OUTSIDERS MUST NOW STAND UP FOR
UTAH WILDERNESS
Dear
HCN,
The recent defense of the Utah counties’
recommendations for Utah BLM wilderness by former Grand County
Commissioner Paul Menard (HCN, 5/29/95) deserves a
response.
The Utah congressional delegation told
Utah’s county commissioners they could decide how much Bureau of
Land Management wilderness should be protected. The ensuing
recommendation process was a sham and the results were, as the Salt
Lake Tribune editorialized, a “most extreme anti-wilderness
position.”
Despite the popular yammering that
local people know the land best, many county commissioners have
never visited the wilderness located within their county. In some
cases field work was conducted by buzzing past in helicopters and
planes. Wild claims of phantom roads were substituted for
on-the-ground inventories.
In the end the
counties recommended that 994,414 acres of the 5,700,000 acres of
Utah wilderness be protected and the other 83 percent be damned.
The four most southeastern Utah counties, Garfield, Kane, San Juan
and Wayne, recommended flushing 2.8 million acres of the 3.1
million acres of wilderness: 91 percent of the wild country would
go unprotected. These counties recommended zero wilderness for
Dirty Devil Canyon, Grand Gulch, White Canyon, Parunuweap Canyon
and Muddy Creek.
Paul Menard suggests that Utah
elected officials can be trusted to take care of the land. With a
few exceptions, that is flat wrong. The Utah senators and
representatives intend to pass a bill this Congress to open
millions of acres of BLM wilderness to dams and drill rigs. The
canyons will be lost if the wilderness issue is resolved by Utah
politicians.
It is now up to those who live
outside of Utah to convince their congressional representatives to
support the HR 1500, America’s Redrock Wilderness Act, which would
protect Utah’s 5.7 million acres of BLM
wilderness.
Scott
Groene
Cedar City,
Utah
The writer works for the
nonprofit Southern Utah Wilderness
Alliance.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Outsiders must now stand up for Utah wilderness.
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