Obama Plans to Overturn Bush Executive Orders

Environment News Service



Dirty Devil proposed wilderness in southern Utah (Photo © Ray Bloxham courtesy SUWA)


WASHINGTON, DC, - President-elect Barack Obama and his transition team are already reviewing all of President Bush's executive orders, considering which will be allowed to stand and which will be overturned, the head of his transition team, John Podesta said on Sunday. Obama's decisions could invalidate environmentally damaging orders issued by the current president.

"As a candidate, Senator Obama said that he wanted all the Bush executive orders reviewed, and decide which ones should be kept, and which ones should be repealed, and which ones should be amended," said Podesta, who served as White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton.

"Across the board, whether it's national security, the economy, the senior leadership that will manage health care, energy and the environment, I think he intends to move very quickly," Podesta told Chris Wallace on Fox News.

"They want to have oil and gas drilling in some of the most sensitive, fragile lands in Utah that they're going to try to do right as they - walking out the door. I think that's a mistake," Podesta said.

On election day, the Bush administration announced that it will open up about 360,000 acres of Utah public lands to oil and gas drilling in its December lease sale.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management did not publish details of the 241 proposed oil and gas parcels, but some are believed to be near national parks and monuments such as Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah.

Preliminary site lists show the leases for sale in December would include large areas considered worthy of wilderness status.

BLM Utah State Director Selma Sierra said Thursday that the parcels "have been set aside for a number of years pending completion of resource management plans for six field offices." Five of those plans were signed by the Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Stephen Allred last week in Washington, triggering the leasing decisions contained in the plans.

"These decisions represent far more stringent environmental protections than existed in old plans or that have ever been imposed by any BLM Utah plan. In other words, these new environmental restrictions provide many layers of safeguards to prevent environmental damage to sensitive natural resources. So lands previously set aside are now available for leasing, but with stricter-than-ever controls," said Sierra.

But environmentalists are opposed to any further oil and gas development in the Red Rock country of southern Utah.

"The election of Barack Obama represents a new day for environmentalists..."
Scott Groene, executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, which has fought to keep oil and gas development out of wilderness areas, views the Obama presidency as "the best opportunity for wilderness protection in SUWA's 25 year history."

"We will encourage the new Secretary of Interior and staff at the Bureau of Land Management to protect southern Utah's wilderness, including such places as Labyrinth Canyon, the Dirty Devil, the San Rafael Swell and Cedar Mesa," said Groene.

Groene wants review of what he terms, "disastrous last minute Bush administration decisions for legal violations, including the six awful land use plans the administration just approved, which open millions of acres of redrock wilderness to oil and gas leasing and ORVs."

He wants the Obama administration to give "meaningful protection to the redrock, by re-instating the process, born under President Clinton and killed by the Bush administration, that gives Wilderness Study Area protection to lands identified by the BLM as having wilderness character."

His wish list includes reform of the BLM, which Groene says "manages more of our most spectacular western public lands than any other agency and which folded like a house of cards in a tornado to anti-wilderness interests under pressure from Bush appointees."

Podesta said a president can do a great deal using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action. "I think we'll see the president do that to try to restore a sense that the country is working on behalf of the common good," he said.

Environmental advocates are looking to the incoming administration with hope. Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said November 4, 'The election of Barack Obama represents a new day for environmentalists. His election brings an end to eight years of unrelenting assaults on the environment."

"Our staff and members are ready to work with President-elect Obama and the new Congress to advance his 'New Energy for America Plan,' which includes creating five million clean technology jobs, putting a million hybrid cars on the road, and capping carbon emissions," said Beinecke.

Podesta was one of several members of the Obama's top leaders who appeared on Sunday TV talk shows across the broadcast band.

Today President-elect Obama and Michelle Obama are meeting with President George W. and Laura Bush at the White House.

Table Mountain back in wilderness bill

By Mike Gervais
Inyo Register

With the Eastern Sierra/Northern San Gabriel Wild Heritage Act scheduled to go to the Senate on Thursday, the bill’s co-authors have reincorporated Table Mountain into the mix.

At the request of the U.S. Forest Service, Table Mountain has been added back into the Wild Heritage Act by co-authors Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Santa Clarita). The addition of Table Mountain, which was removed from the bill earlier this summer as part of a compromise that allowed for the 9,000-acre White Mountain proposed wilderness, has some on edge, as recent maps include several cabins in the proposed wilderness area.

The residents who lease property that includes nine cabins near Table Mountain worked feverishly Monday to contact local legislators and express their concerns about the inclusion of the cabins and the relatively short time-frame in which they had to submit comments.

That work paid off, with the Forest Service reporting Monday afternoon that it was in the process of re-drawing the wilderness map for Table Mountain.

Table Mountain was added to the Wild Heritage Act sometime around July 16, but maps were not made available to the public until the week of July 21 and the U.S. Forest Service, which leases the cabins to private individuals, did not receive the updated maps until last Thursday, leaving only three days for that entity to comment before the Sept. 8 comment deadline.

Those maps showed six or seven private-use cabins inside the wilderness designation. At least three of the cabins that are located inside the wilderness addition are only 50-150 feet from the boundary, which Bishop resident Bob Klug, who leases property and one of the cabins from the U.S. Forest Service, said didn’t follow any geographic or topographical line.

“A friend of mine who owns the pack station showed me the maps on Saturday,” Klug said. “The maps had been changed on the 25th of July, and none of the cabin owners who could be losing their cabins were notified.”

With comments regarding the Wild Heritage Act due Monday, Klug spent a busy weekend tracking down the lease-holders of the eight other cabins in the area to warn them of the comment deadline and encourage them to speak up on the issue.

He was able to speak with Boxer Legislative Aid Tom Bohigian, who said the inclusion of the cabins may have been an oversight. “He tried to reassure me that they have no intent of shutting down anyone’s cabins or any roads,” Klug said. But he added he won’t rest easy until he sees something in writing that protects his cabin.

Klug said that when he contacted McKeon’s staffers, he was told to submit any comments or questions via e-mail.

McKeon Press Secretary Lindsay Mask, however, told The Inyo Register that the inclusion of the cabins “was a mapping error. Mr. McKeon is 100 percent aware of it, and private land will not be included.”

“The remapping they’re having done right now excludes the cabins, the water systems and the electrical,” said U.S. Forest Service Public Information Officer Nancy Upham.

