The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017 Page 22
Late last fall, during a telephone interview from his offices on Capitol Hill, Congressman Bishop told me that he decided to pursue the grand bargain when he realized that the old conflict-based manner of tackling disputes had failed. “I’ve got to break paradigms and try something new,” he said. But why something so ambitious in a place so difficult? Bishop invoked a favorite quotation, one that he and others often attribute, perhaps apocryphally, to Dwight Eisenhower: “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.”
Eventually any such plan will be introduced into Congress as a bill that spells out what’s being traded for what. And in theory a grand bargain that has the support of all sides would stand a decent shot of navigating the hyper-partisan halls of Congress to become law.
A few years ago, if you had asked which politician would emerge as the Great Compromiser on wilderness, Bishop wouldn’t have been anybody’s first choice. Now 64, he’s a seven-term congressman from Utah’s First Congressional District, which stretches across the top of the state. The federal government manages nearly two-thirds of Utah’s land, and Bishop firmly believes Uncle Sam is terrible at the job. He has likened federal ownership to Soviet collectivism, and he argues with a pungent eloquence—he’s a former high school debate coach—that the government should get out of the stewardship game and revert the land to local management.
“When you try to control the land from a four-, five-hour flight away, the people always screw up,” he told me. He has repeatedly fought to weaken environmental laws and neuter federal agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and the Forest Service.
Yet Bishop is no wild-eyed back-bencher. He’s chairman of the powerful House Committee on Natural Resources, with sway over issues ranging from energy production to mining, fisheries, and wildlife across one-fifth of the nation’s landmass. Last fall he helped kill renewal of the 51-year-old Land and Water Conservation Fund, which raised billions for recreation and state and federal land acquisition, until it could be overhauled. (The fund was reauthorized in mid-December, but for only three years.) The League of Conservation Voters has given Bishop a 3 percent lifetime rating. Still, he can be a powerful ally, as his work on the grand bargain shows. Bishop’s effort is a genuine attempt to solve the kinds of long-stewing western land-use conflicts that at their worst devolve into potential violence.
Time is running short for Bishop, however. The Obama administration has given him room to cobble together a deal with conservationists, ranchers, Native Americans, energy companies, and others—the kind of huge grassroots pact that most parties would prefer. But if an agreement isn’t reached soon, the president appears poised to step in and do some preservation of his own, in the form of a major new national monument in eastern Utah called the Bears Ears. The clock is ticking.
For some critics, though, the deal struggling to be born is a devil’s bargain. And it has exhumed a pressing version of an age-old question: How much can you compromise before you sacrifice the very thing you’re trying to save?
Last September, nearly three years after Bishop sent out his letter, I traveled to eastern Utah to check on the progress of his idea. Initially Bishop had asked various groups—everyone from the Utah Farm Bureau to the Nature Conservancy—to put their wish lists to paper within a month. In the years since, more than 1,000 meetings have been held, involving dozens of interested parties, as counties worked on detailed proposals to submit to the offices of Bishop and his congressional colleague, representative Jason Chaffetz, a Republican whose district includes southeastern Utah. Now everyone was waiting to see how the congressmen would merge these often conflicting dreams into one plan without pissing off everybody. Deadlines have come and gone. “It’s a total mess,” one staffer told me, referring to the difficulty of the process.
Still, it’s easy to see why several environmental groups are interested. Over the years Utah’s deeply red political culture has often kept the state’s enviros on the defensive, simply trying to prevent losses. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, or SUWA, has filed so many lawsuits to stop development on state and federal land that its enemies call it “Sue-Ya.” From 1930 to 1980 more than half the lands in Utah that environmentalists would have called wilderness and are managed by the BLM—some 13 million acres—were lost to drilling, roads, and other development. Since 1980, however, greens have held the line. Less than 2 percent of would-be wilderness acres have been lost, thanks to efforts that have included land exchanges, lawsuits against oil and gas drilling, and other tactics, SUWA says.
“Utah has always been hard,” says James Morton Turner, author of The Promise of Wilderness, a history of modern wilderness politics. “It is the trail that wilderness has never been able to get to the end of. It is steep, straight uphill, hot, and dusty.” Utah received no designated wilderness under the 1964 Wilderness Act; even today the state has fewer wilderness acres than Florida. The conflict over land and what to do with it has simmered for decades.
But Bishop’s idea strikes a chord with SUWA’s 58-year-old executive director, Scott Groene, who sees an opportunity to gain the kinds of permanent protections the group has long sought. A huge chunk of Utah—more than 3 million acres—exists in a limbo state known as wilderness study areas. These places are neither fish nor fowl; Congress has granted WSAs wilderness-like protections while they’re studied for permanent status. But some WSAs have been in a holding pattern for upward of 35 years.
