Posted on 11/01/2003 9:19:10 PM PST by doug from upland
Monument's creation upheld - Challenge to Giant Sequoia designation is turned away.
WASHINGTON -- The last legal challenge to California's Giant Sequoia National Monument collapsed Monday as the Supreme Court declined to consider an appeal by Tulare County and logging groups. Issued without comment, the court's action upheld President Clinton's creation of the 327,769-acre Giant Sequoia monument.
Frustrating Western conservatives and private-property advocates, the court likewise refused to hear challenges to other Clinton-era monuments in Arizona, Colorado, Oregon and Washington state.
"I think it's great," said Barbara Boyle, the Sierra Club's Sacramento-based senior regional representative. "It reaffirms the validity of the Antiquities Act, and of a president's ability to create monuments."
The Supreme Court's action, coming on its first day of the new October term, was not surprising. The court hears only a few of the cases that are appealed to it each year; usually, only about 100 are taken up for full oral argument, out of some 7,000 petitions.
Westerners, moreover, have consistently failed in their previous legal challenges to the sometimes sprawling monuments created under the Antiquities Act of 1906.
"The Supreme Court is extremely busy," said Kent Duysen, general manager of Sierra Forest Products, "but we always thought we had a good case. We're disappointed, but not shocked."
The Forest Service is preparing its final management plan for the Giant Sequoia monument, which is expected to be completed this fall.
"I think they've been proceeding as if the challenge would fail," Boyle said.
Steven Worthley, a Tulare County supervisor whose district reaches into the forested area, added that while "the odds were not good going in" to the case, he believes the stage could be set for legislative action. Worthley contended that Congress should consider putting limits on monument size.
"Hopefully, there will be some rational examination of this," Worthley said.
So far, though, Western lawmakers have failed in their periodic efforts to scale back the presidential powers to create national monuments. For instance, the Western-dominated House Resources Committee approved in April 2002 a bill putting restrictions on monuments larger than 50,000 acres. That bill never advanced any further.
Almost exactly two years ago, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina rejected the argument raised by Tulare County, Sierra Forest Products and the Sugarloafers Snowmobile Association, among others.
Last October, an appellate panel upheld Urbina's opinion.
For the Bush administration, the case has posed a conflict between ideology and presidential authority.
Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, who oversees the Forest Service, recused herself from monument decisions because she once represented its California opponents. The Forest Service's own monument planning has been criticized by environmentalists and California Attorney General Bill Lockyer.
But as a matter of upholding presidential authority, the Bush administration contended Clinton's use of the Antiquities Act could not be second-guessed by courts. In part, this is because the law doesn't waive the sovereign immunity that shields most governmental actions.
Moreover, Solicitor General Theodore Olson argued that Clinton's use of the Antiquities Act in creating the Giant Sequoia monument on April 15, 2000, fell well within a president's customary authority.
More than half a dozen previous legal challenges to presidential use of the 1906 law had likewise failed.
"Presidential actions are entitled to a strong presumption of regularity," Olson noted, so "the proclamation must be assumed to reflect a good-faith determination by the president that the Antiquities Act standards are satisfied."
The law lets presidents, acting without congressional approval, designate national monuments "which in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with ... proper care and management of the objects to be protected."
Tulare County officials contended the monument was unnecessarily big. It is about half of the size of Yosemite National Park. The monument is designed to protect some of the world's largest and oldest trees.
The sequoia groves themselves account for about 20,000 acres, or roughly 6%, of the total monument.
FRom their website
What We Do
We bring to bear our scientific expertise, analysis and bold advocacy at the highest levels to save, protect and restore America's wilderness areas.
Many of The Wilderness Society's founders and earliest leaders were scientists and policy experts. Aldo Leopold is remembered world-wide for his ground-breaking work on an ethical treatment of the land. Robert Marshall was among the first to suggest that large tracts of Alaska be preserved, and shaped the U.S. Forest Service's policy on wilderness designation and management.
