Public Lands, Private Endeavors

As Administration Rolls Back Safeguards of Wilderness, Preservationists and Environmentalists Cry Foul

By Jim Carlton, Wall Street Journal | Online Only | Jan. 11, 2002

Northwestern Montana's Cabinet Mountains

Credit: USDA Forest Service

INDIAN PASS, Calif.—The desert here is so pristine that artifacts from an ancient tribe lie untouched in the drifting sand, a fact former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt cited when he denied a permit for a huge gold-mining operation in the area during the waning days of the Clinton administration.

But the sanctity of this place is under renewed assault. President Bush's interior secretary, Gale Norton, reversed Babbitt's denial, clearing the way for Glamis Gold Ltd. of Reno, Nev., to dig a 1,600-acre open-pit mine that critics say would leave a gaping hole in the ground and skyscraper-tall mounds of toxic mine tailings—marring an American landscape that is still largely untouched by modern man.

Leaders of the 3,000-member Native American Quechan tribe, whose ancient foot trails, pottery shards, and sacred rock sculptures dot the area, are aghast. "The Bush administration is laughing at us," says tribal president Mike Jackson Sr. "They're saying, 'We don't give a damn about your history.'"

Administration officials and their supporters deny they are weakening environmental protections. They say they are merely restoring balance after years of unfair throttling of logging, ranching, and mining interests. In any case, Norton's actions are part of a series of environmental rollbacks that the administration, using its executive powers, has made through this year across the vast public lands of the American West.

On the day after Christmas, the U.S. Forest Service gave the go-ahead to another mining proposal long opposed by environmentalists, the Rock Creek mine project in the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness Area of the Kootenai National Forest in northwest Montana.

Forest Service map

The Rock Creek mine, sponsored by Sterling Mining Co. of Veradale, Wash., would extract copper and silver ore from shafts dug deep into the Cabinet mountain range. Local environmentalists vehemently oppose the mine, as do many area businesses tied to tourism, fearing it will pollute streams and lakes, harm endangered species and possibly cause parts of the wilderness area to collapse.

But officials with the Kootenai National Forest, which oversees the wilderness area, say their hands are tied in part by the federal Mining Law of 1872, which makes it difficult for federal agencies to thwart a properly filed mining claim on U.S.-owned land. At the close of the Clinton administration, Babbitt amended the hard-rock mining rules to empower federal officials—for the first time in 130 years—to reject mining proposals deemed to pose excessive environmental risks. But his successor, Norton, rescinded the historic revision this fall, restoring the 1872 law.

Opponents of the Rock Creek mine say they will appeal the Forest Service's decision to federal court if higher officials of the agency fail to reverse the action by local forest managers. Many environmentalists complain they can't get a fair hearing from Republicans in Washington, who are beholden, they claim, to big donors from the mining, timber and oil industries. In the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush and the Republican Party received $3.5 million from the coal industry, while hard-rock mining companies pitched in $5.8 million in contributions to Bush and his party, according to the Center for Public Integrity in Washington.

"It's real obvious what the game is: to side with industry and blow everybody else out of the water," says Gloria Flora, a former U.S. Forest Service supervisor who now heads a conservation group in Montana.

White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan disputes that. "The president is committed to promoting a clean environment, and to give local communities input and flexibility to ensure the environmental standards work for their community," she says.

Kootenai National Forest

Credit: USDAFS

But "flexibility," on the ground, has often meant reopening public land for exploitation. In Oregon's coastal mountains, for example, crews recently have been busy felling giant trees on U.S. Bureau of Land Management property that had been protected under a 1998 listing of the region's coho salmon as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The loggers went to work in September, after a U.S. district judge in Eugene, Ore., ordered the coho delisted, in a lawsuit filed by fishing groups. Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered the coho put back on the endangered list, but not before dozens of stately Douglas fir trees, some centuries old, came down.

Environmentalists accuse the Bush administration of helping friends in the timber industry by not filing its own appeal of the delisting decision, and then trying to block Earthjustice and other environmental groups that did manage to intervene on the government's behalf.

"The timber should never have been cut," says Francis Eatherington, a 52-year-old environmental activist who lives near the fresh clearcuts in Oregon's coastal mountains. "It's heartbreaking."

A BLM spokesman says the agency wasn't trying to help the industry, and that any logging it authorizes must follow a strict environmental review.

The administration also failed to appeal another U.S. district judge's ruling last May that blocked implementation of President Clinton's order barring road construction on about 60 million acres of national forest. Environmental groups had to intervene on the federal government's behalf then, too, appealing the ruling by Judge Edward Lodge in Boise, Idaho, to the Ninth Circuit. But, with an appeals ruling still pending, officials of Alaska's Tongass National Forest have gone ahead with timber-sale plans in several roadless areas anyway, threatening one of the world's last preserves of giant, old-growth spruce and hemlock trees.

"This is absolutely the opposite of what the [Clinton] roadless rule intended," says John Schoen, a National Audubon Society biologist in Anchorage.

Tongass officials say they are resuming a permitting process that had already begun before the roadless rule was signed. It is up to Bush, they say, to decide whether the Tongass area should remain in the plan or not.

In the Southern California desert, the gold-mine controversy flared up in October, when the Interior Department's new top lawyer issued an opinion that there was no legal justification behind Babbitt's denial. That led to Norton's reversal a few weeks later. She has yet to make a final decision on a permit for the mine, but members of the Quechan tribe are preparing for another day in court.

"You wish you didn't have to refight this battle," says tribe lawyer Courtney Ann Coyle, "but it looks like we're going to have to."

Subscribe to the Today's News RSS feed