There has been much discussion regarding the inclusion or exclusion of Table Mountain since the Wild Heritage Act was proposed in June. The scenic area was initially proposed as an addition to the bill, then tabled in favor of 9,000 acres of wilderness in the White Mountains, then ultimately included in the wilderness in July at the behest of the U.S. Forest Service.

“During the meetings in Bishop (held in early July to gather citizen input about the Wild Heritage Act) they had dropped Table Mountain from the wilderness to appease the anti-wilderness people,” said Klug.

“Table Mountain was an area that was added in later on a Forest Service recommendation,” said Paul McFarland of the Friends of the Inyo. “We certainly didn’t push to have anyone’s cabin included in wilderness,” he added, speaking for the Friends.

McFarland said the inclusion of the cabins could have been an easy mistake to make.
“Things like this are going to come forward more and more, and they need to be changed,” said McFarland.

If the Wild Heritage Act was passed into law including the Table Mountain cabins, the dwellings would have most likely been taken over by the Forest Service.

“Historically, you cannot have a private dwelling in the Wilderness,” Klug said.

According to McFarland, “I don’t know if there are any leased cabins in wilderness, but I do know there are ranger cabins.”

Phone calls seeking comment from Boxer’s staffers and the Advocates for Access to Public Lands were not returned as of press time Monday.

Members of the Inyo County Board of Supervisors were unavailable for comment on Monday, as they were in budget hearing meetings.

Wilderness, schmilderness

In Nevada, wilderness-wary locals derail lands bills that could help their communities

WESTERN ROUNDUP
by Gordon Gregory
High Country News

A view looking northwest from the top of Bald Mountain, Nevada, an area that could be proposed for wilderness protection. CAMERON JOHNSON

SMITH, NEVADA
In this tiny farm town, which lacks a stoplight or even a store, the gathering of more than 700 people on April 2 was unprecedented. And they weren’t at the high school gym to watch the Bulldogs play Class A basketball; they were there to tell officials just what they thought about a proposal to turn their mountains into wilderness.

It was a peaceful if not entirely well-mannered crowd, with most wildly cheering those who railed against wilderness, and jeering the three lone proponents. Shouts of "go back to Santa Cruz" and "we’re the public, stupid" peppered the warm evening.

Over and over, angry citizens came to the microphone to proclaim that no outsiders were going to tell them to keep their trucks and ORVs out of the hills they considered their heritage. Jim Sanford, former publisher of the local paper, summed up the mood: "I don’t think this group here tonight is interested in compromise."

But without compromise, there would be no public-lands bills like the ones approved over the past six years for three other Nevada counties, bills that called for the sale of thousands of acres of federal land and -- in conjunction with a 1998 law generated billions of dollars for everything from school funding to park development. Pushed by Nevada Sens. Harry Reid, D, and John Ensign, R, the bills sought to eliminate the management headaches and local resentments that are rife in a fast-growing state where more than four of every five acres is federal property.

The bills also designated major new wilderness areas. In Congress, the rough political calculus for such bills is this: If locals get to benefit from the sale of land owned by all Americans, the broader public receives additional wilderness in return. That seemed fair enough to folks in Clark, Lincoln and White Pine counties, where a total of 164,000 acres of federal land was identified for auction and about 1.7 million acres were added to the wilderness system. And the state’s congressional delegation had every reason to expect success in other counties.

But in western Nevada this winter, that calculus was faulty. In quick succession, three counties -- Lyon, Mineral and Esmeralda -- rebuffed efforts to craft compromise bills for lands within their boundaries. Fear and misunderstanding fueled a revolt against what locals perceived as a land grab. And now that the state’s anti-wilderness forces are energized, their efforts may derail what until recently seemed like a collaborative way to both meet local needs and protect wild lands.

The federal government owns more than 86 percent of Nevada, more than it owns in any other state. In some counties, the dearth of private property has limited growth, inflated property values and complicated land management. While counties with large federal holdings do get annual PILT funds (Payments in Lieu of Taxes) from the government, the payments are often a fraction of the taxes they’d receive if the land were privately owned. Esmeralda County, for example, gets only about $60,000 a year through PILT, even though 98 percent of it is federally owned.

The first attempt at redress was the 1998 Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, which called for the sale of thousands of acres of BLM land near Las Vegas in Clark County. Thus far, about $2.7 billion has been generated from those lands sales, and some of that revenue has also been made available to other Nevada counties through public-lands bills.

The Clark, Lincoln and White Pine lands bills were designed with local input to meet local needs. For example, the White Pine County bill created 550,000 acres of wilderness and identified 45,000 acres of BLM land for auction. Funds from those land sales will go to the state education fund, local law enforcement and fire protection, and to the BLM. In addition, the bill transferred thousands of acres of BLM land to the county and state for commercial and park projects and funded a study of off-road vehicle trail expansion.

With such successes under their belts, in 2007 Sens. Reid and Ensign and Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nev., set their sights on Lyon, Mineral and Esmeralda counties, again hoping to craft bills that combined wilderness designation with public-land sales and other locally beneficial provisions. Senate staffers began meeting with wilderness proponents, some ranchers and a few local leaders in the three counties. But most residents and many local officials were unaware of the process until early 2008, shortly before the bills were to be drafted. They felt blindsided by the news that such legislation was being considered for their areas and that they had only a few months to be involved.

"We just found out about this in February," says Mineral County Commissioner Richard Bryant, who says he and others were "dumbfounded" when they learned that almost 500,000 acres of federal land in the county were being considered for wilderness designation.

At a May 21 meeting, the commissioners lambasted Sen. Reid’s staff for not involving the counties earlier in the process. The commissioners couldn’t endorse any lands bill this year, they said; they needed time to determine what wilderness would mean for activities such as mining, geothermal development, grazing and recreation.

Lyon County residents say they were similarly surprised. Most first heard about the bill in late January, after local ranchers announced that they had met with congressional staff and representatives of the Nevada Wilderness Project to discuss how wilderness designation might affect their ranching operations.

Marianne Leinassar, whose family has run sheep in the area since 1858, says the ranchers had assumed that the wilderness would cover about 88,000 acres in the Bald Mountain area -- renamed Wovoka by local wilderness proponents -- because it had been the focus of past discussions about possible wilderness.