Groene believes that haggling to protect lands that already enjoy a degree of protection is “just a waste of our time.” Millions of additional acres of unguarded BLM lands are still out there, unprotected even by WSA status, according to environmentalists’ surveys. Greens also have their eyes on gaining wilderness protection for some Forest Service lands in eastern Utah. Traditionally the Forest Service’s guiding principle has been embodied in the slogan “Land of Many Uses,” which means allowing everything from sheep grazing to timber harvests to mountain biking. Wilderness protection, by contrast, is the most stringent status available for federal lands. Motors and mountain bikes are prohibited; resource extraction is allowed only in cases involving preexisting mining claims and leases. Environmentalists have shown a willingness to be flexible, though, by considering less restrictive designations, such as national conservation areas, which block drilling but allow some other uses.
Still, the wish list is long. For example, above Moab environmentalists want wilderness status for the forested La Sal Mountains that serve as the town’s watershed, now national forest. To the north they want protection for the Book Cliffs, one of the largest nearly roadless places left in the lower 48. They also want protection for places of staggering beauty and lonesomeness such as Bowknot Bend, where the Green River coils back on itself at the bottom of a canyon of sun-fevered rock. In his most optimistic moments, Groene, a former “hippie lawyer” who now wears dad plaids, allows himself to dream of a day when his group could shut its doors, its mission all but accomplished.
But what would cause the other side to budge?
To look for an answer, I fly into Salt Lake City and drive due east, past the ski resorts of the Wasatch, until the land flattens and bleaches and oil jacks nod their equine heads. This is Uintah County. On the same day Bishop sent his first letter to groups like SUWA, he sent a second, different letter to the elected commissioners of Uintah and every other county in Utah—the level of government that to Bishop best serves the ideal of local control. Bishop acknowledged the long stalemate over their public acreage. Then he told the locals how to break it. Wilderness, he wrote, “can act as currency”—chips that can be cashed in, in exchange for projects like drilling pads, mines, and airports. “The more land we’re willing to designate as wilderness, the more we’re able to purchase with that currency.”
This was new, and it would change the way wilder
ness skeptics looked at the W-word. The counties of eastern Utah, which had been bloodied and economically frustrated by wilderness stalemates as much as any counties in the state, took notice.
No place illustrates this better than Uintah County. Millions of years ago the Uinta Basin was a vast, shallow inland sea. Today, beneath the ground there’s an ocean of hydrocarbons that could make Uintah one of the next global hot spots for energy extraction. The county, which is nearly the size of Connecticut and covers much of the basin, already has more than 7,100 oil and gas wells—and a world-class pollution problem—but that’s nothing compared with what boosters hope for. The ground holds huge amounts of additional oil and natural gas, plus oil sands and oil shale. The energy isn’t found only in Uintah: in 2012 the most productive oil well in the lower 48 was located outside Moab, and as many as 128 more wells could appear in the area in the next 15 years, the BLM projects.
In Vernal, the Uintah seat, I speak with county commission chairman Mike McKee, an ex-farmer who explains the problem as he sees it. The feds own nearly 60 percent of his county, including many of those potential future oil lands, where would-be drillers are subjected to Washington’s bureaucratic red tape, the shifting energy policies of successive presidential administrations, and lawsuits, all of which can make drilling on federal lands more difficult and uncertain than drilling on state lands. If counties like Uintah compromise, officials want dependable assurance that companies really will be able to drill.
McKee stands before a rainbow-colored map in a conference room. It shows the new protections that Uintah County officials think they can stomach and what they want in return. The map is the outcome of dozens of meetings involving everyone from snowmobile groups to the Wilderness Society, McKee explains, and similar maps have been cobbled together all over eastern Utah. Up in one corner there’s a new wilderness area in the Uinta Mountains. Another is marked in the south, for Desolation Canyon. (“Their ultimate prize,” McKee says of environmentalists. “A spectacular area.”) Negotiations are ongoing about the possibility of turning Dinosaur National Monument into a national park. And a blob of gray covers roughly half the map—a proposed new “energy zone,” where current or future oil or gas drilling or tar-sands operations could occur.
It might be hard to find enough common ground to facilitate any huge deals simply by swapping lands. But Utah has something else to grease the bargaining wheels. During the statehood processes that occurred when the West was settled, the federal government gave new states land, arranged in a checkerboard pattern, most of it to be logged, mined, or grazed, with the proceeds largely helping to fund state schools. In Utah today these trust lands make up 6.5 percent of the entire state—millions of acres. But since they are still arranged in checkerboard patterns, many sit inside federal lands that are now wilderness study areas; they’re like holes in a doughnut. Critics, including Bishop, say this effectively makes the land undevelopable, leading to underfunded schools. (The real cause of that problem, many believe, has been Utah’s tax-averse citizenry.) However, these state lands can be legally mined and drilled, and the federal government has to allow access to them, even through potential wilderness. That’s why Groene calls them “a ticking bomb.”
Many on both sides would like to see them on the trading block. Environmentalists want the development threats removed. Counties and state legislators want the parcels traded out for other lands that are more accessible. Both sides have something to gain.
