The Campaign for America's Wilderness today submitted testimony (PDF) from executive director Mike Matz for the hearing record on the nomination of Senator Ken Salazar as the next Secretary of the Interior.
In supporting the nomination, Matz praises Sen. Salazar’s “impressive conservation record,” and notes that “Sen. Salazar has been a strong proponent of protecting public lands that qualify as part of the National Wilderness Preservation System, exemplified by his advocacy recently for S.22, the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, which will protect almost a quarter million acres of Rocky Mountain National Park as wilderness, as well as 66,000 acres of wilderness within the proposed Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area, in Colorado.”
“The U.S. Department of the Interior administers approximately 518 million acres of land, an area equivalent to the land masses of Alaska, California, and Missouri combined,” says Matz, pointing out that “the Interior Department is charged with the legal responsibility to act as steward of these lands in the public interest, to balance the management of these lands between the need to develop and to conserve, and to maintain a legacy of our natural heritage for future generations." Matz writes that under the Bush-Cheney Administration, the Interior Department “has viewed the public estate as more a resource mainly for the benefit of extractive industries, in contravention of its legal requirements and mission,” and looks forward to Mr. Salazar restoring “balance to the equation of development and conservation.”
In his testimony, the conservation group leader recommends a number of actions Senator Salazar can take to this end as Interior Secretary, including:
- Increased funding to rehabilitate the aging infrastructure of America’s National Parks;
- A review of all pending wilderness recommendations for the National Park System;
- Reversing the Bureau of Land Management’s policy of no longer conducting any wilderness inventories;
- Immediate suspension of the BLM’s Alaska Resource Management Plans planning process, to give time to conduct a complete evaluation of its purposes and needs;
- Rescinding a 1981 James Watt order, in order to affirm secretarial authority, through the BLM, to conduct wilderness reviews and recommendations in Alaska under the Federal Land management Policy Act; and
- Recommending a presidential proclamation establishing a national monument for the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge, under the authority of the Antiquities Act of 1906.