But at a Jan. 25 meeting, the ranchers saw maps from the Nevada Wilderness Project indicating that up to about 690,000 acres were being considered for wilderness designation in Lyon and in neighboring Mineral County. "We were all taken aback," Leinassar recalls, as they realized the size of the potential wilderness. "This was huge."

The news that hundreds of thousands of acres might become wilderness and that a bill to that effect could be drafted by summer spread like dust in a fast spring wind. Many didn’t know what wilderness designation meant, so anything seemed possible; there was talk of fences, even razor wire stretched across the landscape -- vast areas placed off limits, with mines closed, flight paths diverted, firefighting hobbled, and military training curtailed during wartime. Rumors of conspiracy and speculation about what Reid was really up to ran wild. "They were like a tornado generating their own storm," Steve Pellegrini, a retired teacher and wilderness advocate, says of his neighbors.

Within weeks of the Jan. 25 meeting, locals formed the Coalition for Public Access. By March, membership reached 1,000, then 1,500, most from Lyon County. Residents in Mineral County also started their own chapter. "This has united just about everybody in all of our surrounding communities who are normally ... on separate sides of the fence on water issues, on grazing issues, things like that," says Emery Thran, the group’s chairman. "This affected a lot of people." Residents saw wilderness not as a way to protect the natural qualities of the land, he says, but as a federal assault on what they most value.

In a place where many families arrived in the area more than 100 years ago, those values often involve a personal sense of history. Dr. Robin Titus practices medicine out of a one-physician clinic set amid an ocean of alfalfa fields. From her small office window, she can see the mountains her great grandfather mined. Some of her ancestors are buried there. And though she is an avid outdoors-woman, the idea that "outside" interests might affect local use of the nearby mountains rankles her deeply. "Somebody from out of town is trying to do something that affects the way we live here," she says. "People will tend to fight over that."

But wilderness supporters say many locals simply misunderstood the status of the proposal, as well as what a wilderness designation would mean. The Nevada Wilderness Project had not finalized its plans when it presented its maps to ranchers at that January meeting, says Cameron Johnson, northern Nevada outreach director for the group. He says it had identified roughly 690,000 acres in Lyon and Mineral County as possible wilderness, but had yet to make specific recommendations about which areas were most suitable for designation. Contrary to rumor, he says, his organization would have recommended accommodating traditional uses, including all existing mines and grazing allotments.

Thran, however, says the problem wasn’t a lack of understanding. He blames overreaching by wilderness proponents: If they had remained focused on the Bald Mountain/Wovoka area, he says, the outcome might have been different. "I don’t know if it would have raised an eyebrow around here," he says, of a bill containing just the 88,000-acre Wovoka wilderness. "But now, they’ve pretty much angered our community. No negotiations now. I’m sorry." Titus agrees that local passions are so inflamed that reasoned discussions on the topic are nearly impossible. "People feel that if they give in at all, they’ll lose it all," she says.

Local wilderness proponents still hope that at least the Wovoka area can receive protection through other legislation. Pellegrini and fellow advocate Art Shipley say that when they explain to other residents why the area is so special, many agree it deserves protection from off-roaders. But as soon as the word "wilderness" is mentioned, they say, people back away, thinking that practically the entire county is included. "I wish we didn’t have that 690,000 acres hanging over us," Pellegrini says.

The western Nevada experience may well hang over other potential lands bills in the state, as newly-empowered anti-wilderness activists are determined to continue the fight.

Peter Liakopoulos, host of the Las Vegas talk show Rural Nevada Today, is promoting the creation of a coalition of 14 counties to fight public-lands bills. The BlueRibbon Coalition, an off-road advocacy group based in Pocatello, Idaho, is backing anti-wilderness efforts in Nevada and elsewhere, says Brian Hawthorne, the group’s public-lands policy director. "I think what you’re seeing is a change, a realization that you’re trading wilderness for reasonableness," he says.

Part of what’s changing as well is that some local officials, under pressure by the Coalition for Public Access and others, now refuse to even talk about a lands bill because of the likely wilderness component. Lyon, Mineral and Esmeralda counties passed resolutions this winter opposing any new wilderness within their boundaries. Lyon County and Esmeralda County also passed resolutions rejecting any lands bill that designated new wilderness, effectively shutting off further consideration of any lands bill.

Mineral County commissioners put lands bill discussions in limbo earlier this spring, when they said they weren’t ready to work with Senate staffers. Mineral County Commissioner Jerrie Tipton still says a carefully crafted lands bill is critical to her county’s economic future, and she, for one, would consider some wilderness as part of the package. "(Federal land ownership) is part of the reason we’re so damn poor," she says. But overcoming a tidal wave of opposition may be impossible at this time, she says: "A year ago, I would have said that we can work through it. Today, I don’t know."

The only hope is to fully engage residents in the design of the lands bill, Tipton says. "These people (local citizens) have to be brought into it, or it’s not going to work," she says. "They need to have a hand in the crafting of the vision, or we’re all going to be tarred and feathered."

Without local residents and governments on board, there’s little chance that Sens. Reid and Ensign and Rep. Heller will press forward on these bills. A modest lands bill for Carson City (which includes the former Ormsby County) is progressing without rancor -- in part because the county contains no chunks of federal land large enough to qualify for wilderness. Jon Summers, Sen. Reid’s communication director, says, "We said from the beginning we’re not going to force this down anyone’s throat."

Two decades of hard work, plowed under

Wilderness activists look on as the Bush administration gives oil and gas drillers first crack at the West’s last wild lands




by Matt Jenkins
High Country News





Oil well at the top of Long Canyon near Dead Horse Point State Park, Utah.

BIG RIDGE, COLORADO — Not far from the northwest Colorado oil and gas outpost of Rangely, benches of shattered sandstone rise to a seven-mile-long, piñon-and juniper-mottled landmark called Big Ridge. A herd of wild horses ranges across the land here, and the draws that run down from the 7,500-foot-high ridge shelter Fremont Indian pictographs, petroglyphs and archaeological sites that date from around 600 to 1300 A.D. On a bitterly cold December day, the flat winter haze has given way to a deep cerulean blue. Time seems to be marked only by the lazy pass of an eagle overhead.

