Tom's Turn: Notes from our Senior Editor

War on Wilderness

May 15, 2003

That muffled chuckling you hear is Jim Watt, getting his delayed revenge.

Mr. Watt was Secretary of the Interior at the beginning of the Reagan administration. His tenure was raucous and colorful. He opposed nearly everything you can think of in the way of sound environmental policy and he couldn't keep his mouth shut. He was constantly in the papers, insulting people right and left. He divided the populace into "environmentalists" and "Americans." He was finally forced to resign when he bragged that an advisory group he had appointed would pass muster. We've got, he told a reporter, "a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple."

Prior to taking over the Interior Department, Mr. Watt practiced law at the Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver. One of his subordinates was Gale Norton. Ms. Norton now runs the Department of the Interior. She seems to share her old boss' political views, but she learned from his gaffes: she says little and carries a very big stick.

Lately, she has turned her stick against the millions of acres of wilderness managed by her Bureau of Land Management. In essence, the administration has just issued a directive in Alaska and settled a suit filed by the state of Utah that together would limit the BLM lands eligible for wilderness protection to around 20 million acres out of a total of around 230 million. Earthjustice attorneys, representing a wide swath of the environmental movement, have moved to intervene in the Utah case and block the settlement.

This is distressing but hardly surprising. It fits neatly with the administration's incredible hostility to all things environmental. They would do well to remember Wallace Stegner:

"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed... We need wilderness preserved, as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."

Tom Turner, Senior Editor
yourturn@earthjustice.org