Wilderness News

The Bush administration favors a proposal to create a Forest Service-run national heritage area in Alaska but wants to remind Congress it needs to create heritage standards first.

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey told the Senate National Parks Subcommittee that the Forest Service supports being the steward of the Kenai Mountains-Turnagain Arm National Forest Heritage Area proposed in Sen. Lisa Murkowski's (R-Alaska) S. 3045.

As a long time resident of Santa Clarita, I was pleased to see that 13,700 acres of our local Magic Mountain and seven miles of wild and scenic Piru Creek were included in Congressman Buck McKeon's and Senator Barbara Boxer's wonderful bipartisan wilderness bill for the Eastern Sierra and Northern San Gabriel Mountains ("McKeon bill protects 42,000 acres," May 30, 2008).

For many years Congress took the comparatively easy way out in preserving wild, natural areas of our country. It did so by designating tens of millions of acres of land in the West for protection. That was relatively easy because nearly all of the land involved already belonged to the federal government.

Meanwhile, not much was done in the East. A growing population in this region had to make do with a relatively stagnant list of wild places kept that way through government protection.

Two pieces of federal legislation aimed at protecting nearly 14,000 acres of local wilderness and resolving the decades-long dispute between the city of Santa Clarita and Cemex were officially endorsed by the city council this week, bringing both bills one step closer to enactment.

Created through a bipartisan congressional effort spearheaded by Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, both the Eastern Sierra and Northern San Gabriel Wild Heritage Act and the Soledad Canyon Mine Act will have significant impact in the Santa Clarita Valley if approved.

With little fanfare, Congress has embarked on a push to protect as many as a dozen pristine areas this year in places ranging from the glacier-fed streams of the Wild Sky Wilderness here to West Virginia's Monongahela National Forest. By the end of the year, conservation experts predict, this drive could place as much as 2 million acres of unspoiled land under federal control, a total that rivals the wilderness acreage set aside by Congress over the previous five years.

Conservation experts say Congress could by year's end place wilderness protections on as many as 2 million acres, nearly as much as has been designated in the past half-decade.

A coalition of environmental groups on Monday said they will file a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management over its plan to auction off oil and gas leases on the natural gas-rich Roan Plateau in western Colorado on Aug. 14.

In May, Congress gave more than 106,000 acres of mountains and old-growth forests with salmon-filled streams the strictest level of federal protection.

The Bush administration is pressing in its waning months in office to implement a spate of rule and policy changes that could reshape the face of the West.

Rep. Nick J. Rahall may try to expand protections for the New and Gauley rivers all the way to their confluence at Gauley Bridge.

Rahall announced the idea late last week during a ceremony celebrating a National Parks Conservation Association award for his work protecting public lands.

"I do not believe we are done protecting this river - this mighty resource," Rahall said during a speech at the ceremony at Sandstone Falls Visitor Center east of Beckley. "The legacy is not complete."