Environmentalists cry foul over Leavitt's wilds deal

WASHINGTON — Activists are deriding the Bush administration for formalizing what environmentalists call a back-room deal with Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt to halt wilderness-like protection of millions of acres in the West.

"The Bush administration has effectively put a freeze on important protections for wilderness nationwide," said Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope, as an example of environmental groups' complaints.

The criticism comes just before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is scheduled to vote today on Leavitt's nomination to become head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Late Monday — and reported in Tuesday editions — the U.S. Bureau of Land Management formally ordered staff to halt protecting any land as if it were wilderness, unless Congress has actually given it that status or declared it a formal wilderness study area (WSA).

Those orders implement a settlement reached last April with Utah, in a lawsuit initiated by Leavitt. Utah contended — and the Bush administration later agreed — that only Congress can create wilderness areas or WSAs, not the BLM.

So the BLM agreed to dump rules — nationwide, not just in Utah — created by the Clinton administration that allowed forestalling development on millions of wild acres in the West, including Utah, to ensure their wilderness characteristics are not impaired, and to allow possible future designation as formal wilderness.

In Utah, environmental groups have pushed to create wilderness on 9 million acres of BLM land. However, Congress has put only 3.2 million acres of it into formal WSAs. Rules now prohibit treating the rest as if it were also a WSA — and may allow activities from motor vehicles to mining there if land use plans deem it proper.

The BLM says wilderness values are now given equal footing — and not special weight — with other land use values in the planning process.

However, Ted Zukoski, an attorney for Earthjustice, said, "Even (former controversial Interior Secretary) James Watt understood that BLM has broad authority to protect wilderness lands, and used that authority to protect such lands."

He added, "The extreme radical position taken by this administration rolls back more than a quarter century of settled land policy."