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Citizens demand
more protected wilderness
By Geoff
Schumacher
Las
Vegas
The rejuvenated wilderness movement mobilizing across the West can trace its rebirth to a meeting on Memorial Day weekend in 1998 at a ranch near Tucson, Arizona. The "mentoring conference" brought together "old dogs" of the wilderness movement--some of whom were involved in its beginnings in the early '60s--with enthusiastic young guns. From that meeting came an outpouring of energy and a rough strategy for protecting more wild lands.
Since then, coalitions have formed in every Western state to gather information and build support for new and expanded wilderness areas. Leading the charge is Utah, where environmentalists have developed a process being emulated across the West. Dissatisfied with low-ball government efforts to identify lands suitable for protection, citizens have taken over the task of surveying wild areas to determine which ones should be protected.
In Utah, a massive inventory--in which 500 volunteers spent 50,000 hours walking natural areas over two years--identified 9.1 million acres deserving of wilderness protection. The Utah Wilderness Coalition then held a series of public meetings across the state to allow residents to critique its work. In the end, even the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) agreed with the group's recommendations. The product is a bill in Congress that has 156 co-sponsors.
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In These Times ©
1999
Volume 24, Number 3 |