In its own modest way, Big Ridge stands where two worlds collide. It is one small chunk of the Piceance Basin, a gigantic oil and gas field that has lured energy companies for decades. But it is also still a relatively untouched island, and conservationists have tried to protect it as wilderness.
In 1997, Amoco drilled a well here, but came up dry. The company plugged the well and moved on, leaving behind a half-mile of road and a barren well pad. At about the same time, the Colorado Environmental Coalition (which would later team with several other groups to form the Colorado Wilderness Network) discovered that Big Ridge still qualified as wilderness, as defined in the 1964 Wilderness Act: "an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence … with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable."

In July 2001, the Wilderness Network nominated the area to the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for protection as wilderness. That nomination was a gamble: Just eight months earlier, another oil-and-gas company had leased several parcels of the area. And oil and gas leases generally trump a wilderness designation, even if they haven’t been developed yet.

"Even though the area was leased, the larger landscape was getting hammered," says CEC’s Kurt Kunkle, who helped identify the area as potential wilderness. "Protecting a little part of that seemed important, so we were willing to take the risks."

At first, the gamble seemed to pay off. Under a Clinton-era directive, the BLM agreed to include Big Ridge in its roster of places that might be eligible for wilderness protection, and to take a "second look" at any proposal — such as oil and gas drilling — that might disqualify it from protection. As a result, in 2002, when El Paso Corporation applied to the BLM for permission to drill an exploratory well on its lease in the proposed wilderness, the BLM thought twice about allowing it. The agency gave El Paso permission, but only after it determined that the well would affect just .01 percent of the proposed wilderness. The company promptly drilled another "duster," a dry hole.

It looked, for a moment, as if Big Ridge might escape with only a few scars. Then, last April, wilderness activists across the nation were rocked to their core. Interior Secretary Gale Norton and then-Utah Governor Mike Leavitt settled a wilderness lawsuit that blew the doors wide open for drilling in Big Ridge and many of the hundreds of other areas in the West proposed for wilderness protection (HCN, 4/28/03: Wilderness takes a massive hit).

Just over a month later, El Paso applied for — and quickly won — permits to drill five more wells in the proposed Big Ridge wilderness. Last November, the company tried a second well about 200 feet from Amoco’s dry hole. That, too, proved dry. Late in the month, El Paso plugged the well and abandoned it; the company has momentarily pulled out and is deciding whether to drill the other four wells.

A few days after El Paso moved out, I arrive with Jennifer Seidenberg and Reed Morris from the Colorado Environmental Coalition. We park our cars at the bottom of the hill and hike the half-mile up to the abandoned drill pad. The sign from the earlier Amoco lease has been knocked to the ground, and silence reigns over the site. In the middle of the 1.3-acre pad bulldozed out of the side of a ridge, the well — a capped pipe — sticks out of what looks like a bomb crater of oozing muck.

On the edge of the pad, a rented trailer sits empty, its TV satellite dish pointed at the sky. The door is unlocked. Inside, mud is caked on the thin carpet, and the just-departed drillers have left a note on the counter: "Sorry to leave a mess."

The making — and the undoing — of the citizens’ wilderness movement

Welcome to the world of citizen-led wilderness protection. Behind the big official wilderness areas — celebrated places like the John Muir Wilderness in California and the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho — a gritty, on-the-ground fight is on to protect the West’s last remaining wild places. These are areas that citizens’ groups believe should be protected from harm until Congress can decide whether to formally recognize them as wilderness areas.

Many of the proposals have been around for years. But they may not survive much longer, because the Bush administration has made energy development the first priority on public lands. Big Ridge is an emblem of what could happen to the several hundred proposed wilderness areas throughout the West. This fall, the BLM began offering a new wave of oil and gas leases that could set the stage for intensive development on lands that, only eight months ago, the agency considered candidates for wilderness.

Understanding the recent controversy requires going back to 1964, when Congress passed the Wilderness Act, laying the foundation for subsequent bills that protected over 400 wilderness areas on the national forests. In 1976, Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA), which expanded the Wilderness Act to cover lands run by the Bureau of Land Management. It gave the BLM 15 years — until 1991 — to recommend wilderness areas to Congress. As a result, the 1990s saw several large BLM wilderness bills, including the 1990 Arizona Desert Wilderness Act and the 1994 California Desert Protection Act.
FLPMA did something else that was significant: It opened the door for continuing, citizen-initiated efforts to protect more BLM wilderness (HCN, 3/23/03: The Wild Card). The law required the BLM to continuously inventory "resource and other values" on public lands, and to protect those values. That allowed citizens’ groups to find lands that met the BLM’s own criteria for wilderness — areas larger than 5,000 acres that were roadless and free from human disturbance — and to ask the agency to protect those lands until Congress could decide.

These are not "wilderness study areas," which, for the most part, the BLM itself identified and must manage as wilderness until Congress has the opportunity to grant — or deny — them formal protection. Instead, they’re more like proposed wilderness study areas: wilderness-quality lands that the agency missed during its own inventories.

During the Clinton administration, the BLM agreed to take another look before permitting potentially damaging activities on these lands. According to Dave Alberswerth, who served as a special assistant to the Interior Department’s head of land and mineral management during the Clinton administration, and now works for The Wilderness Society, "The idea was to try to protect — within the secretary of the Interior’s discretion — the wilderness, roadless, undeveloped character of lands proposed for wilderness designation. For a while, it became known as the ‘take-care’ policy."

The BLM wasn’t required to protect these areas as wilderness, but it could impose stipulations on development projects, to minimize their impacts on wilderness character, or recommend postponing such projects. And in practice, the BLM frequently denied mineral leases on these lands.

Clinton’s secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, gave citizens’ wilderness proposals their most explicit recognition in Utah. In its initial inventory in the 1980s, the Utah BLM identified only 3.2 million acres — which remain protected as wilderness study areas, because Congress has yet to pass a BLM wilderness bill for the state. Not satisfied with this, activists did their own inventory, spurring the agency to designate an additional 2.6 million acres as "wilderness inventory areas," bringing interim protection to a total of about 5.7 million acres.

Wilderness advocates scored a similar victory in Colorado, where in 1997, the BLM agreed to take a "second look" at a total of 600,000 acres proposed for wilderness protection by the Colorado Environmental Coalition.

