by Hope Jahren
Despite appearances, collaborations are undemocratic, argue critics like Gary Macfarlane of Friends of the Clearwater, an environmental group in northern Idaho. The public already has a process for how changes can be made to our public lands, Macfarlane says: the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act. Macfarlane describes it as “a law that tells federal agencies to look before you leap” and says you have to allow all interested parties to participate. The act also mandates that the best available science be considered. Collaborations don’t have to do that, says Randi Spivak, director of the public-lands program for the Center for Biological Diversity.
Then there are the concerns about wilderness. Designation of new wilderness areas has often been a centerpiece of collaborations over the past 15 years. But in order to push wilderness through, the big environmental groups have been willing to make sometimes disturbing compromises, critics say—even to the Wilderness Act itself.
Compromise has long been a central part of wilderness politics, of course. The 1964 Wilderness Act took eight years and 65 bills to become law, and the final act grandfathered in some grazing and mining. But the old compromises were largely about boundaries—what’s in and what’s out. The new deals embrace a more insidious type of compromise, not just about where wilderness will be but also about how it will be managed.
“Our fear is that some conservation groups look at the 1964 act as the place to begin a new round of compromises,” says Martin Nie. That shift, he adds, “could threaten the integrity of the system.”
In collaborative efforts, large conservation groups that badly want to protect wilderness must deal with groups that sometimes loathe the idea, so conservationists increasingly feel pressure to make wilderness more palatable to opponents—and that means watering it down, says critic Chris Barns, a longtime wilderness expert who recently retired from the BLM.
The number of special provisions—exceptions added to a wilderness bill, almost always leading to more human impact—has increased in the past several years, according to a 2010 study in the International Journal of Wilderness. The Lincoln County deal was saddled with a raft of such provisions. The Owyhee deal, given a thumbs-up by such groups as Pew and the Wilderness Society, lets ranchers corral cattle using motorized vehicles, which is supposed to be forbidden in wilderness. The result of such compromises, Barns and others say, is areas known as WINOs—“wilderness in name only.”
Another problem with these exceptions is that they become boilerplate for future bills, Barns says. A provision that first appeared in 1980 has since turned up in more than two dozen wilderness laws. Such changes might seem small, says Barns, but they erode, bit by bit, America’s last wild places.
The large environmental groups involved in these deals say such criticisms are off-base. “For us, what it comes down to is, as the nation grows, there are less and less wild places left in America,” says Alan Rowsome of the Wilderness Society. “And we want to protect them as soon as possible, because if you wait 10 years or 15 years or 20 years, that place may not be protectable. It may not be as wild a place, or as open, or as important to protect.”
As for the criticisms about horse trading, Pew’s Mike Matz says, “I would submit that these deals have always been complex. At the end of the day, we are entirely comfortable with the deals we have struck.”
But Athan Manuel, lead lobbyist for the Sierra Club on federal-lands issues, acknowledges some of the criticisms. “We don’t have to get some of these bad deals just because we think the atmosphere is going to be worse next year,” Manuel says. “I think we sometimes suffer a crisis of confidence in the environmental community.”
Which brings us back to Utah and the grand bargain. With Pew and the Wilderness Society heavily involved throughout much of the process, critics were watching and worrying. Though Bishop hadn’t yet unveiled his final proposal, some didn’t like what they were hearing—that green groups were willing to swap out Utah’s school trust lands for parcels located elsewhere, so that wildlands could be consolidated and the state could more easily drill for oil and gas. “It’s wilderness for warming,” Randi Spivak says. “We should be keeping fossil fuels in the ground.”
“It’s painful,” SUWA’s Groene acknowledges, “because everything you give to Utah you have to assume will be sacrificed.” But the kinds of ethical dilemmas that collaborations have posed elsewhere? He’s still waiting on them. “The whole goal was to be put in that terrible place where we had to decide” those kind of things, he says. But they aren’t even there yet.
