Bush Woos West by Trying to Ease Land Restrictions : Policy: Plans benefit ‘wise use’ coalition of loggers, ranchers and others. Environmentalists oppose changes.

In an attempt to woo conservative rural Westerners as the presidential election approaches, the Bush Administration has quietly moved to ease or delay restrictions on the nation’s public lands.

The new policies, strongly opposed by environmental groups, are intended in part to strengthen Bush’s appeal to such Western economic interests as loggers, livestock ranchers and miners.

“It’s a presidential year, and I think the President realized that an awful lot of his support comes from the West,” said Rep. Barbara F. Vucanovich (R-Nev.).

The West that Vucanovich has in mind is worlds away from urban Los Angeles. It is the wide-open deserts of Nevada and the Big Sky country of Montana, where many people still make a living off the land, resent the government’s extensive property holdings, and view environmentalists as dangerous fanatics.

With these constituents in mind, the Bush Administration has proposed rules to limit the ability of environmental groups to stop timber sales or mining operations and embraced policies aimed at providing compensation to landowners hurt by regulation.

Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr., a former New Mexico congressman sympathetic to such concerns, advocated greater support for them after trips to the West this year made him uneasy about potential defections from the conservative Republican camp.

“Many people expressed their belief that the Administration was moving too far to the left environmentally and not taking their concerns into consideration,” said Steve Goldstein, Lujan’s spokesman. “Lujan went to the White House and raised this issue at several levels.”

The grousing came from the so-called “wise use” movement, a loose network of industry and grass-roots groups formed over the past few years to protect private property from regulation and fight environmentalist-supported curbs on grazing, mining, oil exploration, hunting and off-road vehicle recreation.

Lujan believes that the movement is an important political constituency that must be heeded because environmentalists will never be happy with the Administration no matter how it tries to please them.

“The nature of the environmental organization, and my dealings with them, is to criticize, not to say that anything is correct,” Lujan said in an interview during a recent visit to Los Angeles. “That is not to denigrate them in any way. That is just the way the business is.”

“Wise use” members number in the tens of thousands in the West, where the federal government owns huge tracts of land--in some cases, most of the acreage in a state.

Today’s movement is an angrier and better organized version of the rancher-led Sagebrush Rebellion, a largely unsuccessful campaign launched in 1979 to obtain state and private ownership of federal lands.

In their zeal to get government off their backs, “wise use” activists hold demonstrations, send out newsletters, file lawsuits and pack public hearings.

“There is no question they are influencing things around here,” said an Interior Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I’d say it goes back to about a year. It’s very clear that when these guys start to scream about issues anywhere in the country, we’re pretty soon getting inquiries, sometimes from the department, sometimes directly from the White House.

“It’s ‘What are you doing?’ and ‘Why are you doing it?’ kind of thing. It’s rarely overt. But if you get asked often enough about the same kinds of things, a message comes through.”

Signs abound that the Administration takes this coalition seriously.

They include a proposed Interior rule that would force environmentalists to go to court to stop logging, oil and gas drilling, mining and other commercial uses of public lands pending administrative appeals. Such activities now are halted simply by filing an appeal.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture also has proposed a rule to abolish the appeals process for timber sales on U.S. Forest Service land. Both rules are expected to be made permanent.

“The choice will be to go to court or let it go,” said Jeanne Souvigney of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, an environmental group. “But with all these judicial appointments by Republican administrations, we don’t think we can get . . . unbiased rulings.”

Further angering environmentalists, Administration officials have proposed a requirement to force the government to consider the economic consequences of any plan to conserve an endangered species--a proposal that critics contend would decimate wildlife protection and one that they believe Congress will reject.

Earlier this year, the Administration decided to allow logging on 1,700 acres of virgin forest in the Northwest that scientists said should be conserved to ensure the survival of the threatened northern spotted owl.

Bush officials also are siding with mining interests that are fighting a congressional attempt to overhaul the 1872 Mining Act and with livestock ranchers battling Congress over a proposed substantial fee hike for grazing on public lands.