In both Colorado and Utah, the BLM began to consider giving citizen-proposed wilderness more formal protection. In January 2001, Babbitt issued the BLM Wilderness Handbook, which laid out a standardized, nationwide procedure for determining which lands were eligible for "upgrading" from citizen-proposed inventory areas to official wilderness study areas.

But the Handbook was issued without an opportunity for public comment, in a wave of controversial last-minute directives just 10 days before President Clinton left office. The Utah government, and the oil and gas companies, saw the Handbook as a circumvention of public process.

"There is a big difference between BLM giving essentially policy effect to environmental groups drawing their private line on the map, and the public process of oil and gas leasing," says John Andrews, associate director and general counsel of Utah’s School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, who fought the rule.

And the Handbook played straight into an intensifying debate over FLPMA. Wilderness foes contend that the BLM had a one-shot opportunity to recommend potential wilderness to Congress — and that the opportunity ended with FLPMA’s 1991 deadline. By their reckoning, the citizens’ wilderness proposals were moot; they’d come in too late.

Again, the locus of that fight has been Utah. In 1996, the state sued the U.S. Department of the Interior, arguing that the BLM didn’t have the authority to add areas it missed the first time around. But two years later, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals rebuffed the state when it ruled that the "plain language" of FLPMA required the BLM to continue to inventory potential wilderness.

The ruling only fueled frustration among oil and gas companies. "People had a horrible time getting (drilling permits) through. It was this endless cycle of review," says Connie Brooks, a Denver lawyer who represented Utah in the wilderness case. The citizen-proposed wilderness in Utah, she says, "was the land in between. It was basically off-limits for oil and gas leasing. (BLM) would actually use pages from Wilderness on the Edge" — a compendium of citizen-proposed wilderness put together by the Utah Wilderness Coalition — "and they’d redraw the boundaries (of leases offered for sale). We had them cold on it."

According to the Utah BLM, between November 1999 and April 2003, energy companies sought leases on 214,170 acres of wilderness inventory areas and citizen-proposed wilderness. The BLM turned down all of them.

But last March, Gov. Leavitt resurrected Utah’s legal challenge — and got a very different reaction from the Bush-appointed leaders in the Interior Department. Late in the day on Friday, April 11 — just two weeks after Utah refiled the lawsuit — Secretary Norton signed the settlement agreement that stripped interim protection from Utah’s 2.6 million acres of wilderness inventory areas and invalidated Babbitt’s Wilderness Handbook.

"We looked at the concerns Utah was raising, and took a close look at the law," says Lynn Scarlett, the Interior Department’s assistant secretary of Policy, Management, and Budget. "People might have hoped it said something different, but our read is that Congress said, ‘There’s the process, and it’s 15 years, and that’s the end of that.’ "

On Sept. 29, BLM Director Kathleen Clarke officially rescinded the interim-protection policy nationwide, removing protection from millions of acres and dealing a serious blow to two decades of citizens’ effort to save the West’s last wild places.

All of the citizens’ wilderness proposals that fell under the old policy "had a chance to be protected as wilderness," says Ted Zukoski, a lawyer for Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm. "Now, BLM is saying, ‘We can’t and we won’t plan to protect that character in terms of creating (wilderness study areas).’ BLM is making those decisions now that will make it impossible for those areas to be protected in the future. That’s what we’re losing."

Now, as at Big Ridge, the oil and gas industry is beginning to move drill rigs onto lands it already has leased. And it’s looking to lease more: One series of proposed wilderness lands has already hit the auction block, and a second is coming in a matter of days.

Legal settlement blows away a homespun wilderness proposal

Thirty miles west of Big Ridge, just south of Vernal, Utah, lies another area that’s long been torn between wilderness and energy development. Here, the White River cuts through the Uinta Formation on its way to the Green River, creating towering turrets and battlements. On the benchlands above the river, golden eagles roost atop old sheepherders’ cairns on sandstone outcrops.

Back in 1871, explorer Frederick Dellenbaugh, who was part of John Wesley Powell’s expedition, wrote of the area: "Beautiful is the wilderness at all times, at all times lovely, but under the spell of twilight it seems to enfold one in a tender embrace, pushing back the sordid, the commonplace, and obliterating those magnified nothings that form the weary burden of civilised man."

Starting in the 1950s, the Vernal area was largely overrun by oil and gas development. But the area around the White River came to stand at the center of a truly homegrown wilderness proposal. In 1985, a doctor named Will Durant and an oil and gas driller named Doug Hatch ran the river with Clay Johnson, a local machinist — who found the spot Dellenbaugh described, with the help of a postage-stamp sized sketch in the fold of another explorer’s journal.

The following winter, says Durant, "We sat down at Doug Hatch’s kitchen table, and pulled out the topo maps and started drawing lines. We shrunk it as much as we could to avoid anything that would interfere with the proposal."

On paper, they came up with about 9,000 acres, which they then checked on the ground to be sure that no roads or wells would disqualify them from protection. "We’d go out and get lost and wander around, and then we’d try to figure out where we went. We were pretty satisfied that everything was copacetic," Durant says.

As it turned out, their proposal wasn’t perfect: An oil company held a lease within the area. But they were able to stave off development of the lease in an exhausting fight that went all the way to an Interior appeals board in Washington, D.C. Later, Durant’s Uintah Mountain Club teamed up with the Salt Lake City-based Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, which expanded the club’s proposal to about 19,000 acres, and incorporated it into what is now a 9.1-million acre statewide wilderness proposal. In 1999, the BLM designated 15,800 acres of land around the White River as a wilderness inventory area.

In the 3.3 million acres of land that the BLM’s Vernal field office administers, a 15,800-acre wilderness inventory area was a small but important contrast to the rest of the well-dotted landscape. Many in the agency realized its significance. While the BLM couldn’t deny a company’s "valid existing right" to drill, which comes with a lease, it could refrain from issuing new leases, and it could quietly allow existing ones to expire. And that’s what it did.

"I think the BLM realized how important it was to us," says Durant, "and I think there were some people in the BLM who wanted to see more balance."

But the expanded 15,800-acre area brought more trouble, because some of the newly incorporated land was already leased for oil and gas development. And in 1997, the consortium that owned those leases, the Resource Development Group, started pushing to drill.

