western lands update spring 2015

Western Lands Update The Newsletter of the Western Lands Project http://westernlands.org

Western Lands Project P.O. Box 95545 Seattle, WA 98145-2545 (206) 325-3503

westernlands.org

Spring 2015Volume 19, No. 1

In This Issue:

Continued on page 2

3 Defense Bill riders

4 California Desert plan

5 Boundary Waters

6 Holding history hostage8 Grand Canyon develop-ments

Senator Pinocchio

It makes sense to assume that a senator from Montana knows more about Montana than a senator from, oh, Connecticut. But the defer-ence paid to a member of Congress on issues affecting his or her state can be a serious problem when it comes to public lands. These lands belong to every citizen in every state, but because the West is where most public land is found, its fate rests mainly in the hands of western politicians. They dominate the committees that oversee related issues and they regularly whine to their non-western colleagues about the large footprint the federal government occupies in the form of western public lands.

Thats why you can introduce a bill year after year to save the Red Rock wilderness of southern Utah, with congressional sponsors from all over the country, but if Utah Senator Orrin G. Hatch doesnt like it, its not going anywhere. Fundamentally, our national policies for Bureau of Land Management lands are shaped by politicians from the desert states and our National Forest policies by those representing the Wests forested states.

So, what if these guys and gals who have been given such a wide berth dont know what theyre talking about?

Such was the case back in February, when Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) was speaking on Montana Public Radio about the problems of historically timber-dependent communities dealing with the decrease in logging and mill jobs around National Forests in Montana. The downturn has been variously attributed to competition from Canada, Pine Beetle infestations, and a dramatic drop in the value of Montana wood products following the Great Recession. But Tester didnt men-tion those factors. Instead, he stated, Unfortunately, every logging sale in Montana right now is under litigation. Every one of them.

2 Western Lands Update Spring 2015 Vol. 19 # 1

PinocchioFrom page 1

A popular bit of false wisdom in old logging towns around the West is that lawsuits have destroyed the timber in-dustry. The bte noire of the litigating environmentalist is a tried and true way to get people all worked up in places like rural Montana. Yet what Tester said was completely inaccurate. As his quote spun around the Internet, grassroots forest activists in Montana started cranking out their own numbers and spreading them around. One colleague active on the Bit-terroot National Forest said there had been no timber sale litigated there for nine years; another who works around the Flat-head National Forest counted only four active timber sales that had been taken to court and 13 that were proceeding.

In very little time, Montanans and others were flooding the email box of the Washington Posts Fact Checker columnist, Glenn Kessler, known for issuing Pin-occhios to lying politicians and public figures.

One day after the original gaffe, Tes-ters office sent out a revised statement, evidently hoping to stymie questioners by straying into the obscure territory of timber sale terminology. Nearly half the awarded timber volume in Fiscal Year 2014 is currently under litigation.

When Fact Checker asked Testers staff for data to back up the new statement, they simply sent him to the U.S. Forest Service. Kessler waded through reams of complicated data from various reports and from Forest Service spokespeople. He ultimately determined that out of 97 active timber sales in Montana, 14 were under litigation, but only four of them had been enjoined from proceeding (i.e., from the

trees being cut). The second Tester state-ment, too, was wildly off. Not nearly half, but just 10 percent of the volume Testers office referred to was under litiga-tion.

Kessler awarded Tester Four Pinno-chios, the maximum, and concluded that the Senator needs to brush up on his facts and his math before he opines again on the subject.

It should be noted that filing challenges against timber sales is not some frivolous afternoon project. Forest protectors file lawsuits because the Forest Service doesnt always comply with laws pertaining to forest management, endangered species, and environmental impacts. We are lucky theyre out there poring over maps and ground-truthing what the Forest Service says, and that they have the facts at hand when someone like Tester starts bloviating about stuff he doesnt know.

Senator Jon Tester. Photo: Mother Jones

Western Lands Update Spring 2015 Vol. 19# 1 3

Gang Green gives defense-bill riders a pass

Many times over the past decade or so, Western Lands Project has joined with other grassroots public-land defenders to counter the errant ways of the national environmental groups. We dont mean just pissing and moaning about them in these pages or on Facebook, but actively, usually hastily, pulling together a public re-sponse to a bad policy or law they support or a bad thing they are doing. We darkly joke that we spend more time dealing with them than the agencies and politicians whom we expect to be the malefactors.

In early December of last year it hap-pened again. We learned suddenly that the Defense Bill the epitome of so-called must-pass legislation was moving to-ward passage with a bunch of public land bills riding along. In fact, an entire section of the bill, Title 30, consisted of 96 such bills. Some were harmless such as those ordering studies for public memorials or providing funding for a National His-torical Park but commingled with those were some terrible pieces of legislation, many of which we and others had success-fully fought for more than a decade. And never before had we seen major public land legislation being carried along on the back of a military-spending bill.

