Lame Duck Looks to Save America's Wild Spaces
Democrats are working to push several public land protection bills onto an omnibus measure before the 111th Congress ends.
Congressional Democrats are thinking of loading several dozen public land protection bills onto an omnibus and driving the packed vehicle across the finish line before the 111th disappears into history.
There couldn’t be a better time for a big burst of conservation legislation. December seems to be the right month.
Especially this December. It’s been quite a week for those who observe anniversaries of really big land conservation achievements.
Fifty years ago Monday, President Eisenhower’s Interior secretary, Fred Seaton, signed an order protecting nearly 9 million acres on the coastal plain of what is now known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – possibly the most fought over piece of real estate anywhere north of the 60th parallel.
Thirty years ago, as of last Thursday, the Alaska lands act became law – establishing at one stroke 10 national parks, 10 national wildlife refuges, and more than doubling federal wild lands protected as wilderness.
There is no stronger protection for America’s natural heritage than wilderness, which the Wilderness Act, one of the most eloquent pieces of craftsmanship to emerge from the sausage factory, defines 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.”
That waxing of legislative poetry passed Congress in 1964, by 374 to 1 in the House and 73 to 12 in the Senate.
Nearly half a century later, there are still plenty of unspoiled wild places in federal ownership that are eligible for wilderness protection. Several are included in pending bills that ought to be loaded onto the omnibus.
Legislation with bipartisan sponsorship would expand wilderness areas in Idaho’s mountains, Washington’s forests, and Michigan’s lakeshore. Republicans Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker are carrying a bill to protect 20,000 acres of Appalachian woodlands in eastern Tennessee.
Often, opponents of protecting unspoiled wild lands moan about resources being “locked up,” as if extracting commodities to be used up and thrown away is all that land is good for.
Certainly, balance is always called for in deciding which of our public lands should be use for producing the energy and materials that our society needs and which should be saved for their scenery, their wildlife, or for the stories that they tell about America’s past. Often, however, the pressures to spend today outweigh the duty to save for tomorrow.
A few weeks after protecting a slice of northern Alaska, Eisenhower reminded his fellow citizens about that duty in his farewell address: “We must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow.”
Echoing his predecessor nearly a quarter century later, Ronald Reagan voiced the same ideal:
We want to protect and conserve the land on which we live – our countryside, our rivers and mountains, our plains and meadows and forests. This is our patrimony. This is what we leave to our children. And our great moral responsibility is to leave it to them either as we found it or better than we found it.
Those are words worthy of driving forward an omnibus bill that would make this another December to remember for land protection.