[PCA] Great Basin Conservation: Pinyon Concerns news article

penny at pinenut.com penny at pinenut.com
Fri Sep 15 15:23:31 CDT 2006


Las Vegas Sun:  September 15, 2006 at 7:30:35 PDT 

A home on the range where developers can play 

White Pine County bill among challenged land swaps 
By Launce Rake 
Las Vegas Sun 


A large coalition of environmental groups is challenging legislation by Nevada's two U.S. senators that would create almost 550,000 acres of wilderness in White Pine County but allow private development on other federal land. 

The environmentalists say that surrendering 45,000 acres in that county to development in exchange for wilderness protection is a bad deal that a Congress controlled by Democrats would be less likely to approve. The groups want a delay to see whether Democrats succeed in taking control of the House or Senate in the Nov. 7 elections. 

The White Pine County bill is one of four pieces of legislation the environmental groups oppose. The others involve similar land-use exchanges in Idaho and Utah. 

"All of them have this quid pro quo strategy of giving away public land in one place for protection in another place," said Janine Blaeloch, director of the Western Lands Project. "If wilderness is going to be protected, it should not happen at the cost of losing the rest of our public lands." 

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D.-Nev., and his Republican colleague, Sen. John Ensign, drafted the White Pine County bill. It would trade federal wilderness protections, which generally prohibit development and restrict most motorized recreation, on some lands for the privatization of other lands. 

The bill is modeled after a 1998 bill, the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, which set aside land for wilderness and designated other land for sale for private development and other uses. Under the Reid-Ensign measure, 85 percent of auction proceeds would go to conservation projects throughout the state. Another 10 percent would go to White Pine County government and 5 percent to the state's fund for public schools. 

The coalition of 80 groups is challenging another bloc of conservation groups that support carving out more land for wilderness and favor the Reid-Ensign bill. 

Blaeloch acknowledges that a number of conservation groups favor some elements of the bills. "Some conservation groups are supporting these bad bills," Blaeloch said. "We want the environmental community to recoalesce with the idea of protecting all public land ¦ If you have conservation groups going along with the idea that it's OK to spend public land like currency, then ultimately public lands are doomed." 

The coalition includes the Seattle-based Western Lands Project; Olympia, Wash.-based Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility; Haily, Idaho-based Western Watersheds Project; Salt Lake City's Glen Canyon Institute; and other groups from across the country, but concentrated in the Pacific Northwest and Great Basin states. 

The coalition is asking for a moratorium on work on the four targeted bills and other federal lands legislation. Instead, it asks for the proposed exchange to go through a regular administrative process established by law for the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service and other federal land managers. 

The Wilderness Society, a national group that is a member of the Nevada Wilderness Coalition, is supporting three of the four bills, including the Reid-Ensign bill. The one exception is a bill affecting Washington County, Utah, around the town of St. George. 

That bill would sell at least 24,300 acres of federal land, while designating 93,000 acres as wilderness. The Washington County bill was co-sponsored by Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, and Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah. 

Jeremy Garncarz, associate director of the society's wilderness support center, the group's political outreach effort in Washington , said the protests lodged from the 80 groups do not indicate a significant divide in the environmental movement. 

"There really isn't a split in the community," said Garncarz, who has tangled with the Western Lands Project and allied groups before over similar issues. "I just got back from D.C. working with 150 activists working on over two dozen campaigns, wilderness campaigns and public lands campaigns, from the East Coast to the West Coast. 

"The Nevada and Idaho bills were pieces of legislation supported from the ground up, broadly supported bills," Garncarz said. 

"We believe strongly that wilderness is a nonpartisan issue," he said. "Wilderness is not a Republican or Democratic issue. Wilderness is an American issue." 

Reid and Ensign considered the perspectives of Nevadans from different geographical, political and economic points of view in drafting the White Pine bill, Garncarz said. Two more bills, both in Idaho, went through a similar process. 

"These bills are not perfect," he said. "No one is saying they are, but there are some good things here." 

Together, the Nevada and Idaho bills would designate 1.4 million acres as wilderness. 

"That is substantial. We're still working with the delegations and other stakeholders to make these bills better." 

Reid spokesman Jon Summers said the criticism, coming less than two months before congressional elections, is ill-timed and off-target. 

"Sen. Reid works to ensure that the process behind writing these bills is a broad and inclusive one, aimed at bringing federal resources to solve tough local problems, as well as balancing growth with conservation," Summers said. "With the land sales involved in the legislation, the only lands that are allowed to be sold are those that the Bureau of Land Management has already identified as being suitable for sale." 

Summers said that the BLM does an environmental analysis of the lands being sold, a process that is consistent with the National Environmental Policy Act. Reid and Ensign "worked with environmental groups, tribal leaders, local elected officials and residents" on the White Pine bill "to write legislation ¦ with the needs of all Nevadans in mind." 

While Garncarz salutes Reid for setting aside wilderness in the White Pine bills and earlier land bills affecting Nevada, including the 1998 Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act, other environmentalists are less pleased with Nevada's senior senator. 

Katie Fite, a director with the Western Watersheds Project, said the White Pine bill would help some congressional Republicans, who could cite the legislation to shore up otherwise poor environmental records before the midterm elections. 

But her biggest concern is the impact the bill and others like it will have on the environment. The White Pine legislation would "basically really destroy pinion-juniper forest" in favor of creating grasslands for the cattle industry, she said. 

"It's really an ecological concern," she said. "The whole aim of that is killing trees." 

Launce Rake can be reached at 259-4127 or at lrake at lasvegassun.com. 

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