April 27, 2011 07:48 PM UTC

Tipton vs. Wildlands

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• by: ClubTwitty

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

EDITED-Corrected: This photo was misidentified as Gateway’s iconic feature, The Palisade, which is among the areas in Tipton’s Third Congressional District where BLM would be prohibited from protecting the land’s wilderness character.  It is correctly identified in the comment thread. Apologies for the mistake

Scott Tipton is at it again, following another’s lead in a manner that harms his district.  

His latest salvo against the Third Congressional District comes by way of his cosponsorship of HR 1581, a bill:

To release wilderness study areas administered by the Bureau of Land Management that are not suitable for wilderness designation from continued management as de facto wilderness areas and to release inventoried roadless areas within the National Forest System that are not recommended for wilderness designation from the land use restrictions of the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Final Rule and the 2005 State Petitions for Inventoried Roadless Area Management Final Rule, and for other purposes.

The BLM lands in question do in fact meet all the criteria for Wilderness designation, which is precisely why they have been managed to protect their ‘suitability‘ for congressional designation since 1976, when Congress directed that the BLM do so.  

In Colorado the lands-which would be opened up to drilling, mining, off-road vehicles, and other industrial and harmful activities-include places like Eagle County’s Castle Peak (part of Rep. Polis’ recently reintroduced Eagle and Summit County Wilderness Preservation Act), and the Little Bookcliffs, renown for its wild horses.  

In fact, under HR 1581 the BLM is specifically directed not to manage to protect these wildlands, which

…are no longer subject to the requirement of [the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act section 1782] subsection (c) of such section pertaining to the management of wilderness study areas in a manner that does not impair the suitability of such areas for preservation as wilderness.

Wilderness Study Areas are part of the National Landscape Conservation System-a Clinton-era initiative within the BLM that manages its Wilderness Areas, National Conservation Areas, and WSAs.  

A noble effort to promote a conservation ethic within this land agency that has earned such non-flattering nicknames as the ‘Bureau of Livestock and Mining,’ the NLCS safeguards what’s left of BLM’s wildest public lands.

The Bureau of Land Management’s National Landscape Conservation System (NLCS) contains some of the West’s most spectacular landscapes. It includes over 886 federally recognized areas and approximately 27 million acres of National Monuments, National Conservation Areas, Wilderness Areas, Wilderness Study Areas, Wild and Scenic Rivers, National Scenic and Historic Trails, and Conservation Lands of the California Desert.

This represents about 10% of the more than 260 million acres of public lands this agency manages. The majority of agency lands-of course-remain open to the range of multiple uses. Besides, Wilderness and managing lands for their wilderness and roadless characteristics are both tools that fall specifically within the multiple use mandate, as noted in the Multiple Use and Sustained Yield Act:

… The Secretary of Agriculture is authorized and directed to develop and administer the renewable surface resources of the national forests for multiple use and sustained yield of the several products and services obtained therefrom. In the administration of the national forests due consideration shall be given to the relative values of the various resources in particular areas. The establishment and maintenance of areas of wilderness are consistent with the purposes and provisions of this Act.

The policy itself is spelled out as:

It is the policy of the Congress that the national forests are established and shall be administered for outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, and wildlife and fish purposes.

Of these uses, only logging (“timber”) is (generally) disallowed in Wilderness, WSAs, or within National Forest Inventoried Roadless Areas.  

Indeed, considering roadless forests and IRAs specifically, wildlife habitat values are best maintained by keeping these areas as undeveloped backcountry.  That’s why the Colorado Division of Wildlife’s field biologists recommended that all the state’s IRAs be kept roadless in comments submitted during a 2005 state task force on the matter.

Roadless lands are popular areas for recreation-helping drive a multi-billion dollar industry in the state, including across much of the 3rd Congressional District.  The value of National Forest roadless lands-both in terms of ecological quality and in terms of tangible ecosystem services-in sustaining Colorado’s (and much of the nation’s) clean water sources is unsurpassed.  

But Scott Tipton wants to take all that away.

“This is the biggest attack on wilderness we have seen in the history of The Wilderness Society,” Wilderness Society policy analyst Paul Spitler said of the Wilderness and Roadless Area Release Act. “This proposal flies in the face of values Americans hold dear with respect to stewardship of our public lands. It also flies in the face of nearly fifty years of legislation designating new wilderness areas. Your favorite places where you love to hunt, fish or hike? Gone. Protection for our drinking water and habitat for wildlife? Gone”.

HR 1581-cosponsored by Scott Tipton (and Mike Coffman)-would strip protections that have existed for over a decade-or several decades (on BLM lands)-and hamper agencies’ authorities to keep these lands as they have been for hundreds of years: wild natural places, for wildlife, for clean water, for recreation, and for generations to come.