Land Swaps to Save Environment Gain Ground

President Clinton stood on a breezy plain just outside Yellowstone National Park earlier this year, announcing an agreement to halt a massive gold mine by swapping $65 million in federal assets.

Conservationists, battling for years to block a mine that many feared would inundate the Yellowstone River with poisonous acid flows, celebrated. The pact, Clinton declared, provides “a model for America’s challenges, not only in the environment, but in other areas as well.”

Six days later, on the other end of Montana, a Wyoming businessman filed 104 hard-rock mining claims on 2,150 acres of the Rocky Mountain Front in the Lewis and Clark National Forest.

In the ensuing weeks, helicopters flew 4-by-4-inch mining stakes up into the remote canyon--a key link in a spectacular range of prairie and mountains considered among the best grizzly bear and major-predator habitat in the world.

“This area has been selected for wilderness designation. You couldn’t have picked a worse place to develop, in terms of its wildlife value,” said Mark Good of the Montana Wilderness Assn., one of the environmental groups already lining up to take on a new fight.

“It may just be coincidence,” Good said. “But . . . I personally think it’s going to be a case of saying, ‘I won’t develop it, but you’ve got to pay me not to.’ ”

In recent months, the Clinton administration has turned to high-profile exchanges of federal land, cash and assets as a means of tabling some of the nation’s most troublesome environmental disputes: redwood logging in Northern California, coal mining in Utah, salvage-timber harvesting in Oregon, logging on Montana’s scenic Blackfoot River.

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The exchanges, lauded by major environmental and parks organizations, provide the opportunity of ending courtroom skirmishes that could have lingered for years and permanently protecting hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness.

But questions have been raised about whether the deals may wind up swapping an environmental threat in one location for one elsewhere--and whether landowners who propose ecologically risky development ought to be compensated with federal payoffs. And some raise fears of a wave of speculation on federal lands.

In the Sweet Grass Hills of northern Montana, for example, a Minnesota gold prospector negotiating on 14 mining claims near the Canadian border came forward a few weeks after the Yellowstone pact with a new estimate of the value of his claims, far higher than previous tallies. And in Moab, Utah, two men with mining claims on the Colorado River declared in October that the government would have to buy them out if it wanted to halt mineral development. “We will be owed millions and millions of dollars,” Ray Pene told a local newspaper.

“Now, there’s nothing to stop a prospector from claiming some of America’s most valued public lands, then putting out his hand to extract tax money in exchange for backing off the threat,” the Great Falls (Mont.) Tribune said in an editorial on the proposed hard-rock mine on the Rocky Mountain Front. “That’s really awful public policy.”

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“Every time we make one of these deals, we’re in effect . . . saying they have a private right to take and destroy public assets, and Clinton is capitulating to that extortion,” said Tim Hermach of the Native Forest Council, an environmental group that objected to recent swaps that halted salvage logging on federally owned old-growth forests in Oregon by offering equivalent logging rights on other ancient forests.

Administration officials say land exchanges--a mechanism used hundreds of times over the years but gaining momentum as a tool for unlocking some of the nation’s most troubling environmental disputes--allow for the protection of threatened lands at a time when Congress is increasingly unwilling to spend money to buy federal parklands. A gold mine in Montana instead could be swapped for an office building in Washington, D.C., or a closed military base in Northern California or a good building location in downtown Las Vegas.

Nowhere is the policy shift more evident than in the West, where a government that once opened up vast tracts of land for logging and mineral development now is ready to hand over millions of dollars in assets to stop it.

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“The New World mine [near Yellowstone] is a classic example. There’s a piece of property and a mine proposal where I think it’s fair to say the overwhelming majority of Americans think it’s probably a dumb idea to put a mine there,” said John Leshy, The Interior Department’s chief solicitor.

“There’s land out there that’s not in federal ownership that ought to be. At the same time, everybody but the most committed socialist would say there’s federal property out there that doesn’t really belong in national ownership. And there are the seeds of an exchange.”

The agreement to stop the New World mine--which would have stripped gold, silver and copper valued at $600 million from three Yellowstone River watersheds-- came after a series of secret talks among representatives of Crown Butte Mines Inc., conservation groups suing to stop the mine and administration officials.

The deal called for Crown Butte to hand over the lands it holds near Yellowstone and spend $22.5 million cleaning up the effects of past mining, in exchange for $65 million in federal assets to be selected by February. The pact is hardly a boon for the mining company, which will barely break even on the money it has already invested.

For groups opposing the mine, it assures that the mineral-rich region will not be the subject of further lawsuits and hearings.

“As much as we were convinced the mine was illegal, there would never be certainty in the permitting process. We could find ourselves fighting this mine time after time after time, every five years,” said Brian L. Kuehl, project attorney for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a conservation group. “It was a zero-sum game. There was no way you could play and win.”

A month after the Yellowstone agreement, Clinton announced that the proposed extraction of 3 million tons a year of coal from Utah’s red-rock desert would be halted by declaration of a national monument on Escalante Canyon and the Kaiparowitz Plateau. The deal will allow the state, which has opposed the pact, to swap trust lands within the monument for federal assets. The administration has offered to help the Dutch company seeking to extract coal from the plateau to locate other suitable federal coal leases or revenue.

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In Northern California, the administration in late September announced a $380-million deal with Texas financier Charles Hurwitz to preserve 7,470 acres of ancient redwood groves slated for harvesting. The pact is to be financed with state and federal assets, but falls short of conservation groups’ hopes to protect all six ancient redwood groves of the 60,000-acre Headwaters Forest.

