Expanding the wilderness: businesses seek a more balanced approach to restricting public lands - wilderness areas

Nation's Business, May, 1993 by David Warner

Douglas Crandall, general manager of Brand-S Lumber, can foresee the day when the Livingston, Mont., sawmill could be forced to close.

It's not that Montana is running out of timber, it's that preservationists want to put millions more acres of forested public land in the state off limits to a host of activities, including logging, to protect ecosystems by designating the lands as wilderness areas.

In Montana, 3.4 million of the state's 9.3 million acres of forested public land already are designated as wilderness. Nationwide, wilderness areas, which are authorized by Congress, account for more than 95 million acres of restricted-use public lands.

Preservationist groups such as the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club want to set aside additional areas in other states, too. More than 100 million acres nationwide are currently being considered for wilderness designation, mostly by two branches of the U.S. Interior Department--the Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service. (See the chart on Page 67.)

The Wilderness Act set up the National Wilderness Preservation System with an initial 9 million acres in 1964. Wilderness is defined by the act as a roadless area "where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." Logging, building of roads or structures, and using motorized vehicles are prohibited in such areas. And those restrictions effectively bar livestock grazing, mining, hunting, and developing for oil and gas, for example.

Nearly 270 million acres owned by the U.S. government are already off limits to most, if not all, economic activities through various restricted-use laws, such as those dealing with wilderness, wetlands, and wildlife refuges, according to the four federal agencies that oversee the government's land holdings. Those agencies are the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Forest Service, and the National Park Service. The U.S. government owns 688 million acres, or more than one-third of the U.S. land mass.

Although most of the lands designated as wilderness through the early 1980s had been largely undeveloped and isolated areas, the more recent designations and lands now being recommended or studied for inclusion in the wilderness system include prime timber, livestock-grazing, mineral, energy-resource, and recreation areas.

So, why do more public lands need to be put off limits to such activities?

"The areas we're talking about are critical areas of land that either have spectacular scenic value or other values for recreation and tourism or [are] important wildlife habitat areas, which are needed in this country," says Michael Francis, director of national forest programs for the Wilderness Society, in Washington, D.C.

While even the advocates of multiple uses of public land agree that there are legitimate concerns about protecting ecosystems in many areas of the country, they disagree with preservationists about how much land should be set aside as untouchable.

Says Bruce Lippke, director of the University of Washington's Center for International Trade in Forest Products, in Seattle: "It's not clear that you couldn't have all those things [scenic beauty, wildlife habitat, and tourism] better and easier and cheaper through management, where you take some of the wood off for products."

Brand-S Lumber's Crandall, who also serves on Montana's Environmental Quality Council, agrees that there are areas throughout the country that should be set aside as wilderness. "But there's a great misconception with the public that the best way to manage land is through wilderness designation," he says.

Crandall points out that the No. 1 recreation spot in Montana is the Hyalite Drainage Area, in the Gallatin Forest, just south of Bozeman. For the past 45 years, the area has also been one of the most heavily logged. Now, part of the Gallatin Forest is being considered as a wilderness area, and timber harvesting there has ceased. A number of small mills in Montana have closed as a result, according to Crandall.

Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that putting lands off limits and not managing them can have adverse effects on wildlife and timber, not to mention local economies.

The battle over public lands, however, is not a fight solely between preservatiomsts and the timber industry, as much of the public seems to think or is led to believe. The issue is far wider. "All of the economies of this state ... virtually everything that goes on in this state is tied to the use of [public] lands," says Mark Walsh, associate director of the Utah Association of Counties, in Salt Lake City. The federal government owns about 65 percent of Utah.

Walsh and the cattle and sheep ranchers, miners, and hunters are worried about legislation in Congress sponsored by Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., that seeks to add more than 5 million acres to Utah's 800,000 acres of wilderness.

Neighboring Nevada is worried about similar efforts to designate more public lands there. The federal government owns about 82 percent of the state, and 793,000 acres (about 1 percent of the state) are wilderness.