As the 40th anniversary of the
Wilderness Act approaches Sept. 3, there is a temptation to talk
about iconic places such as the John Muir Wilderness in California
or the Bob Marshall in Montana. But out in the middle of a
worked-over oil and gas patch south of Vernal, Utah, lies the White
River, a gem that serves as a better emblem of the plight of
today’s wilderness movement.
In 1985, local doctor
Will Durant, oil and gas driller Doug Hatch, and machinist Clay
Johnson gathered around Hatch’s kitchen table and worked out
a wilderness proposal for 9,700 acres of spectacular canyon along
the White River. This is a place that the landlord, the federal
Bureau of Land Management, has never — to this day —
leased for oil and gas development.
But the proposal got
swallowed up. By the 1990s, with Utah politicians becoming
increasingly anti-wilderness, the local Uintah Mountain Club turned
for help to the Salt Lake City-based Southern Utah Wilderness
Alliance. SUWA expanded the White River proposal to about 19,000
acres; then it inserted it deep into the 9.1-million-acre statewide
wilderness proposal it was trying to sell to a national
constituency, over the heads of the Utah congressional delegation.
Much of the newly added land was already leased for
drilling by a consortium of oil and gas companies. But for a few
years, the White River and millions of acres of citizen-proposed
wilderness throughout the West enjoyed interim protection provided
by the Clinton administration’s Interior Department.
Then, in March 2003, the state of Utah resurrected a
six-year old lawsuit challenging the federal government’s
authority to protect lands that had been proposed for wilderness by
citizens. Just two weeks later, Interior Secretary Gale Norton and
then-Utah Republican Gov. Mike Leavitt settled the case.
Suddenly, millions of acres of proposed wilderness across the West
were vulnerable to drilling and other resource development. Around
the White River, that opened the door to begin the permitting
process for 15 wells. By the end of 2003, there was a palpable
sense that wild places like this were disappearing all over the
West. So on a cold and clear day last December, I met Uintah
Mountain Club members Nancy Bostick-Ebbert, Paul Ebbert and Tom
Elder in Vernal, and we set out in search of the original White
River proposed wilderness.
For hours we ground away in
four-wheel drive through axle-deep mud, lost in the maze of oil and
gas service roads. Finally, we abandoned our vehicle at a well pad
and walked down a dry wash.
Winding down into the depths
of the river canyon, we entered a different world. Sphinx-like
sandstone spires rose over a fringe of cottonwoods. The languid
glide of the White River’s water, under a blanket of early
winter light, mesmerized us as it flowed toward the Green River.
There was no need to explain why this small piece of the
vast federal estate deserved protection. But 40 years after the
Wilderness Act, places like the White River have disappeared inside
schemes for wilderness that exist only in four-and-a-half pound
citizens’ proposals. While they wait, wild lands are being
whittled away by wells and roads.
We’ve been here
before. Beginning in 1929, the Forest Service designated primitive
and then wilderness areas on the national forests. But because the
designations were administrative, they could be reversed by
succeeding presidential administrations. In 1950, for example, the
Forest Service decided to carve off a part of New Mexico’s
Gila Wilderness, the nation’s first wilderness, for loggers.
This vulnerability led early wilderness champions like
Bob Marshall and Howard Zahniser to campaign for the Wilderness
Act. They wanted to ensure that Congress would have sole authority
to designate wilderness. In the years since the Wilderness Act,
Congress has never de-designated a single wilderness area.
It is time to treat each proposed wilderness area as a
real, solvable problem. Instead of talking about keeping 15 wells
out of a proposed wilderness on Utah’s White River, we need
to talk about making that area official wilderness. There’s
no reason why the White River can’t join the list of smaller,
stand-alone proposals that are moving forward. They include Wild
Sky in Washington, Boulder-White Clouds in Idaho, Ojito in New
Mexico, and Tumacacori Highlands in Arizona.
None of the
15 wells now being proposed lies in the core of the White River,
the 9,700-acre wilderness that Durant, Hatch and Johnson
envisioned. Now could be the last chance to break it out of
SUWA’s 9.1-million acre mega-proposal and try to convince
Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson, who represents the White River area,
to take it to Congress.
It might be a wild idea. But
after all these years of entrenched bitterness, it’s time for
wilderness to find a home in Utah.
Matt Jenkins
is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org) where he is
associate editor. His anthology of 34 years of High
Country News’ coverage of wilderness, A
People’s History of Wilderness, will be available
in November.
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