Federal authorities are conducting talks with another private landowner in the new Mojave National Preserve in California aimed at protecting 285,000 acres threatened with possible mining and home-building.

The pacts are not unlike other land exchanges the Interior Department and private groups such as the Nature Conservancy have negotiated for years in an attempt to consolidate land holdings, provide buffers and direct development into less environmentally sensitive areas.

But they are by far the largest and most consequential of these exchanges in recent years. The policy has escalated steadily under the direction of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who pioneered their use as governor of Arizona in the 1980s, and it comes when the Clinton administration is seeking to rehabilitate its relationship with environmental advocates angered by the president’s authorization of salvage-timber harvesting on federal lands.

Although groups such as the Sierra Club and the National Parks and Conservation Assn. have applauded most of the exchanges, others have warned that they carry the potential of environmental blackmail, speculation on public lands and the shifting of problems from one area to another.

“Trading these companies for assets the U.S. owns is policy with a lot of pitfalls in it,” said Jim Jensen of the Montana Environmental Information Center.

The pledge to help locate other potential coal revenue displaced by the Utah desert pact will mean mining coal somewhere else, quite possibly in eastern Montana, northeastern Wyoming, western Colorado, Kentucky or central Utah. “I do not like the notion that somehow we should sacrifice eastern Montana for whatever purposes that Bill Clinton has in making this situation,” Jensen said.

Even Montana Gov. Marc Racicot has cautioned against the possibility that the Yellowstone pact could provide an incentive for other controversial claims. “There is a downside,” Racicot said. “By whatever procedure or method that’s being selected, you may create unintentionally the possibility of value or investment that wasn’t there before.”

But advocates of the Yellowstone agreement said replacement would come from lands evaluated and licensed for leasing in less-sensitive locations, or revenue from already-operating coal mines. They also downplayed fears that speculators will seek to cash in on federal largess.

“It’s clear there aren’t enough public assets or resources to use this model in anything more than a handful of cases. There’s only one Yellowstone, and if this [New World] mine wasn’t situated right next to Yellowstone Park, I don’t believe this deal would ever have come to pass,” said Doug Honnold of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in Montana.

At the same time, said Leshy, the federal government under the existing 124-year-old mining law has no alternative but to compensate landowners blocked from development. “It’s pretty hard to tell a property owner you can’t do anything with your property without paying him.”

In northwestern Montana, conservation groups say the prospect of new claims for hard-rock mining on the 3.2 square miles directly between two key wilderness areas points up the need to reform the mining laws that gave rise to the government intervention.

The 120-mile-long Rocky Mountain Front is the only place where the massive granite bluffs of the Rockies rise directly out of the Great Plains. The front’s value as habitat for grizzlies, mountain lions, wolves, elk and deer is unparalleled. “This is one of the few places in the world where the big brown bear or the grizzly goes out onto the flats for their winter ranges, which is something they’ve done throughout history,” said Bert Goodman, a retired state wildlife official from nearby Choteau.

After years of contention, the U.S. Forest Service last summer released draft environmental studies on opening the front to limited natural gas development--an alternative that could open a mile-wide strip near the base of the mountains, but would not have nearly the impact of opening mining roads and runoff through the heart of Blackleaf Canyon above Bynum.

“If you put a mine here, you might as well write it off as wildlife habitat,” said Wendy Whitehorn of the Montana Wilderness Assn.

Mark Alldredge, the businessman who staked the mining claims, said he is perplexed at the outcry and affronted by accusations that he is hoping to negotiate a buyout.

“Of everything that’s been said, I found the most offensive that I would file on sensitive land merely to be bought out later by the federal government,” he said.

Alldredge said aerial photographs of the region and some gross sampling “interested me enough that I elected to go ahead and stake some claims.”

Because a federal moratorium on patenting new mining claims prevents him from taking title to the land, Alldredge is not ready to say what mineral he’s looking for. “I don’t know exactly what’s there,” he said. “There’s a good chance that I’ll walk away from this project. . . . I can’t tell you until we’ve completed the sampling.”

The law that allowed Alldredge to stake his claims on federal forest land on the Rocky Mountain Front also allowed Crown Butte to access some of its lands near Yellowstone. Under the 1872 mining law, Alldredge could take title to the federal forest land at a price of $2.50 to $5 an acre simply by showing there is a mineral deposit there that can be mined.

Once a valid claim is established, officials have little jurisdiction under which to deny a mining permit. Proceeds from the mine would flow exclusively to the developer; unlike federal laws on coal, oil and natural gas extraction, there is no provision for government royalties.

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Conservation groups are gearing up to use the Yellowstone swap as a key argument in pushing for reform of the hard-rock mining law next year. Blocked in 1994, when reform advocates and western senators seeking to protect jobs and economic benefits from mining deadlocked, such reform is likely to focus on preventing developers from taking title to federal lands by way of mining claims, guaranteeing the government revenue from mined federal lands, allowing the government more discretion in denying mining permits and requiring cleanup and restoration of mined areas on government property. Clinton vetoed a Republican-backed measure that would have slightly increased the amount mining developers must pay to purchase public lands.

“In an ideal world, the law should give the agencies the clear authority, if not the obligation, to say no to stupid projects,” said Richard Parks of the Northern Plains Resources Council, the only one of the conservation groups battling the New World mine that opposed the exchange agreement.

“What we should be able to do is say, ‘Look, guys, this is a bad idea. Take your papers and take a hike.’ ”