Posted on 09/30/2003 5:30:01 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
New guidelines issued Monday by the Bush administration could allow oil and gas companies and off-road vehicles on federal lands that had been off-limits to protect their natural qualities.
The policy directives were sent to BLM state offices to implement an agreement Interior Secretary Gale Norton struck with Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt in April to resolve a lawsuit the state filed against the department.
The settlement rescinded protection for 3 million acres in Utah and millions of additional acres across the West.
Leavitt has since been nominated by President Bush to head the Environmental Protection Agency. The backroom deal has been questioned by Democrats challenging his fitness to lead the agency.
Under the directives issued Monday, the Bureau of Land Management can still decide to preserve the pristine, natural qualities of lands, but those decisions will be made in a planning process for each parcel and weighed on equal footing against potential mining, grazing, timber and recreation uses, said Jim Hughes, deputy director of the Bureau of Land Management.
Ted Zukoski, an attorney for Earthjustice, said it could open up important, ecologically sensitive stretches of land for development in Utah, Colorado, Arizona and California.
"This is the Bush administration continuing its policy to hand over America's wild places and open spaces to the timber and oil and gas mining lobbies," he said.
A wilderness designation prohibits motorized recreation and permanent development of the land, including the building of roads, power lines and pipelines. It is meant to preserve pristine lands "untrammeled by man," according to the 1964 Wilderness Act.
Hughes said it is likely that some of the areas that environmental groups wanted protected as wilderness will not be protected when the final land use plans are complete.
"They just don't rise to the level of what we might want to call our crown jewels of wilderness," he said. But those decisions, he stressed, will be made by local land managers based on input from residents in the region.
Yup. And a way to provide jobs and domestic sources of energy. What's not to like about it?
We want other countries to exploit their natural resources to get a high standard of living, but we want to ignore ours so that we lower our standard of living?
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