When I asked people for a place that exemplified the challenges and promise of the grand bargain, many pointed to San Juan County, which anchors Utah’s bottom right corner. Though larger than New Jersey, it has only 15,000 residents, many of them conservative sons of Mormon pioneers.
The current county commission chairman there is a man named Phil Lyman, who for the past three years has spearheaded the county’s public-lands advisory council, a citizens’ group that is charged with helping officials craft a proposal to give to Bishop. In the midst of that work, Lyman was convicted of leading an illegal ATV excursion into Recapture Canyon, an area that had been partly closed to protect ancient Native American ruins.
Lyman lives in Blanding—at 3,600 people, the county’s largest town—which was founded by his great-grandfather in the 1890s. It has a bowling alley, a bank, and a few wide streets that seem designed to take tourists elsewhere. On Main Street old ranchers limp in and out of the San Juan Pharmacy. Down the block I find the door to Lyman’s accounting office open. A sign inside invites visitors to take a complimentary copy of the Book of Mormon.
To environmentalists, Lyman, 51, symbolizes all that is backward in Utah. To others he’s a hero for resisting government overreach. The day I meet him, he’s still waiting to find out if he’ll go to prison over his conviction for conspiracy and trespassing. (He was already fined and in mid-December would be sentenced to 10 days in jail.) He scratches his head at the furor he has caused. It was all a misunderstanding, he claims.
“I’m the poster child for gun totin’, beer drinkin’, ATV drivin’,” he says. “I’m an accountant!” He doesn’t even own an ATV. “But I do have a fire in the belly about hurting innocent people,” he says.
We drive into the sagebrush desert in Lyman’s pickup, and he tells the same story I’ve heard elsewhere about how reluctant he was at first for his county to join the grand bargain. All it would do is stir up trouble for years, with no resolution—and the county was already trying to start talks with a Navajo group. But once he decided to get on board, swayed by his elected duty to give the approach a try, Lyman threw himself into it.
To everyone’s surprise, people with different viewpoints actually started talking to each other, Lyman says. Around eastern Utah, cooperation was in the air. The Wilderness Society joined the grand bargain early on. So did Pew, though it generally pursued its own track. In the spirit of mediation, greens told Bishop that in some places they would be willing to accept less proscriptive national conservation areas instead of a stricter wilderness designation, which many counties feared.
Working county by county, the collaborators nailed down the first tentative deal—a single puzzle piece in the larger grand bargain—in the fall of 2014 in Daggett County, a smaller county in northeastern Utah. (Individual deals like this, the hope went, would eventually be submitted to Congress as one overarching Utah lands bill.) Among other things, the agreement designated over 100,000 acres of wilderness and conservation areas in exchange for the acquisition of a large natural-gas facility and future development of a ski area.
Momentum was building. Summit County, home to Park City, asked to contribute to the Public Lands Initiative. An election in Grand County, home to Moab, saw ultraconservative commissioners voted out and a more receptive slate voted in. At various times as many as eight counties across eastern Utah were in play.
But just as the grand bargain looked most promising, the wheels started to co
me off. One month after Daggett County inked its deal, elections swept very conservative candidates back into power there. The new county commission reneged on the agreement that had just been celebrated. As Groene sees it, Bishop had made a crucial error by telling county officials that they had the power to stop any negotiation if they didn’t like how it was going. If you’re a small-town politician in rural Utah and you strike a deal that makes a lot of concessions to environmentalists, he says, “then all the people you know are going to yell at you in the grocery store the rest of your life. Politically they can’t play that role in these small towns.”
When Daggett County reneged, Bishop didn’t seem to have a Plan B to keep momentum going elsewhere, Groene says. Bishop calls this criticism “terribly unfair.” After all, he says, “anyone can walk away” from this process—even the environmental groups.