The Uintah Mountain Club may have felt it had BLM support in the earlier fight, but all that changed following the Norton-Leavitt settlement. Last summer, three months after the settlement, the BLM released a draft environmental impact statement that would allow 423 wells south of Vernal, including 15 wells in the White River wilderness inventory area, and 35 more in the citizen-proposed areas nearby. A final environmental impact statement should be completed before this summer, and drilling could start any time after that.

"Up until recently," says one agency insider, "it looked like, of any place in the state, (White River) was going to be wilderness."

Now, that looks unlikely.

Oil and gas companies rush onto wild lands

Last October, Pete Kolbenschlag of the Colorado Environmental Coalition (CEC) wrangled a spot in an oil-and-gas leasing course put on by the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation. Kolbenschlag found himself filling out a worksheet on how to bid for an oil and gas lease in an area proposed by his group for wilderness protection.

The exercise, written by Craig Carver, a Denver lawyer who represented Marathon Oil in a mid-’90s wilderness battle against CEC, reads: "The current Secretary of the Interior has determined to turn over management of the surface and subsurface resources of the CEC lands to those friends of the Vice-President who served on his energy advisory board. You can’t find out who those folks are, but they tell us to lease the CEC tracts come hell or high water."

As industry dives in, BLM offices have clear direction from Washington, D.C., to make oil and gas their first priority. Four months after taking office, President Bush issued two back-to-back executive orders, directing government agencies to expedite energy projects, and ordering agency managers to produce extensive documentation any time they deny a project. At the same time, Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force called for expediting development in the Rocky Mountain states. This summer, the Bush administration established the Rocky Mountain Energy Council to fast-track oil and gas projects.

Not all of this started with Bush. In November 2000, President Clinton signed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act Amendments (EPCA), which required the Departments of Interior, Agriculture and Energy to study oil and gas reserves on federal lands, and "restrictions or impediments" to their development. That report was released last January, and the April wilderness settlement knocked a lot of "impediments" out of the way. In August, BLM Director Kathleen Clarke issued a memo to agency managers, requiring them to re-evaluate restrictions "in areas where access to public lands and energy minerals is severely restricted."

Washington is also taking a much more hands-on approach. "People at the very local level are getting phone calls from these political people within the (Interior) department, saying what to do," says Martha Hahn, the former BLM state director in Idaho. "(As) a state director, you constantly try to buffer everything that’s being shot at you and your employees (from Washington, D.C.) and keep your employees on task. The political types in the department are going around that buffer. It’s driving the state directors crazy."

Hahn was pushed out of her position with the BLM in 2002 under pressure from Sen. Larry Craig (HCN, 3/18/02: BLM director forced to resign). She later lost a job at the Argonne National Laboratory, after she was quoted in a Vanity Fair article critical of J. Steven Griles, the former oil-and-gas industry lawyer who is now second-in-command of the Interior Department.

The political types have made it clear that dissent will not be tolerated. In an appearance before the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission in Reno, Nev., last October, BLM Director Clarke said land managers in her agency had "lost some discipline, lost some accountability, did a lot of freelancing." According to The Associated Press, Clarke vowed to send a "team to look at some of our more problematic field offices."

It’s almost impossible to get BLM staffers to talk about life inside the agency these days. Two current BLM state directors contacted for this story declined interviews, and only a handful of BLM employees would comment on the record.

"The pressure, in terms of them not saying anything, is so huge it’s obvious," says Hahn. "People are just terrified right now." But the shift within the agencies is clear: In the wake of the April wilderness settlement, the BLM has been moving to get citizens’ wilderness lands back into the leasing line-up — first and foremost in Utah. A July 2003 briefing for BLM Director Clarke noted that Washington sees Utah as "leading the way" in leasing such areas. The memo proposed establishing a "SWAT team" to conduct the environmental analysis for leasing "backlogged" wilderness inventory and citizen-proposed wilderness areas.

This November, the first of the Utah wilderness inventory areas hit the auction block in the BLM’s quarterly oil and gas lease sale. Several found no buyers. But several parcels in a former wilderness inventory area in Desolation Canyon on the Green River — best-known as a boaters’ paradise, but also on the edge of a large oil and gas field — were actually purchased. (The BLM did defer five parcels for further analysis of their "wilderness characteristics.")

"A lot of the areas that are moving forward with potential leasing activity are adjacent to long-standing oil and gas activity," says Interior’s Lynn Scarlett. "In many instances, the leases are smack-dab next to (existing) oil and gas activity."

A much bigger round of parcels will be leased from late January to mid-February, including parts of citizen-proposed wilderness in four states (see list at left).

In Vernal, the first rumblings of change came last year, with a massive seismic exploration project that, in part, targeted two wilderness inventory areas and four citizen-proposed wildernesses. "I think (that) was just an eye-opener for what was getting ready to happen," says Mary Hammer, a former Vernal BLM wildlife biologist. "As soon as that (Norton-Leavitt) settlement was reached, it was like, ‘Bingo! We’re gonna go in.’ "

One BLM employee says that in areas like Vernal, "Up until recently, industry was pretty cooperative. Even if they had a lease in one of these areas, they wouldn’t exercise it. But right now, because they’re being politically pushed, they’re coming in right and left."

John Andrews, of Utah’s School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, downplays the leases. "Don’t buy into the concept that, if lands are leased, ruin and destruction are actually happening. From leasing to any sort of significant development involves a lot of what-ifs, and the percentage of leases that ultimately have much activity on them is very, very limited."

Nonetheless, these new energy leases are the biggest threat to the future of wilderness. "Undoing" leases is next to impossible, buying them out is extremely expensive, and they give companies a right to drill. They lay a nearly bomb-proof foundation for future development.

And if there’s a sense of urgency in the rush to drill, it may be because the Norton-Leavitt settlement has not gone unchallenged. A coalition of environmental groups, represented by Earthjustice and including The Wilderness Society, SUWA, the Colorado Environmental Coalition, and several other state wilderness groups, has asked the federal courts to overturn the settlement. The challenge is now before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver — the same court that shot down the state’s anti-wilderness lawsuit in 1998.

The industry is pushing hard to buy leases before that challenge gets heard by a judge, says CEC’s Kolbenschlag. "They want their drilling permits approved, they want to get those leases in — they want to have all that stuff ready to go, because they know they can get it in now."