Two of the worst bills we saw in Title 30 had previously failed to pass amid per-sistent grassroots opposition despite many re-introductions and re-hearings. These were:

Sealaska Land Entitlement Finaliza-tion, which gave away 70,000 acres of the Tongass National Forest to Sealaska, a Native Corporation notorious for some of the worst logging practices in Southeast Alaska. Nearly all of the 70,000 acres, in-cluding ancient forest, will be logged with minimal environmental regulation.

Southeast Arizona Land Exchange and Conservation Act, which traded 2,400 acres of national forest land protect-ed by Executive Order in 1955 to Resolu-tion Copper, a foreign-controlled mining company, in order to facilitate the develop-ment of a copper mine that has long been opposed by local interests. The lands

are considered sacred by the San Carlos Apache, who with help from non-Native groups and a retired miners coalition, suc-cessfully fought the land trade for years.

And yet there was no organized or vo-cal opposition among the D.C.-based envi-ronmental groups. The Sierra Clubs public lands guy was quoted as saying there were no levers to pull to stop inclusion of Title 30 or passage of the overall bill. The websites of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Wilderness Society had noth-ing directing members to oppose Title 30,

but during crunch time were displaying pop-up fundraising pleas and plush toy offers. The fact is, they supported many of the bills and were not willing to jeopardize their passage by opposing the worst of them.

In what has become a familiar routine, Western Lands Project and Wilderness Watch co-authored a letter to members of the Senate, which was poised to consider the House-passed bill, urging the removal of all of Title 30 from the Defense Bill.

The lands traded to Resolution Copper are considered sacred by the San Carlos Apache. And yet there was no organized opposition to the trade among D.C.-based green groups.

Continued on page 11


The Desert Renewal Energy Conserva-tion Plan draft EIS issued in late February fits the latter description displaying a degree of complexity that made us im-mediately want to turn away and not look again. And thats what we did.

The thing is 12,000 pages long and has to be read and worse, navigated online. The document analyzes alternative ap-proaches to provide effective protection and conservation of desert ecosystems while allowing for the appropriate devel-opment of renewable energy projects across 22.5 million acres of the California desert. A joint project of the State of Cali-fornia and the feds, the plan is essentially aimed at dividing the desert up into areas that will be protected (to varying degrees) and those that will be targeted for renew-able energy projects.

Six alternatives are analyzed, with names like Disturbed Lands and Low Resource Conflict Alternative, Increased Geographic and Technology Flexibility Alternative, and Geographically Balanced

Alternative with Variance Lands. One Si-erra Club staffer called the plan confusing for veteran conservationists and incompre-hensible for the general public.

But it was not the complex and volumi-nous nature of the document that turned us off. It was two other things:

(1) The DRECP is yet another major proposal for renewable-energy develop-ment that does not consider a Distributed Generation alternative that would focus on rooftops, developed land, and point-of-use development near transmission and in power centers. Also missing is an alterna-tive that would focus on 15 million acres of degraded and contaminated lands iden-tified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as suitable for renewables.

(2) The plan is a time-wastage trap. As we said in our brief comment letter:

We reject the DRECPs comingling of industrial renewables development and land conservation, which cynically pulls land preservation advocates into partici-pating in false and unacceptable tradeoffs between development and protection. These advocates should be joining us in calling for a massive investment in the EPA lands approach rather than acquiescing to the consignment of some lands to eventual destruction.

The draft plan is already considered a failure due to lack of support from the

Desert renewables plan is a $30 million waste of time

It is the lot of the public land activist to spend hours reading really big, highly-technical documents, because any proposal that could significantly affect public land is subject to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), requiring detailed analysis and disclosure of a projects potential impact. It might be an environmental assessment (EA) that looks at two alternative courses of action or a more detailed and higher-poundage environmental impact statement (EIS) that covers numerous alternatives and layers of proposals.

The DRECPs commingling of renewables development and land conservation pulls land preservation advocates into participating in unacceptable tradeoffs between development and protection.

Continued on page 11


The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness .Photo:Knowltp

Forest Service pursues land exchange for Minnesotas benefit

Minnesotans are rightfully proud of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wil-derness. The BWCAW is massive at more than 812,000 acres, it is the largest Wilderness Area in the Midwest and significantly larger than such well-known western Wilderness Areas as Glacier Peak (WA) and Joshua Tree (CA).

In March, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Forest Service proposed a land exchange in which about one-third of the School Trust lands within the BWCAW, about 30,000 acres, would be traded to the United States while the State of Minnesota would acquire lands of equal value elsewhere within the Superi-or National Forest. The benefit of the trade for the state is clear: the School Trust lands within the BWCAW are checker-boarded and cant be economically developed, while much of the Superior National Forest

lands overlie or are adjacent to third-party mineral estates. The trade would allow the State to partner or contract with these third-parties to develop valuable iron and copper ore deposits.