During the time I spend researching the grand bargain in Utah, many people tell me that what is unfolding might represent the future of land conservation in America. “This could be a model for other states to resolve these issues in a constructive way,” says Mike Matz, who directs wilderness conservation projects for the Pew Charitable Trusts, one of the nation’s largest conservation groups. Utah’s collaboration has spurred counties in Wyoming to try to settle the future of hundreds of thousands of WSA acres there. Whether this trend should be applauded is hotly debated, however.
Land conservation in the U.S. is harder today than ever. The easiest places to protect—the high country of peaks, pines, and pikas—have already been taken care of. What generally remains are lower-elevation lands that have more claims on them, whether from off-road drivers, mountain bikers, or energy companies, according to Martin Nie, director of the Bolle Center for People and Forests at the University of Montana. Add a highly polarized Congress that won’t pass anything even remotely controversial and you’ve got a formula for inaction. “The market is dictating that tactics need to change,” says Alan Rowsome, the Wilderness Society’s senior government-relations director for wildlands designation.
Enter collaborative deal-making. Collaborations have their roots in the watershed groups that formed in the late 1990s, during the Clinton administration. Collaboration often comes down to stakeholders—ranchers, loggers, ATV groups, environmentalists—sitting in a room and negotiating about lines on a map. The goal is to strike a balance between the needs of nature and the ever-greater demands of people. Over the past 15 years some of the nation’s largest and most respected environmental groups—including Pew, the Wilderness Society, and the Sierra Club—have played active roles in collaborations around the West. At its best, collaboration has helped break logjams in stubborn public-lands conflicts and has created a new way forward to protect significant chunks of the map.
But some environmental watchdogs, wilderness specialists, and academics worry that the approach is also setting dangerous precedents. In their pursuit of land preservation and wilderness, critics charge, environmental groups frequently horse-trade inappropriately with the public’s lands—shutting out dissent, undercutting their conservation mission, and even eroding bedrock environmental laws.
Many say the new collaborative trend began in a remote place in eastern Oregon called Steens Mountain. In 2000 environmentalists and ranchers brokered a complex agreement that involved new wilderness and land exchanges and also created a novel management area on public land that would be overseen in part by the ranchers themselves. Some environmentalists praised the compromises, but to Janine Blaeloch, founder and director of the watchdog Western Lands Project, the deal smelled funny. Blaeloch was particularly concerned about how conservationists gained protections around Steens only if they “paid” for them with outright losses of other public lands or by agreeing to reduced protections elsewhere. Blaeloch dubbed it “quid pro quo wilderness.”
The trend soon gained popularity in Nevada, where four-fifths of the state is managed by the federal government. Having had success with a deal in Clark County, which surrounds fast-growing Las Vegas, Democratic senator Harry Reid tackled a more collaborative effort in a large county to the northeast, Lincoln. At first glance the 2004 Lincoln County Conservation, Recreation, and Development Act seemed like a success: it created 14 wilderness areas covering nearly 770,000 acres. The bill had the support of the Wilderness Society and the Nevada Wilderness Coalition, the latter supported financially by a Pew-backed group called the Wilderness Support Center.
But a closer look revealed a disturbing deal. Nowhere did the Lincoln County bill break more with the past than by going against a long-standing government policy of trying to keep federal lands in federal hands. Instead, according to historian James Morton Turner, it required the feds to sell more than 103,000 acres of public land at auction.
Twenty years ago, when environmentalists haggled over protecting lands, they sometimes compromised in a way that temporarily returned hoped-for wilderness acres to the kitty while they continued fighting to protect them at some future date. In Nevada the environmental groups hadn’t simply delayed protection for public lands; they allowed them to be sold off entirely.
Inspired by Lincoln County, other collaborative efforts followed, including a controversial 2008 deal across the state line in southwest Utah’s Washington County and another in the dry Owyhee country of southwest Idaho in 2009. And why not? “Collaboration” sounds great. It
suggests consensus and compromise—the idea that everyone will be heard and their ideas made part of the finished product. But as George Nickas, executive director of Wilderness Watch, has said, compromise sometimes means “three wolves and a sheep talking about what’s for dinner.”
In short, whether collaboration is a good thing or not depends a lot on where you stand—and what you stand to gain. A 2013 study found that the groups most likely to collaborate are large, professional environmental organizations that often represent diverse agendas. According to Caitlin Burke, a forestry expert in North Carolina who has studied collaborations, if such trends continue, “we will see a marginalization of smaller, ideologically pure environmental groups [whose] values will not be included in decision-making because they are unable or unwilling to collaborate.”
Idaho’s Owyhee Initiative, for instance, which steers issues like ranching in southwest Idaho, has banned from participation groups that have successfully litigated to reduce grazing in areas of the Owyhee. The initiative, however, preserves a role for more mainstream groups like the Nature Conservancy and the Wilderness Society.