The battle rages on in the courts

To some extent, the legal challenge to the Leavitt-Norton settlement may be tempering the rush into wild areas.

"I think it’s a very great disincentive," says Craig Carver, the Denver lawyer who wrote the exercise teaching companies to lease proposed wilderness areas. "Industry doesn’t like controversy; it’s not a good place to invest money."

Now, conservation groups are engaged in the legal equivalent of hand-to-hand combat, challenging every lease and drilling permit application. The Colorado Environmental Coalition has appealed El Paso’s wells on Big Ridge to the Interior Department’s Board of Land Appeals. The Resource Development Group’s proposal to drill in the White River area will almost certainly be challenged. And the November lease sales in Utah are under litigation by SUWA.

Earthjustice and The Wilderness Society have also sued to gain access to the records of the negotiations between the Department of the Interior and Utah that resulted in the Norton-Leavitt wilderness settlement. But challenging even one specific project requires tremendous resources. And for some spots, such as Colorado’s Big Ridge, it may already be too late.

Back at Big Ridge, Seidenberg, Morris and I walk up to the first well El Paso drilled and abandoned. We’re in no hurry: Occasionally, we step off the road to weave through old-growth piñon, the ground beneath the trees dappled with snow and rich moss. When we finally reach the well, we find that the pad is in the first stages of a long recovery. Shredded piñon and junipers have been raked across the ground, but the scar is unmistakable.

As the sun begins to dip and the cold sets in, we linger a while. We take in Big Ridge itself, rising to the east. And we talk about that question of balance that follows the wilderness movement, always.

In the Rocky Mountain states, about 2.5 percent of the land is protected as wilderness. Roughly 64 percent of the public land is open to leasing. "Look at what we’re trying to save vs. what oil and gas companies have access to," says Morris. "Oil and gas wants all of it. We want to protect 5 percent."

Big Ridge is by no means the last chance for the gas companies — there’s plenty more land, even around here, for them to take a stab at. But here in the Piceance Basin, Big Ridge may be the last chance for wilderness. And for now, it looks as if that chance has been lost.

Interior’s Lynn Scarlett points out that, in oil and gas leasing and development, "there’s a lot of points of public engagement as you march along in the process" — points where concerned citizens can intervene to shape the fate of wild places. But while the public still has a voice with the BLM on how those areas will be developed, protecting them as wilderness is no longer an option.

In the painfully delicate balancing act called multiple use, wilderness — and its citizen supporters — have been cut out of the picture. "Why is it that you can keep leasing forever?" Seidenberg asks as we begin to trudge back through the snow and mud. "You can keep finding oil. But you can’t find any more wilderness."

Matt Jenkins is associate editor for High Country News.
These stories were made possible with support from the following individuals: Grant Heilman, Farwell Smith, Nelle Tobias and Andy Wiessner.

Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance 801-486-3161, www.suwa.org

Colorado Wilderness Network 970-385-8509, www.cowildernessnetwork.org

The Wilderness Society 800-843-9453, www.wilderness.org

Campaign for America’s Wilderness 202-544-3691, www.leaveitwild.org

Earthjustice 510-550-6700, www.earthjustice.org

U.S. Department of the Interior 202-208-3100, www.doi.gov

Bureau of Land Management 202-452-5125, www.blm.gov

Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States 303-623-0987, www.ipams.org

The Oil and Gas Accountability Project posts a list and maps of BLM parcels being offered for sale (including details about which of them overlap with citizen-proposed wilderness) at www.ogap.org, under "lease sale maps."

Bush Administration Formalizes Anti-Wilderness Policy

Issues Directive to Halt Future Wilderness Consideration on BLM Land

Press Release
Wilderness Society

On September 29, 2003, the Bush administration issued a national policy guidance preventing the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from inventorying or protecting wilderness-quality lands. This decision formalizes a court settlement between the Bush Administration and Utah Governor Mike Leavitt. The new directive by the Department of the Interior for its land managers reverses decades of wilderness policy and puts the interests of drilling, mining, logging and road construction ahead of the public interest. This directive is the latest of a number of steps the Bush Administration has taken to weaken protection for America's wilderness areas.

The new directive, in the form of an instruction memorandum, specifically prevents land managers from inventorying and recommending BLM land for wilderness study and designation. The 80,000-acre Sand Tank Mountains in Arizona, recently acquired from the Department of Defense, and the spectacular 38,000-acre Roan Plateau in Colorado (transferred to BLM in 1997) are among the first casualties of this policy change and now officially lose any opportunity for wilderness consideration and protection. BLM's abandonment of protection for wilderness lands outside the Reagan-era wilderness reviews revokes a policy followed by every president since Jimmy Carter.

For nearly three decades, on-the-ground BLM management experts considered the values of wilderness on the same level as other possible land uses -- including development -- and provided the American public an opportunity to have a voice in the use decision.

The guidelines suggest that BLM will have the authority to protect "scenic values," "unfragmented habitat," and restrict ORV use, but the steps the agency must go through essentially preclude any true protection of wilderness-quality lands as wilderness study areas.

The Bush Administration often touts the 22 million acres of wilderness areas and wilderness study areas (WSAs) on its lands as evidence that no more protection of these areas is needed. But that 22 million acres is less than 10 percent of all public lands managed by BLM. In addition, the Interior Department has petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court decision that permits citizens to hold the Department accountable when it fails to protect wilderness character. The Administration also touts alternate designations such as "Areas of Critical Environmental Concern" or ACECs, as suitable replacements for wilderness. But these areas are often open to destructive uses such as oil and gas drilling, logging or mining. For example, one-third of all ACECs in Colorado have already been leased for drilling.

This formal policy has an immediate effect on wildlands in several states including Colorado where 600,000 acres of public land in the state are withdrawn from future consideration as wilderness. Places like Vermillion Basin are stripped of potential protections by this top-down policy.

Background

In April 2003, the Department of Interior settled a lawsuit with the state of Utah that impacted tens of millions of acres of land in the West managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The backroom deal rescinded interim protections for millions of acres of wilderness-quality lands and reversed the department's long-standing policy to inventory and recommend lands for wilderness designation. Land managers, tasked with planning the use of public land by the BLM, have been without formal guidance on how to implement the profound policy changes resulting from this backdoor deal. In addition, many local BLM staff first learned of the administration's actions through media reports. As part of the settlement, the Bush administration threw out the Wilderness Inventory Handbook, which guided land managers in fairly inventorying wilderness-quality lands and protecting them during BLM land use planning -- as required by the Federal Land Policy Management Act.