Last summer Lyman’s San Juan County was the last of seven counties to hand in its blueprint to Bishop. It called for 945,000 acres of protection, a mix of wilderness and national conservation areas. Parts of famous geologic landmarks such as Cedar Mesa, Comb Ridge, and Indian Creek, with its world-class rock climbing, would get bolstered protection. It was far more than many people expected—or than many others could tolerate.
“No one would have predicted that San Juan County would’ve come up with a proposal that included a million acres of land protection, and part of that protection uses the W-word,” says Josh Ewing, director of the group Friends of Cedar Mesa.
Yet the proposal still needs a lot of work, conservationists say. For one thing, the county’s plan (along with several others’) contains language inoculating it from the Antiquities Act. This law gives the president the power to preserve landscapes by creating national monuments on federal land without requesting local input or consulting Congress. Because San Juan County and other eastern Utah counties are more than 60 percent owned by the feds, many state politicians hate the act, calling it the epitome of government overreach. While the county sees the exemption as insurance that its hard work won’t result in a monument, conservationists consider an exemption a deal-breaker.
Then there’s the Native American issue. About half of San Juan County’s residents are Native Americans, and about one-quarter of the county is reservation land. Because of a general lack of outreach, but also by their own choosing, only a few Native Americans participated in the county’s grand-bargain planning. “It’s a trust thing,” Lyman acknowledges. “I don’t blame any Navajo personally who doesn’t trust the white community, the federal community, the county.”
Lyman drives up Highway 95, the road where Seldom Seen Smith yanks survey stakes in Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, and turns onto a dirt road. He stops the truck among Mormon tea and sagebrush, where the earth is slowly reclaiming the ruin of an old uranium mill. Bones of rebar poke through concrete. Lyman tells me that his grandfather once owned the nearby uranium mine, one of the richest around.
Conservationists want protection here. But under the county’s proposal, this would be an energy zone. Right now, Lyman says, there isn’t a mine operating anywhere from Durango to Hanksville. “Let’s really draw the line,” he says. “West of here would be the wilderness they want, and east of here would be the really productive public lands, managed intelligently. Real people, good jobs, putting food on the table.”
He toes a loose bit of concrete and squints into the hammered brightness of a desert noon. “When you’re from here and your ancestors were part of this,” he says, grabbing his chest, “you ask yourself, What am I doing? What’s our legacy? Do we have anything to leave and show we were effective?”
Is this place God’s cathedral or man’s quarry? I’m reminded that how you answer depends on where you stand and where your grandfather stood before you.
On my other morning in San Juan County, I head out with Josh Ewing to see an alternate future for this place. After a 90-minute bounce over rough roads, Ewing stops his truck and disappears among old-growth juniper. I jog after him. We’re atop Cedar Mesa, a massive high plateau whose edges are fissured with canyons and that once was the northwestern frontier of a prehistoric civilization, home to the ancestors of today’s Hopi, Zuni, and others. Ewing—bespectacled, fast-talking, a climber who fell hard for the red-rock country and is now director of Friends of Cedar Mesa—hustles through the sage and sand. “It gets in your bones,” he says as we walk past yucca and prickly pear, ripe with purple fruit. “It’s got that beauty combined with the archaeology.”
The junipers part, and the earth yawns open in a canyon of tall sandstone walls striped like candy. High on one wall perch several ancient cliff dwellings. We follow steps hacked into the stone that lead to ledges—the ground falling away 500 feet—until we reach walls, stone rooms, a granary. In the dimness of a kiva, or ceremonial room, a half-dozen gnawed corncobs stand upright as if in an artist’s still life. Ewing guesses the place is 800 years old.
Ewing shakes his head: this side canyon and its relics aren’t protected in the plan San Juan County submitted to Bishop, he says, and they won’t survive another millennium without help. “Things don’t stay the way they are by not doing anything,” he says. Here was that difference again: while Lyman wanted to leave a legacy by developing the land, Ewing and other conservationists wanted to do so by protecting it. His group estimates that there are more than 100,000 archaeological sites in the greater Cedar Mesa area—cliff dwellings, burial sites, kivas, petroglyphs, and pictographs. “There are probably closer to a quarter million.”
