Congress Moves To Close Land To Development

The Democratic-controlled Congress, stepping up a push that gained little ground when Republicans were in the majority, is on the verge of walling off as many as three millions more acres of the nation's wilderness from commercial and recreational development.

Lawmakers are moving to designate nearly as much land as wilderness area over the next year as they did during the Republican Party's recent 12-year tenure in the leadership. During that period, which ended last year, some of the party's more conservative members held key congressional posts, and blocked efforts to add much to the 107 million acres nationwide officially considered wilderness.

By declaring vast swaths of undeveloped land from Virginia to Oregon as wilderness areas, the current flurry of bills would close them to the timber, oil and mining industries. Although few of the often-remote areas involved are at active risk of development, some of them contain commercially valuable timber and others, such as the wild canyon lands of Utah, could harbor reserves of natural gas.

As a result, the bills are provoking bitter complaints from some business interests including the oil industry. They also face opposition from property-rights advocates and users of off-road vehicles, such as snowmobiles, which are barred from wilderness areas.

But many of the bills enjoy strong bipartisan support in the states affected and so are nearly certain to become law. Some even passed the Senate under Republican rule, and had the votes to pass the Republican House, but repeatedly were blocked by a powerful prodevelopment committee chairman who lost his seat in the 2006 election.

The Bush administration hasn't taken a formal position on the pending wilderness measures. But White House and congressional aides say bills with local Republican support, which many of them have, would be likely to win President Bush's signature.

Some of the more politically contentious bills, however, are unlikely to see congressional action. Earlier this year, a bill was introduced in the Senate to designate the oil-rich coastal plain of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness to safeguard it from energy exploration. But Senate aides say oil exploration in ANWR is such a hot-button issue that the bill is expected to go nowhere.

In all, about a dozen bills involving wilderness designation or some other form of permanent protection from development are in the pipeline in the House and Senate, with as many as three million acres at stake. That compares with the 3.5 million acres that won similar status between 1994 and 2006, according to Wilderness.net, a partnership of academics and conservation groups. All the new land in question is national forest or other U.S. property.

"It's almost like the floodgates have opened," says Myke Bybee, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club, the San Francisco-based environmental group that has been pushing for many of the wilderness proposals.

Democrats have tended to support more environmental legislation in recent years than their Republican counterparts. And with fears about global warming, many Democrats see environmental issues like wilderness as part of a platform that can help them cement their control of Congress and perhaps even retake the White House. "The environment has been, is and always will be a top priority for Democrats," says Bill Wicker, spokesman for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

But more so than for many other environmental issues, there's strong bipartisan support for wilderness preservation among both voters and politicians. Among the pending measures, Virginia's Republican Sen. John Warner, Democratic Sen. Jim Webb and Democratic Rep. Rick Boucher have introduced the Virginia Ridge and Valley Act. The bill would protect from development nearly 43,000 acres of forest in the Blue Ridge Mountains as wilderness.

Other bills likely to be passed during the current Congress include Wild Sky, designating 107,000 acres of wilderness in the Cascade Mountains outside of Seattle. Another bill, affecting Oregon, would add 128,000 acres of wilderness on Mount Hood and in the nearby Columbia River Gorge; that measure is pending in the Senate.

Yet another bill calls for barring development on almost all 265,770 acres of Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park. That bill, which is pending in the Senate and has bipartisan support in Colorado, has been hung up in Washington since 1996. More-stringent use restrictions apply to wilderness lands than to national parks. Many national parks include roads, buildings, lodges and other amenities for park visitors, none of which are permitted in wilderness areas.

Larger wilderness bills are in the works, too. Republican Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, for instance, has introduced a bill that would classify 517,000 acres of wilderness in his home state.

Other bills are expected to be introduced soon. Two that apply to California, for example, could sequester several hundred thousand acres. Senate staffers also say discussions are under way in Utah that could result in a wilderness bill protecting as many as a million acres of pristine canyon lands from development under a compromise with the state's Republican delegation. Environmentalists have been pushing for a much larger area of almost 10 million acres.

