Babbitt Pushes Plan for More Land Protections

But for the dusty hiking boots and fleece pullover, Bruce Babbitt could have been a game show host: gripping a microphone, swishing the cord out of the way and announcing to the audience, “Let’s have at it!”

With gusto, the Interior Department secretary launched into a two-hour free-for-all with a not totally friendly gathering of local residents at the Colorado National Monument on Friday, listening to land use concerns and all the while selling his message of accelerated public land conservation to a crowd of skeptical Westerners.

Babbitt’s presence on Colorado’s Western Slope comes at the tail end of a yearlong barnstorming tour during which he’s identified federal land in need of additional protection. His list of endangered areas is growing and is currently at 12, including four sites in California.

Federal protections are expected to be added by expanding the size of existing national monuments, naming new ones and, in some cases, asking Congress for wilderness designation.

Babbitt’s message doesn’t always play well. With the federal government owning 30% of the land in the United States and 10% of the land in Colorado, restrictions on the use of public land--areas managed by the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Reclamation--usually meet stalwart opposition.

What the Interior Department calls conservation, some here are calling “The Great Western Land Grab.” Officials counter by noting that almost all of the land in question is already in federal hands, but the debate is nothing if not heated.

The proposed monument sites in California are: Carrizo Plain near San Luis Obispo, Otay Mesa near San Diego, the Santa Rosa-San Jacinto Mountains near Palm Springs, and a number of large rock formations and islands off the coast.

Elsewhere, the most contentious issue involves designating as a monument 1 million acres on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, an area known as the Arizona Strip; the plan has been heatedly opposed by hunters and off-road vehicle users.

During Friday’s forum, Mesa County rancher Warren Gore spoke for many cattle ranchers, who are leery of taking the land here out of the hands of the BLM and placing it in the less cattle-friendly management of the park service.

“If we can’t make it in the cattle business and related enterprises, we are going to subdivide the ranches,” he said, invoking a common boogeyman--sprawl. “Agriculture equals open space.”

Still, the meeting was more cordial than many have been, and Babbitt worked hard to allay fears that his proposals would not “lock up the land,” as one resident claimed. But he also showed little patience with the kind of endless studies and papers that land use questions can generate.

“On my watch and on President Clinton’s watch, I want to bring this issue to a conclusion,” Babbitt said of the 10 years of wrangling over the future of this red rock canyon land near Grand Junction, which the secretary would like to expand.

The means to that end are likely to cause grumbling in Congress. Babbitt made it clear that he wants the land protected--borrowing an Indian phrase, for “seven generations”--if not by congressional vote, then by presidential proclamation.

It is that “back door” policy of presidential decree that is so reviled. Under the Antiquities Act of 1906, Congress gave the president the right to set aside land as a national monument, a status with somewhat more protection than many other federal lands but less than a national park.

“It’s the president’s power to invoke the Antiquities Act that sets the framework for the discussion,” Babbitt said. “I try to be upfront about that. That’s been the case for 100 years and it’s worked very well. They make a case for Congress doing it, but Congress won’t do it absent the countervailing alternative.”

The practice was widely used in the early days--many of the most beloved national parks began life as monuments--but recent Republican presidents didn’t use the act. Richard Nixon was the first president to not invoke the act. Presidents Reagan and Bush were the only other two presidents who named no new national monuments.

Clinton has done it only once, accompanied by some controversy. In 1996 with minimal public input, Clinton set aside 2 million acres in southern Utah for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. That “stealth” action angered many people across the West. Aside from recreational users, developers are concerned that land that moves out of BLM jurisdiction becomes difficult to purchase.

Nearing his eighth year at Interior and cleared of wrongdoing after an an 18-month special counsel investigation over allegations that he lied to a Senate committee about his role in rejecting gaming rights for a Wisconsin Indian tribe in 1995, Babbitt, a former Arizona governor, seems to feel he’s in a better position to pursue pet projects. In January the president announced an ambitious lands legacy program that would provide up to $1 billion a year to preserve open lands. In October, Clinton announced an initiative that would ban road building and logging on 40 million acres of national forest wilderness.

All of this is happening against a backdrop of increased interest among voters in conservation of public lands. Babbitt says lawmakers did not fail to notice last November’s elections in which voters nationwide approved more than 170 ballot measures devoted to preservation of open space and slow growth.

The Interior Department’s move to protect federally held land comes at a time when many conservation groups are calling for more use of the highest protective status: wilderness. The wilderness designation carries more land use restrictions than any other category. Mountain bikes, off-road vehicles, hunting and a host of other common recreational activities are forbidden in wilderness areas.

“Preachers go back to the Bible, I go back to the Wilderness Act of 1964: ‘Man and his works do not dominate the landscape,’ ” Darrell Knuffke, the Wilderness Society’s vice president of regional conservation, said in an interview. “We’ve seen a real resurgence of interest in wilderness issues in this country. A whole new generation of Americans is discovering wilderness. It’s the best we can do with the best things we’ve got. It is the highest zoning of land in the United States.”

Grass-roots conservation groups are surveying and mapping potential wilderness areas around the country. The cataloging is expected to result in a call for massive expansion of wilderness areas. Some groups believe that more than 200 million acres of public land should be designated as wilderness.