I tell Ewing how all that week in places like Moab environmentalists said that the grand bargain was already on life support. The counties’ proposals were totally unrealistic, they said. Even Pew recently stepped back from talks, saying it couldn’t abide an Antiquities Act exemption. Ewing is more optimistic.
“I don’t think a legitimate negotiation has started yet,” he says. Only after Bishop unveils his draft proposal, he predicts, will the real, painful tradeoffs happen. Why would he force his conservative constituents off their positions any sooner?
And if that movement doesn’t happen? I ask Ewing.
Then this play is over, he replies, at least as far as the legislative effort is concerned.
At the cliff’s edge we talk about the possibility of a Plan B. For years conservationists have been working two tracks, also prodding President Obama to declare a massive national monument in eastern Utah before he leaves office. The prospect infuriates many rural Utahans, who still feel stung by Bill Clinton’s creation of Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument in 1996. The pressure has given an urgency to the process.
Ewing sweeps an arm before us to introduce the leading monument candidate: the Bears Ears, a 1.9-million-acre triangle of land that would encompass all of Cedar Mesa, including more than 40 mini–Grand Canyon systems that few people ever visit. (The name comes from the twin rock towers that rise over the landscape.) Twenty-five Native American tribes, some of them historic enemies, have united to urge Obama to create the monument.
As SUWA’s Groene sees it, the old battle lines are being drawn again, pitting cowboys against Native Americans and environmental groups. On one side are the counties, supporting a flawed grand bargain; on the other, tribes and greens pushing a monument that county officials hate. This time, however, the Great White Father in Washington, D.C., is black. He has declared or expanded more national monuments than any previous president and, sources tell me, is ready to give an underserved people what they want. (The White House did not respond to requests for comment.)
The night before I leave San Juan County, I have dinner in the village of Bluff with Mark Maryboy, the first Navajo to serve as a county commissioner there. Maryboy is as tall and lean as a piece of jerky, and he wears the pointed boots of a former rodeo bronc rider. I ask him why the Bears Ears is so important to Native Americans.
Maryboy doesn’t answer directly. Instead he tells stories. He says his grandparents used to live
on Cedar Mesa. He says the Navajo have stories about everything—about the horned toads on the mesa, about how the sun is called Grandpa, about the male and female winds that live just north of the Bears Ears and how when a person has a breathing problem he will seek out the right one to heal it. There are hundreds of stories, he says.
Only after I leave him do I understand what he meant. He wasn’t talking about acres. He was talking about a way to live.
On January 20, Bishop and Chaffetz unveiled their draft proposal. It would give added protections to about 4.3 million acres of Utah, roughly split among 41 new wilderness areas and 14 national conservation areas, as well as seven “special management areas.” To try to address Native Americans’ concerns, the proposal would create a nearly 1.2-million-acre conservation area for the Bears Ears, to be managed by federal agencies and advised by a commission containing some native people. It would expand Arches National Park and add more than 300 miles of wild and scenic river protection.
On the other side of the ledger, the proposal would release nearly 81,000 acres of WSAs, meaning that they could no longer be considered for wilderness status. It would create large zones for energy development. It would hand over some 40,000 acres of federal land to state and local governments. And it would give Utah right of way to a large majority of those contested 36,000 miles of dirt tracks that spiderweb eastern Utah’s canyon country, often on federal land—clearing the way for the state to open them to off-road vehicles, or improve them, or even pave them, despite the wishes of Uncle Sam. As for the Antiquities Act—that part, curiously, was not addressed, so the counties will be able to suggest their own wording. The final bill “must include language that guarantees long-term land use certainty,” Bishop’s office wrote in a summary of the proposal.
Everyone was destined to be unhappy with aspects of the draft, Lynn Jackson, a Grand County commissioner, tells me, adding, “This is what compromise looks like.”