Utah’s Colorful Canyons an Arena in Wilderness War : Environment: Congress will decide how much of the West’s primeval public lands will stay that way. Rural areas fear losing grazing, timber, minerals.

At the sawmill here, a secretary sells T-shirts emblazoned with a recipe for “Loggers’ Stew.” Among the ingredients: “4 large, well-plucked spotted owls,” “3 finely chopped peregrine falcons” and “2 well-beaten environmentalists.”

Endangered species may play well in New York or Washington, but, in southern Utah’s canyon country, the traditions of the Old West die hard.

Just ask a local what he thinks of Rep. Wayne Owens (D-Utah) and his plan to set aside 5.4 million acres of southern Utah--10% of the state--as protected wilderness, forever off limits to roads, mining, logging and off-road vehicles.

“To sum it up right quick, we’d like to hang him,” said Gene Griffin, pausing behind the counter of the dry-goods store that he runs when he is not tending cattle on his ranch. “It’s government land, but we don’t think they should take it away after we pioneered it. We don’t go back (east) and tell them to take down all those tall buildings.”

Rural Westerners have always looked askance at federal efforts to restrict their use of public lands and resources. But the war over wilderness has reached a critical phase. Over the next decade, Congress will largely decide the fate of the nation’s last big chunks of unprotected wild land--how much remains in its primeval state, how much is potentially open to industrial use.

“We fought over the easy stuff first,” said Debbie Sease, public lands director for the Sierra Club. “What we’re down to are the harder issues.”

Since the Wilderness Act of 1964, Congress has designated about 100 million acres--roughly two Utahs, or 4% of the entire United States--as protected wilderness. More than half of it--57 million acres--is in Alaska.

By the end of this year, the Interior Department is to complete its final recommendations on the unprotected wilderness that remains in the 11 contiguous Western states. Congress then will consider the proposals along with its own wilderness bills, adding and deleting as it sees fit.

Polls indicate strong public support, especially in cities, for designated wilderness areas. It is no coincidence that Owens, a former mission president for the Mormon Church and former aide to Robert F. Kennedy, represents Salt Lake City and its fast-growing suburbs. But, throughout the rural West, where economies rise and fall on the resources culled from public lands, no land-use topic is more divisive.

At a meeting in Denver in March, a coalition of 231 industry groups, off-road vehicle users and rural governments said in a statement that wilderness legislation “destroys job opportunities, removes land from (the tax base) . . . and unduly restricts opportunities for motorized recreation.”

The meeting was sponsored, in part, by the Wilderness Impact Research Foundation, producers of a recent videotape charging, among other things, that wilderness bills discriminate against wheelchair users by denying them access to the outdoors. “The preservationists’ goals have become outrageous,” said Grant Gerber, an Elko, Nev., attorney who founded the group.

Such complaints have found a sympathetic ear among conservative Western politicians like Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah), who has called the Owens bill “so excessive it’s not worth consideration,” and in some quarters of the Bureau of Land Management, the Interior Department agency that oversees fully one-eighth of the nation’s land area.

Conservationists were disappointed but not surprised earlier this year when the Bureau of Land Management recommended that 2 million acres of Utah wilderness receive permanent protection. Critics charge--and some Interior Department officials privately agree--that the bureau distorted its own standards for identifying wilderness to leave a door open for mining companies.

Environmentalists like to say that wilderness needs no defense, only more defenders. But they defend it just the same, citing evidence that designated wilderness can help lure tourists and non-polluting industries, an alternative to resource-based economies subject to the whims of global markets.

In any event, they say, society’s priorities have changed, and the rural West will have to accept the consequences, even if some of them are painful.

“Some of these towns are going to die, (but) they’re not going to die gracefully,” said Brant Calkin, director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “They’re going to squeeze the last bit that they can from the federal lands. And it’s the last stage that’s the most dangerous, because that’s when the desperation is greatest, and the little bit (of wilderness) that remains is at greatest risk.”

Since the 1930s, conservationists have agonized over the fate of southern Utah, a geologic wonderland of yawning “slick-rock” canyons, ocher sandstone cliffs and seemingly limitless views. Harold L. Ickes, Interior Department secretary under Franklin D. Roosevelt, was so taken with the region that he once proposed making 4.4 million acres of it into a national park.

But, in Escalante, residents take a different view.

“A lot of the environmentalists say (development) would ruin the sandstone,” said DeLane Griffin, 67, a taciturn cowboy and brother of the dry-goods dealer. “Well, look at it.” He pointed to a juniper-studded cliff through the window of his brother’s store. “We’ve got a lot of it. We’ll trade it off to them for green grass.”

Small, conservative and overwhelmingly Mormon, Escalante is a dot in a sea of empty land, most of it federally owned.

For generations, the town has lived and died by its public lands--chiefly the ponderosa pine areas of the Dixie National Forest and the arid rangelands where ranchers graze their cattle. Right now, it is dying. Drought has forced cattlemen to reduce their herds, and, recently, the Escalante sawmill, the town’s largest employer, laid off 35 of 120 workers.

Nevertheless, people here seem convinced that Escalante could prosper if only environmentalists, politicians and the federal bureaucracy would let it.

Louise Liston is a retired schoolteacher and the great-granddaughter of a scout on the first Mormon expedition to pass through the area, in the 1880s. She is as good a spokesperson as any for the view that excessive environmental regulation, combined with the “lock up” of natural resources in national parks and other protected areas, is thwarting the region’s economic growth.