The benefits for the United States are difficult to discern, however. First, be-cause of their location within the Wilder-ness Area, the School Trust lands are not actively managed by the State and contain no structures or development of any kind.

Continued on page 9


I recently went to Oakland, California to hang out with my cousin Allison and we spent most of a day at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Homefront NHP in Richmond. Its a great interpretive site that explains how and why thousands of women were mobilized to build ships and aircraft and do other jobs previously un-thinkable for them in the absence of young men to do them. It also provides a broader context for homefront support of the war effort, including changes people made in their everyday lives. The oldest ranger in the National Park System, 93-year-old Betty Reid Soskin, shared her experiences as an African American woman of the time, who would surely have been cleaning white peoples homes if not for the war-

related administrative job she secured in Richmond.

Americans flock to these historical experiences and its clear that people find them worthwhile. In the U.S. Congress, however, where the authorizations and appropriations are made to establish these sites, the projects are treated as home-town pork, and theres a lot of wheeling and dealing around them. Thus, while I didnt tell my cousin this, I knew that the Rosie the Riveter park had been secured in 2000 by way of a devilish political deal involving a very, very bad land exchange.

Republican congressman Jim Hansen of Utah had written a bill to mandate the West Desert Land Exchange, a wildly lopsided trade that would give the State

Rosie the Riveter. Image: Interior Department

Continued on page 7

Holding history hostage

Some of the best experiences Ive had courtesy of the Park Service have been at National Historical Parks (NHP) and Historic Sites (NHS). Simply naming my favorites illustrates the diversity of what they preserve. Chaco Culture NHP in New Mexico protects and displays artifacts of Anasazi culture and also offers a beautiful landscape to wander. I visited the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal NHP when I was in Washington, D.C., at a time when it was threatened by an ill-conceived land exchange proposal that thankfully never went through. Lower Eastside Tenement NHS is an eye-opening experience of the lives of new immigrants in 19th-century New York. And the Manzanar NHS in Californias Owens Valley brings home the shameful internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; some of the first to arrive in that arid place were from Bainbridge Island, close to my home town.


of Utah federal lands valuable for mineral exploitation and development, and would bring to the American public State lands under no threat of development, surround-ed by contaminated military sites, a pollut-ing magnesium plat, and a toxic chemical-incinerating plant. We at Western Lands Project knew how terrible the West Desert exchange was in terms of land value, too, because whistle-blowing appraisers in the Bureau of Land Management were giving us the goods. As Chair of the Natural Re-sources Committee, Hansen had near-total control over public land legislation in the House. Yet, along with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, we were able to raise the profile of the West Desert bill, includ-ing with Rep. George Miller of California, a land-exchange skeptic who agreed that it was a bad deal.

Miller, a Democrat in a Republican-ma-jority congress, had his own bill he badly wanted passed, establishing the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Homefront NHP in his constituent town of Richmond. He was also carrying water for national envi-ronmental groups that wanted a big land purchase in New Mexico. When Miller expressed concerns about the West Desert bill, Rep. Hansen held Rosie and the land buy hostage.

After minor and meaningless tweaks were made to the West Desert bill, it was

Miller, not Hansen, who spoke on the House Floor in favor of its passage, and all three bills passed on the same day.

Virtually every piece of public land legislation we peruse that has more than a few land deals in it will have at least one National Historical Park and/or Historic Site. Members of Congress are attached to these projects because as is certainly the case with the Rosie project they can generate tourist dollars and land-use im-provements in areas that need them. Thats why, in the 1996 Omnibus Parks bill, two big, notoriously bad land exchanges went through, along with the Cumberland Gap NHP and the Colonial NHP. In the 2009 Omnibus Public Lands Act, two NHPs and several Historical Trails were created alongside a dozen terrible projects. In the 2015 Defense Bill, a raft of awful deals was accompanied by authorizations for three new National Historical Parks.

Certainly, it is the way of the world that big public land bills are impure creatures, the result of unseen political calculations and quid pro quos, and thats something we are used to here at WLP. But its painful in a special kind of way that harmful leg-islation should so often be the tradeoff for these diverse, special projects that preserve our history. Janine

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South Rim imperiled again

Those who covet land for development or exploitation may sometimes lose a round, but they dont give up easily. As happens on a regular basis, we recently became aware of the newest incarnation of a project we were involved in many years ago. In 1999 and 2000, we monitored, and ended up opposing, a land exchange between the Kaibab National Forest and a developer that would have privatized 270 acres in the town of Tusayan and facilitated a retail/commercial/residential development near the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. The private inholdings that the public would acquire in the exchange were under no threat of development, so the trade in no way served the public interest.