Adopting a pet peeve of “wise use” activists, Lujan recently endeared himself to many of them by ordering an inspector general’s probe into federal government purchases of land from environmental groups.

Groups such as the Nature Conservancy buy private land targeted for conservation by a federal agency and then sell it to the government when public funds are available. Ranchers and others who depend on the land for a living tend to resent such purchases because they tie up more land for conservation.

In a report in June, the inspector general concluded that the government failed in some cases to obtain documentation from environmental groups before reimbursing them for interest and overhead. The government lawyers, also at Lujan’s request, are considering whether reimbursement for overhead and interest is legal.

Administration officials also slashed and weakened a government report about a year ago that laid out procedures for protecting the borders of Yellowstone National Park from forest clearing and other potentially profitable activities. “Wise use” groups had strongly protested the specter of new restrictions on the land.

“We creamed that one pretty good,” said Ron Arnold, executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, a “wise use” group based in the state of Washington.

Like members of the Reagan Administration, Bush’s appointees have largely sided with ranchers opposed to the reintroduction of the endangered gray wolf to Yellowstone.

Ranchers and their allies fear that the animal will prey on livestock and lead to regulations affecting private land because the wolf is protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Impatient with the Administration, Congress last year funded a study needed for the reintroduction and ordered the Interior Department to do it. The Administration then scheduled an extraordinarily large number of public hearings and meetings, five of them yet to be held in the West.

Environmentalists fret that “wise use” groups will bus in hundreds of opponents to the hearings, as they have on other park proposals.

Environmental and “wise use” activists say that the Administration’s policies on the environment began shifting about a year ago to reflect more strongly the position of industry--a change they attribute to the economic slump as well the election season.

“You have to look at the economic situation,” said Interior’s Goldstein. “That is one of the reasons why this (change in emphasis) has come about now as opposed to two years ago.”

Early in the Administration, Bush officials infuriated many in the “wise use” movement by approving a moratorium on oil drilling along much of the Pacific Coast, prohibiting construction of a dam in Colorado and proposing extensive protection of wetlands.

Even with the recent changes, some in the “wise use” movement remain angry at Bush.

William Perry Pendley, president and chief legal officer of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, the litigating arm of the “wise use” movement, complained that Bush has tried to placate environmentalists and the “wise use” movement. In the process, he has alienated both sides.

Pendley calls the movement’s recent victories relatively minor, noting that the Administration moved to reduce forest clearing even as it proposed to abolish the appeals process. Environmental groups have dismissed the limitations on clearing as inadequate.

“If the (wise use) activists vote, they will vote for Bush but they won’t be energized and activated to get people to the polls and make phone calls,” Pendley said.

Arnold is heartened by recent Administration decisions but remains discouraged by the media’s treatment of environmental concerns. He deplored such films as “Fern Gully”--”brain rot for little kids”--and “Medicine Man,” both of which deal with the importance of conserving forests.

On recent federal government policies, Arnold largely credits Vice President Dan Quayle’s Council on Competitiveness with helping to turn around the Administration on environmental questions.

The council, which reviews regulations and recommends changes, has opened its door in Washington to “wise use” groups. Its executive director, David McIntosh, recently attended a “wise use” convention in Reno and lauded the movement’s efforts.

The convention was sponsored by Arnold’s Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, part of the “wise use” coalition. Arnold says the center’s strategy is to “destroy the environmental movement.”

The environmental movement, however, is not running scared. Carl Pope, the Sierra Club’s conservation director, said he believes that the Administration’s attentions to the movement are only an election year ploy.

With Ross Perot out of the presidential race, Bush no longer feels pressed to court the right wing of the Republican Party, and “some of the Administration’s more outrageous ideas are already beginning to lose momentum,” Pope said.

“The Administration has moved from being kind of an ambiguous force (on the environment) to being an ally of the ‘wise use’ people,” he added. “And that just gives them, for the next six months, a lot of power.”

Times researcher William Holmes contributed to this report.