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Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
Land protections face rollback
By Mike Soraghan
Denver Post Washington Bureau
Mar. 9, 2001 - WASHINGTON - Interior Secretary Gale Norton said she will roll
back some of the land protections at Western monuments created by President
Clinton if the sites' neighbors want changes.
Norton said she'll work work with communities around the monuments, which
have complained that they would like more mining, grazing and off-road uses
now off-limits.
"We're doing things in reverse - we're trying to resolve the problems after
the monuments were created," Norton said Thursday. "We try to tailor things
to existing uses and to what makes sense for the local community."
Her stance is likely to bolster her standing with conservatives, coming out
the same day she announced that a mining industry lobbyist will be her top
deputy and just minutes after taking a slap at her critics in the
environmental community, accusing them in a speech of campaigning against her
nomination to "fill their fund-raising coffers."
Her comments Thursday were the fullest explanation she has given of what she
plans to do about the monuments, and a reverse of what has been reported in
some national newspapers.
Norton's monument plan parallels the slow, cautious approach taken by other
Republicans left seething by Clinton's drive for a lands legacy but mindful
that it was popular with the public.
But environmentalists accuse her of mounting a "backdoor"
campaign to reverse the protections Clinton imposed.
"I think the Bush administration recognizes their public lands agenda is not
popular," said Melanie Griffin of the Sierra Club. "I think they'll be trying
to pursue it quietly."
Clinton designated 21 monuments, many in his last year, imposing protections
on millions of acres he said were threatened by development, tourism or
industry. Westerners howled about the loss of access to the land. Among those
monuments was Canyons of the Ancients, 164,000 acres of mesas, canyons and
ancient Indian ruins in southwestern Colorado near Mesa Verde National Park.
Norton, formerly Colorado's attorney general, has criticized the way Clinton
created the monuments, saying he did not consult with the Westerners affected
by the new restrictions on the land. But she has shied away from a frontal
assault on Clinton's "lands legacy,"
saying she hasn't heard direct calls for repealing the monuments.
House Resources Committee Chairman Jim Hansen, the Utah Republican who has
been the leading critic of the monuments, is working on a similar plan.
Hansen acknowledges that "no one is going to see a wholesale rolling back of
these monuments," but he has solicited ideas from lawmakers about how
Congress could change them.
Conservatives welcomed the plan, calling it a return to sanity.
"If Norton's talking about restoring the uses that were there before the
monument designations, that's good news," said Mike Hardiman, lobbyist for
the American Land Rights Association, a propertyrights group. "You're looking
at restoring the recreational access."
At Colorado's only new monument, so many uses already are allowed that any
changes would negate everything Clinton did, said one of the
environmentalists who lobbied to create it.
"I don't know how you could roll back any of the protections and not just
unravel the whole monument,"
said Jeff Widen of the Colorado Environmental Coalition, who lobbied for the
monument near Cortez.
It's not entirely clear what authority Norton would have to alter the
monuments. Some say the authority is spelled out in the Antiquities Act of
1906, the law Clinton used to declare the monuments. Some think President
Bush could just reverse them, while other say it would take a lawsuit.
What is clear is that the management plans, the detailed rule books of what
is and isn't allowed in the monuments, have not yet been written. The
employees who will be writing them now work for Norton, not Clinton's
interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt.
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