And the Canyon Forest Village devel-opment the exchange was designed to fa-cilitate was a truly hideous one. In addition to the housing, retail, and hotel develop-ment, the project plans included a visitor/entertainment center called Insight. Insight was to be a virtual circus of sensory over-load, including computer games, immer-sion opportunities, and sense-surround, all being sold as a vehicle for enhancing visitors experience of the Colorado Pla-teau.

As the developers described one option: try the Grand Canyon hike simulator, a stairmaster-based recreation that lets people assess their capability to withstand the Canyons near-verticle [sic] angle, broil-ing heat, and arid conditions There was also a river-rafting simulator.

As we put it back then, Or you could just go outside.

Bad taste isnt against the law, but there were several legal issues involved. The most serious environmental issue was the

Hikers on the South Kaibab Trail, Grand Canyon NP. Photo: NPS


Some of the lands are accessible by water or portage but many others have no access at all by water, trail or portage. Unlike other trade proposals within Wilderness Areas, there is no express threat to develop these inholdings. Second, the trade would facilitate mining in the Superior National Forest that could have devastating conse-quences for surrounding public lands and for water quality.

And the proposal doesnt address the principal implied threat within the

BWCAW. Minnesotas constitution requires the State to reserve mineral rights when School Trust lands are exchanged, so the proposal would not prevent future iron and copper mining in the Wilderness. While the Forest Service asserts that the proposal will reduce boundary management, landline, and special use permit costs, those costs are either negligible or largely theoretical. In essence, this proposal would be an outright gift from the American public to Minneso-tas School Trust. Western Lands Project has submitted initial scoping comments on the draft environmental impact statement for the land trade and will be working closely with our colleagues at Save Our Sky Blue Waters in Duluth to respond to the project.

MinnesotaFrom page 5

lack of available water in the area and the proponents plan to bring water to the site by truck and/or by way of a new water pipeline that would stretch from St. George, Utah, more than 100 miles to the north.

Despite this, the land exchange was approved by the Forest Service, and the Coconino County Board of Supervisors approved the rezoning needed for the development. In turn, a feisty campaign put together by opponents led to passage of a citizen referendum that reversed the rezoning, and the Canyon Forest Village project was never built.

Yet the investors have never given up on their desire to bring intensive devel-opment to the park gateway. They have essentially bought and put a headlock on the Tusayan town council. Now they plan to develop two separate inholdings they have on the Plateau that will require a permit from the Forest Service to upgrade roads on public land providing access to their parcels. Their plan would include up

to 1,600 residential units plus some com-mercial development.

The development would create an entire new town at the gateway to what is perhaps our most revered National Park.

The water-supply problem in Tusayan has not improved, but has severely worsened since the previous proposal. We will be monitoring the Forest Services permitting process for the road and have asked for a full environmental impact statement to encompass all of the impacts of this devel-opment, which can only go through with the road improvements the agency must approve. And we will ultimately oppose the project through whatever legal and organizing means we have.

Investors have essentially bought and put a headlock on the Tusayan town council.


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Over a weekend, we gathered signatures from more than 40 organizations from across the country, and faxed the letter to all 100 Senate offices. The following day, the Sierra Club sent out a letter of opposi-tion to just three of the public-land provi-sions.

Of course, we did not win. The Defense Bill passed all $600 billion worth with Title 30 safely ensconced. But in the wake of the bills passage the San Carlos Apache tribe has waged a steadfast and expanding campaign to reverse the Resolution Cop-per land trade, which imperils their sacred

land. Tribal members and supporters have camped out continuously in the Forest Service campground that is part of the land traded to the mining company. In late June they are planning a gathering in Washing-ton, D.C. to protest in the street and at congressional offices.

We have suggested that they may wish to stop by the offices of the Wilder-ness Society, Natural Resources Defense Council, Pew Charitable Trusts, and other organizations that either actively or pas-sively traded away sacred Apache land for something they wanted in Title 30. It may be that Native Americans, with their unquestioned moral standing, are the one group that could inspire Gang Green to rethink their duplicitous ways.

Defense ridersFrom page 3

counties where development would oc-cur and several glaring inadequacies in the analysis for which the EPA has taken the compilers to task. The DRECP team is now regrouping with a new phased approach (and new analysis) that would

address chunks of the original plan. And that approach is likely to violate NEPAs prohibition against piecemealing a project for analysis.

In our view, the thing should be scrapped. The DRECP planning effort is expected to absorb $30 million dollars in consultant fees, untold time and energy of agency staff, and the precious time and re-sources of hapless citizens all to contend with an opaque document that advances an utterly mistaken approach to renewable energy.

Desert planFrom page 4

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