The Wilderness Society remains true to their principles and dedicated to the concept that careful, credible science, bold advocacy, and unswerving vision are essential underpinnings of conservation policy.
A quote from Aldo Leopold
"It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense."
ethical treatment of the land, a ground-breaker in his field.. What a load of BS!
10.31.03 Healthy forest act wins Senate approval
The Senate vote, 80-14, came against the backdrop of cataclysmic wildfires in southern California and information from the General Accounting Office showing two-thirds of all eligible forest-fuels-reduction activities were appealed in California during fiscal years 2001 and ’02.
The report also showed that during the same period, 59 percent of eligible forest thinning projects in the nation were appealed; 52 percent of eligible forest-thinning projects proposed near communities in areas where wildlands and urban areas abut were appealed and that environmental appeals were found to be overwhelmingly without merit with 161 of 180 challenges thrown out.
In all, appeals delayed thinning projects by at least 120 days in those years, the report concluded.
The National Wilderness Preservation System was created on September 3, 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed The Wilderness Act -- eight years after the first wilderness bill was introduced by Senator Hubert H. Humphrey. The final bill passed the Senate, 73-12, on April 9, 1963, and the House of Representatives, 373-1, on July 30, 1964.
The original bill established 9.1 million acres of federally protected wilderness in national forests. The law did not increase the amount of land under federal control, nor did it mandate acquisition of additional lands.
>> Read the Wilderness Act
Eight Years in the Making
In 1956, Howard Zahniser, executive director of The Wilderness Society, drafted a bill to protect some of the nation's remaining wilderness. U.S. Representative Wayne Aspinall (R-CO) called it "a crazy idea," and even the National Park Service originally opposed it. The first version was introduced in 1957 by Sen. Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) and U.S. Rep. John Saylor (R-PA), and was rewritten 66 times. Eventually Zahniser's dream came true, but he died four months before President Johnson signed the Wilderness Act on September 3, 1964.
The National Wilderness Preservation System, created at the signing of the Wilderness Act, was to contain those lands, already owned by the American people, that were "untrammeled by man." They were to be managed "for the use and enjoyment of the American people in such manner as will leave them unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness..." No roads or structures were to be built. Vehicles and other mechanical equipment were not to be used. The minimum size was set at 5,000 acres, with certain exceptions.
The Wilderness Act also put 9.1 million acres of national forest land into the new system. A process was created for congressional designation of future acreage in the national forests, parks, and wildlife refuges. In 1976, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act set forth a process for adding Bureau of Land Management (BLM) areas to the National Wilderness Preservation System. These four sets of public lands total 623 million acres, about 26 percent of our country.
The Wilderness Act of 1964 institutionalized an idea, describing a wilderness as "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." By definition, then, it was a place where vehicles would not be allowed, where no permanent camps or structures could be made, where wildlife and its habitat would be kept in as primitive a condition as possible.
But the act did not do much in the way of creating a system. While 9.1 million acres of national forest areas that already had been administratively identified by the Forest Service as "wild" or "wilderness" or "canoe" were immediately designated by the act, this was the barest skeleton of what would eventually be intended.
The rest would have to come after the federal land-managing agencies surveyed their territory and recommendations to Congress as to which qualified as candidates for wilderness. Such recommendations might or might not be followed by legislation. Moreover, Congress had the power to bypass agency recommendations. It was a cumbersome process at best, but slowly, with many fits and starts and in spite of shifting political winds, bureaucratic complexities, and conflicting needs and desires on the part of the American citizenry, a National Wilderness Preservation System began to take shape.
Excerpted from Wilderness America, a 1990 publication of The Wilderness Society.
We have a vision for America's wild land legacy - to gain lasting protection for another 100 million acres of wild places on America's national lands, including her remaining roadless forests, the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and some 20 million acres within Utah, Idaho and Montana.
The Wilderness system in the United States continues to grow every year from the original 9.1 million acres. Current figures show the size to be 105,677,250 acres. Alaska contains 57,509,859 of the total acres, which is about 54%. 4.67% of the United States is protected as Wilderness.*
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.