Alaska Legislator Pushes to Loosen U.S. Grip on Lands : Environment: GOP’s Young wants private interests and states to control sites. Santa Monicas, redwoods are targets.

With an elk, boar, gray wolf and massive Kodiak brown bear peering down from his office walls, the former Alaskan fur trapper who now heads the House Resources Committee was engaging in a favorite pastime: verbally skinning environmentalists while discussing his plans to take away much of the federal government’s power to protect public lands.

The vast domain of federally owned forests, national parks, rangeland and wildlife refuges is the latest front in a Republican counterrevolution against a quarter-century of government regulation of the environment. In this crusade, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), is emerging as the most flamboyant leader, displaying a raw, confrontational style.

“I am not an elitist,” begins a typical Young diatribe against environmentalists. “The average salary of most of the members of the Sierra Club is $70,000 a year. Is that a person who’s in the ghetto? Is that the working person? No. The environmentalists think nothing about taking jobs away from the working American.”

Determined to loosen the federal grip on hundreds of millions of acres of land, especially in the West, Young and other newly influential Republicans in Congress are advocating legislation to transfer authority over wilderness areas, national parks and wildlife refuges. Some of the land could end up in the hands of state governments or private interests.

Among the potential targets in California discussed by Republicans on Young’s committee are the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in the Los Angeles region and, on the North Coast, Redwood National Park. “We should vastly shrink the size of the Redwood National Park, transfer some to the county and sell the rest of it,” said Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Rocklin).

Young and other congressional members from the West contend that the states are better able to decide if land deserves to be preserved or be thrown open to development. The problem with federal control, Young says, is that the government has been “infiltrated by the preservationists. This is a socialist movement. That’s all it is.”

“Our economic land base is slowly being eroded away,” said Young, a longtime advocate of opening Alaska’s vast Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. “You cannot have a recovery in this country by setting lands aside in non-use classifications. You have to live on what the Earth gives us. If you don’t use that, then you buy things abroad. That’s one reason you have the national debt.”

Originally from California, Young moved to Alaska in 1959, where he made ends meet as a trapper, a dog sled musher and a riverboat captain before being elected to Congress in 1973. There, he labored in relative obscurity, his combative rhetoric dismissed as so much backwoods bluster.

But with Congress in the hands of Republicans determined to wrest power from the federal government, Young has become a force to be reckoned with. Admirers see him as a champion of a populist revolt against environmental policies that have interfered with people’s livelihoods for the sake of protecting a host of non-human species--from redwood trees and spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest to wetlands and woodpeckers in the Southeast.

A like-minded Alaskan, Republican Sen. Frank H. Murkowski, is leading the charge in the Senate, where he chairs the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Murkowski has won one notable concession from the Democratic Administration. Last month, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt approved a 72% increase in cruise ship visits to Glacier Bay National Park despite protests that the ships would be harmful to endangered humpback whales.

In Young’s House Resources Committee, there is strong support for legislation that would remove federal authority over much of the 623 million acres--about 27% of the nation’s land--now under the government’s control.

Most of this land is in 12 Western states, including California, and more than 40% of it is subject to various sorts of environmental restrictions.

In a report recently released by the Resources Committee, the Government Accounting Office stated that the amount of federal land “set aside for conservation purposes” grew from 51 million acres to 271 million during the last 30 years. The report is fuel for Young’s argument that federal land policy is steadily squeezing out people who would use it productively.

But GAO officials pointed out that money-making activities, including logging, cattle grazing, mining, oil and gas drilling and commercial recreation are often permitted on federal land held for environmental purposes.

Taking aim at the national parks, the House committee has also produced a bill, the National Park Service Reform Act, which would force the National Park Service to prioritize its 368 holdings and possibly relinquish authority over parks identified as the least important.

Young insists that policies broadening access to federal lands--whether that means more logging of national forests or more roads into remote sections of national parks--ultimately will be good for the environment.

“My way will make people better respect the environment and the mass of land, if they have accessibility and use of and they will take care of it,” he said. “If you continue the trend the so-called elitist environmental movement has, there will be a rejection of that . . . and people will destroy the parks in time.”

Environmentalists argue that local jurisdiction too often has proven to be synonymous with lax supervision.

“At the local level, there is more of a likelihood that short-term economic interests are going to prevail,” said Ben Beach, spokesman for the Wilderness Society. “It’s going to be more difficult to local officials to resist a mining company that wants to work on public land.”

Transferring the federal lands to a variety of owners who would treat it in different ways would end any hope of preserving “functional ecosystems,” said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. Without a unified federal system of conservation, Pope said, “at best you get islands of conservation, as opposed to intact ecosystems with a full array of species.”

Ironically, some of the industries that stand to profit most from public lands have not joined the call for federal divestiture.

Ranchers, timber and mining companies have long benefited from relatively cheap access to federal lands. They know that some states make it more expensive to do business on lands under their jurisdiction.

The federal system of low grazing fees, no mining royalties and subsidized timber sales can look pretty good compared to the alternatives, said Robert Nelson, a professor of public affairs at the University of Maryland who spent 18 years as a public lands specialist at the Department of the Interior.

“The movement to privatize or localize is not new,” Nelson said. “It is a reaction to overregulation, and it tends lose its steam when some of the more onerous regulations are eased.”