rep. Wally Herger, a Republican. Conservationists welcome this proposed area of 17,000 acres along a winding, undeveloped 15-mile stretch of the Sacramento River near Red Bluff.

A hoped-for prospect is a potential bill for wilderness in California's desert. The landmark California Desert Protection Act of 1994 omitted a few key proposed wilderness areas, due to specific objections including one by the U.S. Army for possible expansion of its Fort Irwin training center. Now, 13 years later, some of those left-out areas, as well as newly acquired private lands next to several desert wildernesses, are ripe for wilderness addition. For example, lands just south of the present Turtle Mountains Wilderness could be added to that wilderness. (The San Francisco Bay Chapter Wilderness Committee adopted the Turtle Mountains 20 years ago, and members have taken numerous trips there, including some service projects with the BLM.)

There is also a brand-new campaign to protect areas in the San Gabriel Mountains surrounding the Los Angeles Basin. Officially launched in late May by the Club's Angeles Chapter, this San Gabriel Mountains Wilderness and Living Rivers Campaign seeks new wilderness areas to the Angeles and the western San Bernardino National Forests and improved water quality and recreational opportunities along the North, West, and East Forks of the San Gabriel River.

Two separate wild-and-scenic-river campaigns relate closely to wilderness. In the central Sierra Nevada, the effort is to designate the Clavey River, a tributary of the Tuolumne and one of only three free-flowing undammed rivers in the western Sierra. Along the central Ventana coast, supporters are working with Rep. Farr to introduce a bill for rivers in his district.

One bill from last year, Rep. Buck McKeon's legislation to add 40,000 acres to the Hoover Wilderness in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, is not yet back, and it is not certain whether McKeon will reintroduce it. Sierra Club activists were especially pleased with a provision in that bill to include the Shoshone stretch of the Amargosa River in the National Wild and Scenic River System. It would be the first such designation in the California desert.

Prospects for other states

Washington. After years of blockage in the House by Resources Committee chair Pombo, the Wild Sky Wilderness Act (H.R. 886/S. 520) for more than 100,000 acres in western Washington finally passed the House this April. The legislation has passed the Senate three previous times and has been endorsed by the Bush administration.

Nevada. What's next for wilderness legislation is not yet known. Nevada volunteers are focusing on restoration work for areas damaged by off-road vehicles or by mining, and also on protecting some key roadless areas in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest's current-management plan update.

Utah. Advocates are working hard to expand the list of current congressional co-sponsors for America's Redrock Wilderness Act, with a thought to possible passage by the House.

Colorado. Most of Rocky Mountain National Park is poised to gain official wilderness designation via a new bill by Colorado's senators and two representatives. Park officials, who have managed the park as wilderness since 1974, support the designation to remove ambiguity.

Alaska. The Udall-Eisenhower Arctic Wilderness Act (HR 39) would grant wilderness for the beleaguered coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This proposal has been in every Congress for 20 years.

Arizona. There are a wild-and-scenic-rivers bill for Fossil Creek and a wilderness bill for the Tumacacori Highlands.

Georgia. There could be a Mountaintown National Scenic Area in the Chattahoochee National Forest.

Idaho. The Owyhee Initiative Implementation Act of 2007 is greeted by the Sierra Club with a cautious qualified support. A bill for Central Idaho's Boulder-White Clouds area would designate 300,000 acres of wilderness but is opposed by the Club because it would include certain damaging precedents, especially mandates for off-road-vehicle use.

New Mexico. Activists are working on a new Sabinosa Wilderness for a rugged canyon area in the Great Plains, and for a Ute Mountain Wilderness and National Conservation Area.

Oregon. The Mount Hood Stewardship Legacy Act has qualified support from the Sierra Club.

Virginia. The Sierra Club supports the Ridge and Valley Act of 2007, for 55,000 acres of new and expanded wilderness areas and two new national scenic areas within the Jefferson National Forest.

More wilderness could also come up in Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

Why protect wild places?

Writing about wild places in the journal of the Wilderness Society in 1983, author and editor T. Watkins quoted Gertrude Stein, who, he said, in her Geographical History of America, "in her inimitable fashion explained what it was all about: `In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.'"

Musing on Stein's concept of "space", Watkins continued, "The space of land was a gift to America. To many historians, that gift was the principal catalyst in the formation of the nation's character and institutions; the dimensions of space... gave us the dimension of our freedom, freedom of movement, freedom of opportunity, the freedom, finally, to dream."

Wild places are freedom's landscape.

Vicky Hoover, chair, Sierra Club California/Nevada Wilderness Committee