“We could be the richest county in the state,” said Liston, who serves on the Garfield County Commission. “We have oil. We have titanium and zirconium. We have coal. We have tar sands.”

Liston emphasized that “we love our national parks” and suggested that tourism is “a help.” But she expressed deep resentment of environmentalists and their political allies, “suitcase saviors” who in her view have no business telling people in Escalante how to run their lives.

A favorite example is a congressional bill last year aimed in part at studying the expansion of Bryce Canyon National Park with an eye toward protecting the views.

Such views cover “two-thirds of my county,” she said. “Can you say that the land is more important than the people? Our children are being endangered, our way of life is at stake, and yet we don’t get the same consideration as the spotted owl.”

Officials in southern Utah describe the Owens bill as an economic catastrophe. A study commissioned by the Utah Assn. of Counties warned that the bill would eliminate livestock grazing in wilderness areas and estimated its annual cost at up to $13 billion, mostly in lost mining opportunities.

Environmentalists note that livestock grazing is permitted in wilderness areas as a matter of law, as is hunting, camping, horseback riding and, in some cases, mining. They question how a bill that affects 10% of the state’s land, all of it so far undeveloped, could cost Utah an annual amount that is nearly half of its $27-billion gross yearly product.

In any event, there is considerable evidence that the fate of towns like Escalante may hinge less on the effectiveness of the environmental lobby than on broad economic tides over which it has little, if any, control.

The minerals industry is notoriously vulnerable to boom-bust cycles of the sort that eliminated hundreds of southern Utah uranium jobs in the 1980s.

And the Bureau of Land Management acknowledges that the commercial potential of southern Utah’s vast coal seams remains largely unproven. Indeed, a draft of a bureau study on the economic impact of setting aside 3.2 million acres of Utah wilderness concluded that “existing employment levels would not be affected.”

“The people here are in a commodity economy on a global scale,” said Calkin, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance director. “(But) all of these economic supports are in trouble and there’s nothing anyone can do. (So,) if you’re a politician in Utah, if you don’t have an answer, you’ve got to have scapegoats. And the convenient scapegoats here are the environmentalists.”

Calkin, 60, is a wiry former Sierra Club president and former New Mexico cabinet secretary who flits about the state in a battered Cessna. The message he brings to county officials and others is that, instead of destroying the economy, wilderness can actually enhance it.

A 1989 study by two University of Idaho geography professors, Gundars Rudzitis and Harley E. Johansen, found that counties with federally designated wilderness areas grew at two to three times the rate of other rural counties--capitalizing on natural amenities to attract tourists and industry alike. The newest business in Escalante is a store specializing in backpacks, trail maps and enviro-trendy Birkenstock sandals.

But Calkin acknowledges that, although he is willing to “genuflect” to the cause of economic growth, it is not his main concern. “You look around, you see what’s happened elsewhere, you see what’s here to be lost, and you say, ‘Not here.’ ”

When piloting his plane above the canyon country on a dazzling morning recently, Calkin dipped a wing toward the site of a proposed coal mine and 18-mile access road and swung low over Jeep trails from the uranium boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

“The first use is gratuitous and short-lived--the guy out there with his Geiger counter,” he said. “(But) there’s never an end to it. It’s a progression that doesn’t have a plan, and about the only plan you have to contain it is wilderness.”

But, to an agency committed to the doctrine of “multiple use,” deciding which public lands to protect has proved troublesome.

Under the Wilderness Act, land agencies are supposed to make a complete list of potential wilderness areas based solely on natural or aesthetic qualities, such as uniqueness and “opportunities for solitude.” Only after they have completed the task may they consider the potential for minerals or other forms of development in deciding whether to recommend the areas for permanent protection.

But, in numerous instances cited by conservationists and congressional investigators, Bureau of Land Management officials who conducted Utah’s initial wilderness “inventory” in the late 1970s excluded areas with minerals potential, often rejecting areas scores of miles from the nearest town on grounds that they weren’t lonely enough.

In a 1985 hearing, then-Rep. John F. Seiberling (D-Ohio), chairman of the House Interior and Insular Affairs public-lands subcommittee, cited the example of the Labyrinth Canyon area of the Green River. The bureau included lands on one side of the river but rejected mineral-bearing lands on the opposite, virtually identical, bank on grounds that they “obviously and clearly lacked any wilderness character.” The bureau said also that the remnants of past mining operations made the area unsuitable.

Seiberling called the bureau’s methodology “arbitrary and capricious,” an assessment shared by some Interior Department officials. “They were much more willing to eliminate lands because of the perceived minerals potential,” said an Interior official who asked not to be identified. “(But,) if the land had wilderness characteristics, it should have survived the inventory process.”

Bureau officials in Utah defended their approach. “I think it’s really foolish to say these (mineral) resources are never going to be valuable,” said Ron Montagna of the bureau’s office in Cedar City. “To have a really stable economy, just like a stable ecosystem, you need a myriad of factors.”

Officials said some areas were excluded because they contain undeveloped mining claims, which would have to be bought out to preserve wilderness qualities. Furthermore, said Greg Thayn, the bureau’s Utah wilderness coordinator, wilderness is partly in the eye of the beholder: “I’m sure if you took different teams out and let them draw lines on a map, none would come up the same.”