But fierce opposition to wilderness designations remains. "The problem with wilderness designations is that there's no recreational access unless you can hike up there," says Greg Mumm, executive director of the Blue Ribbon Coalition, a Pocatello, Idaho-based group representing all-terrain-vehicle riders and other recreation users. "It's good for only one elite demographic."

Officials of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, meanwhile, say they are troubled that so much wilderness is being proposed at one time because potential energy reserves might be closed off. "It has now become part of the environmental activists' playbook to reduce access to almost all federal lands that could safely produce American energy supplies," says Dan Naatz, a vice president for the Washington, D.C., trade group.

Lobbying by such groups has been partly responsible for blocking passage of wilderness bills for much of the period since Republicans took control of Congress in 1994. In the 12 years prior to the Republican takeover, a Democratic-controlled Congress added 23 million acres of wilderness area -- nearly a quarter of the current total.

Getting land designated as wilderness got tougher in 2003, when California rancher Richard Pombo was elected chairman of the House Resources Committee. A staunch property-rights advocate, he kept most wilderness bills bottled up during most of the four years he ran the committee. "We called him our gatekeeper," says Dave Hurwitz, chairman of the Snowmobile Alliance of Western States, a Kalama, Wash.-based group representing snowmobile riders, which opposes nearly all new wilderness proposals.

One of the bills Mr. Pombo kept on the shelf was Wild Sky, which was introduced in 2002 by two Washington state Democrats, Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Rick Larsen.

Situated in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Wild Sky is different from many other proposed wilderness areas. It is located in the backyard of a major metropolitan area, just 90 minutes from downtown Seattle. And it would include parts of a forest that had been logged, but has since regrown. Most other wildernesses are drawn around lands that have been virtually untouched by industrial activity.

Wild Sky has been less contentious than many other wilderness proposals. With peaks that rise 6,000 feet almost from sea level, much of the higher terrain has remained inaccessible to logging. Its lower-elevation forests, meanwhile, were shielded from logging by local activists. Some groves were so intact they harbored immense Western red cedars estimated at 700 years old.

Although the idea of designating Wild Sky as wilderness has enjoyed broad support in the state, it hasn't been unanimous. Snowmobile enthusiasts, in particular, expressed concern that some areas they like to ride in would be sealed off. With few exceptions, the Wilderness Act of 1964 prohibits the use of motorized or mechanized vehicles in a designated wilderness area.

To help reduce opposition to Wild Sky, Sen. Murray and Rep. Larsen agreed to remove from the bill more than 10,000 acres of land where pack-horse groups, snowmobilers and other forest users complained the new rules would restrict them. The strategy worked; the Washington State Snowmobile Association agreed not to oppose the bill after a popular riding area called Windy Ridge was taken out.

Wild Sky passed in the Senate three times between 2002 and 2006 and had wide support in the House. But Mr. Pombo wouldn't let it out of his committee for a full vote. The reason: He wanted the roughly 15,000 acres of previously logged forest left out because he didn't think it qualified as wilderness. Rep. Larsen and Sen. Murray argued it did because the logging took place decades ago and the forest had grown back as lush as before.

"They said all or nothing, so I said, 'Fine, forget it,'" Mr. Pombo said in a 2005 interview with The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Pombo, who is now a partner at a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm, didn't return calls seeking comment.

The seven-term Mr. Pombo was defeated last year by Democratic challenger Jerry McNerney, whose campaign received backing from national environmental groups. Mr. Pombo's old committee, now named the House Committee on Natural Resources, is chaired by West Virginia Democrat Nick Rahall.

Soon after the new Democrat-controlled 110th Congress convened early this year, Sen. Murray and Rep. Larsen re-introduced their Wild Sky bill. It passed in the House in April, and also cleared the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Wild Sky is expected to be the first of the new wilderness bills approved by Congress, with full Senate passage expected as early as the next few weeks, say staffers of the Senate Energy Committee.