Bruce Babbitt: Confronting Tourist Herds Urban refugees are the real threat to our public lands.

The mining West . . . the timber, the grazing, and the homestead West were raided, not settled . . . by different breeds of raiders --Wallace Stegner

Hardly more than a New York minute ago, Bruce Babbitt, scion of a vintage ranching and mercantile family in the high canyon country here, was regarded widely as the brightest star in President Clinton’s Cabinet firmament and every environmentalist’s poster boy.

Back then, Babbitt did appear to have all the right stuff to be the landlord of the nation’s troubled 500-million-acre public domain of parks, rangeland, deserts and wildlife refuges. Here was a seasoned pol able to navigate the turbulent rapids--from the mythological Old West, once dominated by the three Cs, copper, cattle and cotton, to the New West--supposedly populated and visited by more environmentally sensitive folks.

Then the first of a series of setbacks befell him, beginning with the Administration’s humiliating defeat in Congress over raising the grazing fees ranchers pay on public lands, resulting in a proposed rule-making that has generated accusations from ranchers and environmentalists that Babbitt had sold them out.

Now, the political Bowie knives are flashing and the mere mention of his name in many Western states, whether in cowboy bars or country clubs, can start a fight.

Another indication of his waning popularity was a bumper sticker seen on the four-wheel trucks of environmentalists reading, “Babbitt for the Supreme Court.”

But wait a minute! Don’t write Babbitt’s political obituary yet. Now that a seat on the Supreme Court has been ruled out for the present, he’s free to get back to business at the Interior Department where his plans to reform public-lands practices are still alive, and where he’s preparing to face the most difficult dilemma of all: what to do about the explosion, not of cows and sheep, but of two-legged recreationists. “Fun-hogs,” Charlie Peterson, a county commissioner out of Moab, Utah, calls them, the real thundering herd, capable of causing more damage to public lands that any combination of sheep and cattle.

True, Woody Guthrie was correct. This land is their land, but in the West today, virtually every town and national park faces these new raiders: bikers, jeepers, yuppies, New Agers and other refugees from deteriorating urban environments.

Ask any park ranger. Far too many of these fun-hogs are defacing and plundering ancient Native American ruins, fouling overcrowded campgrounds, destroying back roads with $50,000 high-powered Jeeps, violating the very sacred places they leave New York and California to worship. Even gun-toting teen-age gangs from the cities are raiding campgrounds near Flagstaff, Babbitt’s hometown.

Now comes word that the Interior secretary plans to take a page from “Desert Solitaire,” first published nearly 30 years ago and the late Edward Abbey’s poetic, prescient warning of the manifold dangers of “industrial tourism,” the invasion of wilderness and public lands of the West by a new breed of aggressors.

They are the industrial tourists, at once the creators and the prisoners of smoggy traffic jams at besieged parks like the Grand Canyon and Arches National Monument. “For my own part,” Abbey wrote, “I would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live in such a world.”

Abbey’s solution in “Desert Solitaire”: No more cars in national parks. “Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs--anything--but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and their motorized vehicles out. We’ve agreed not to drive our cars into cathedrals . . . art museums . . . We should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places.”

A radical idea in those days. But Babbitt, faced with projections that Grand Canyon visitors will double to 10 million annually in a decade, will soon set this idea adrift in the mainstream. As part of the Grand Canyon Management Plan, he has decided that cars must be banned along the Grand Canyon’s South Rim and a system of shuttle buses or light rail developed to ferry in 5 million visitors a year. As Babbitt put it recently: “We simply cannot continue to build parking lots from Havasu Falls to the Little Colorado River . . . How much can we love places like the Grand Canyon? Isn’t there a point where we risk destroying the very values we cherish?”

Perhaps critics of the nation’s 47th Interior secretary should back off, for he has realized, as none of his predecessors did, that “it’s not the cows, stupid”; that the real danger facing the New West is that it is being loved to death.