Babbitt pushes land protection initiative

By Margot Higgins

February 25, 2000
Web posted at: 8:32 a.m. EST (1332 GMT)

In an effort to preserve as many as 4 million acres of the American West, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt is calling for a new category of public lands protection.

The proposed designation, called National Landscape Monuments, would give the Bureau of Land Management a new role in land preservation, one that has traditionally gone to the National Park Service.

"The nation's largest land agency ought to be induced to have a sense of pride," Babbitt told a audience at the University of Denver Law School last week. "The traditional approach is, you see something nice, you get up a big movement to protect it, and you take it away from the Bureau of Land Management and give it to somebody else, typically the National Park Service."

About a dozen areas would be considered under Babbitt's proposed system, including Steens Mountain and Soda Mountain in Oregon, an expansion of the Colorado National Monument and the Carrizo plain in California's San Joaquin Valley.

If Congress does not warm to Babbitt's wishes, the Interior Secretary hopes President Clinton will use his authority under the Antiquities Act to designate the land monuments.

Environmentalists generally support Babbitt's idea. "This is a very insightful effort on the part of Secretary Babbitt to protect these special places," said Rindy O'Brien, vice president of public policy for the Wilderness Society. "We hope this will elevate certain Bureau of Land Management area land."

Conservationists wonder if the BLM can shoulder the added responsibility. "Our first fear is that the Bureau of Land Management has such a poor history of land management," said Scott Silver, director of the Oregon-based Wild Wilderness organization.

"There is great potential (in Babbitt's plan) for inappropriate overuse from heavy recreation," he also warned.

National Landscape Monuments protection is aimed at preserving entire ecosystems and would extend well beyond visitor centers, Babbitt said. The designated areas would be less traveled than national park areas.

Without the visitor centers, gas stations and other amenities found in most national parks, the National Landscape Monuments would offer a greater "adventure" to the American public, Babbitt said.

"The National Park model is exclusive. It basically moves everything out. It may be, in some of these cases, particularly where you have these big ecosystem landscapes, that it is appropriate to have compatible use which you would not have in a national park," Babbitt said.

While mining would not be legal in the protected areas, hunting and grazing would be considered on a case-by-case basis.

"[Hunting] is an important activity in rural communities [and] properly carried out it is not destructive of conservation diversity. It is not compatible in a national park, but it might be in a Bureau of Land Management monument covering an entire ecosystem," Babbitt said.

Silver worries that BLM lands might not receive the same level of protection as national parks or designated wilderness. "My concern is that in pressing for some sort of designation for lands not protected yet, there may not be a mechanism to protect lands deserving of wilderness protection as designated wilderness," he said.

"Recreational use can have all of the detrimental effects of mining, logging, and grazing," he added. "If inappropriate recreation such as off-road vehicle use is allowed, you may in effect degrade an area from its current state."

Copyright 2000, Environmental News Network, All Rights Reserved

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Bureau of Land Management Public Website
The National Park Service
U.S. Department of the Interior, Secretary Babbitt

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