Wilderness takes a massive hit

The door closes on new BLM wilderness proposals

by Matt Jenkins
High Country News

For years, wilderness groups have been hounding the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to continue to identify lands worthy of formal protection as wilderness. An initial round of wilderness inventories, completed in 1991, led to protection of 6.5 million acres of BLM wilderness. But citizens' wilderness groups argued that substantial areas of potential wilderness were overlooked. In Utah, for instance, the original BLM inventory identified 3.2 million acres which met Wilderness Act criteria - areas larger than 5,000 acres with "outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation." But the Utah Wilderness Coalition argued that the true number was closer to 9 million acres and - under the direction of Clinton-era Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt - the BLM re-inventoried its Utah lands, ultimately identifying an additional 2.6 million acres eligible for protection.

But on April 11, the BLM stepped back in time. The Department of the Interior settled a lawsuit with the state of Utah, eliminating the 2.6 million acres of potential wilderness identified during the 1990s. Not only that, but Interior also agreed to prohibit the BLM from conducting further wilderness inventories or designating new "wilderness study areas" without explicit congressional direction - a policy the Interior Department intends to extend across the West.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton outlined the new policy in letters sent the same day to Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah. It effectively knocks tens of millions of acres out of the running for wilderness protection - and it will likely open up wildlands to development just as the BLM implements a new industry-friendly policy for oil and gas drilling on its lands.

"You have to understand just how radical a proposition this is," says Jim Angell, an attorney for Earthjustice, the nonprofit law firm that represents several wilderness groups. "What they're saying is: Those wilderness inventories that got done, for the most part, under Reagan - and were deeply flawed and highly political back then - are what we're stuck with. BLM can't even re-inventory its own lands to see if they're eligible for wilderness. They have to turn a blind eye to those lands and continue to develop them."

A long battle

The 1964 Wilderness Act directed the U.S. Forest Service to identify forestlands that might qualify for protection as wilderness. But it wasn't until 1976, with the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA), that the same mandate was extended to the BLM. FLPMA required BLM to complete a one-shot, nationwide inventory of eligible wilderness by 1991. As a result, Congress formally protected 6.5 million acres of BLM land as wilderness, while another 15.5 million acres were protected as wilderness study areas for future consideration.

But the BLM's responsibility didn't end there. Federal law requires the agency to maintain an ongoing inventory of potential wilderness. That opened a window of opportunity to wilderness groups, which argued the agency's initial surveys were far from complete. After years of on-the-ground surveys by citizens, the groups took their findings to the BLM and urged the agency to consider more areas for protection.

"It's been very common practice for the BLM to recognize that the first inventories that were done in the mid- to late-'80s, were not entirely accurate," says Heidi McIntosh of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. Interior Secretary Babbitt recognized this and in 1996, he called for the re-inventory of BLM land in Utah, which ultimately identified 2.6 million more acres of potential wilderness.

The agency did a similar thing in Colorado. In 1996, the Colorado Environmental Coalition pushed the BLM to re-evaluate the Vermillion Basin, an oil-and-gas hotspot in the far northwest corner of the state that was being eyed for development by the Marathon Oil Company (HCN, 8/5/02: Land plan attracts an anti-grazing gorilla).

"We were making the case that BLM shouldn't allow any wilderness-damaging activities until (it) has a chance to take a second look," says Jeff Widen of the Colorado Environmental Coalition. And the BLM agreed, identifying some 600,000 acres of land - not only in the Vermillion Basin, but around the state - to protect as wilderness study areas until Congress could consider them for formal wilderness designation.

These re-evaluations were not without controversy. In 1996, the state of Utah sued Interior to invalidate Babbitt's new survey. The state abandoned the suit after an appeals court upheld the BLM's authority to re-inventory wilderness. But this March, Utah refiled, and just two weeks later - on April 11 - the state and the Interior Department announced that they had reached a settlement.

"The timing of the suit is incredible," says Widen. "A number of state-based wilderness groups tried to intervene, and before the judge ever even ruled, Interior just came out of the blue and settled this thing." The settlement follows a Bush administration pattern of inviting lawsuits that could weaken environmental protection and then settling them out of court (HCN, 10/14/02: Wildlife Service bows to home builders).

The end of wilderness?

The new policy could demolish efforts for more wilderness protection - and it is likely to spread quickly region-wide.

The Utah settlement came on the heels of two March letters to Norton from Republican senators and congressmen in Utah, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, California and Montana, asking that "the Bureau of Land Management immediately suspend any new wilderness reviews of public lands other than reviews specifically directed by an Act of Congress." In her April 11 letters to Senators Bennett and Domenici, Secretary Norton made it clear that the invalidation of wilderness proposed after 1991 would extend across the West.

"It's pretty clear that what we're going to see BLM start doing pretty quick is start leasing lands (for oil and gas development) that are in citizens' wilderness inventories," says Ken Rait of the Campaign for America's Wilderness. In Colorado, the first land on the block could be the Vermillion Basin and the energy-rich Roan Plateau near Rifle. In Utah, it's the area around Moab as well as the Book Cliffs outside of Green River, which have long been eyed by oil and gas companies.

The Arizona Wilderness Coalition's just-released, million-acre wilderness proposal for the remote Arizona Strip, north of the Grand Canyon, is also on the rocks, and the new policy affects wilderness efforts in California, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon and Idaho, as well.

Wilderness groups are still pondering their response to the move, but a lawsuit seems likely. Says Widen, "BLM didn't say to the oil and gas industry, 'You applied for drilling permits back in 1980-whatever, so you had your chance.' "

"This is a major issue for the future of the BLM and how it will manage its lands in the 21st century," says The Wilderness Society's Dave Alberswerth. "It's wrong for the administration to say, 'We're never going to do wilderness again.' "

Matt Jenkins is an assistant editor for High Country News.

• U.S. Department of the Interior, John Wright, 202/208-6416,www.doi.gov;

• The Wilderness Society, Dave Alberswerth, 202/833-2300, www.wilderness.org;

• Campaign for America's Wilderness, Doug Scott, 206/342-9212, www.leaveitwild.org.