The following op-ed was published in Headwaters News.


A new set of critics has started taking umbrage at the Bush administration. They aren't the usual suspects. Smoke is curling upward from brush fires on the political spectrum's starboard side.

Deficit hawks are making noise about the rising pool of federal red. The green-eyeshade set is voicing displeasure at an apostasy: a spendthrift Republican administration putting friction burns on the nation's credit card faster than a party-on liberal.

Defenders of public lands should take note. The profligacy is a clue to understanding the Bush administration's drive to expand and intensify consumptive use of national forests, parks and rangelands.

The political calculus of retaining power has driven the administration into the malodorous realm of crony capitalism, well beyond the bounds that traditional conservative values of fiscal discipline, honest markets and prudent stewardship would have imposed.

When the Bush team took over in 2001, America was assured that the Clinton-Gore pander bears were back in their cage and the grown-ups were back in charge. Yet the administration can't bring itself to say no to special interests clamoring for costly government favors.

Expensive crop subsidies for big farms? Ladle them out. More pork for mature energy industries? Fire up the grill. For oil and gas interests coveting hydrocarbons beneath public range, timber companies seeking more taxpayer-funded roads in national forests, or play-machine manufacturers demanding increased access to the farthest reaches of unspoiled public wildlands, Washington, D.C. is a discount candy store.

The administration's undisciplined behavior is threatening the conservation legacy bequeathed to this generation by Theodore Roosevelt and other visionary leaders.

Consider energy, where many of our nation's problems start. The U.S. depends heavily on fossil energy for generating electricity, producing heat and fueling transportation.

The consequences are serious and growing: dangerous entanglement with unsavory regimes, rising emissions of greenhouse gases and unhealthy air pollutants, and increasing pressure to turn the West's wild places into industrial production zones.

Neither the administration nor Congress has championed aggressive policies to lower fossil energy's high costs through greater efficiency on the demand side and more resource diversification on the supply side.

Instead, egged on by fossil energy interests, the administration is overseeing a full-court press to expand drilling on public lands. Last May, the Interior Department announced that no additional BLM lands would ever again be considered for wilderness designation. For good measure, administrative protections for 6 million acres of potential wilderness in Utah were rescinded.

Three months later, federal land managers were directed to remove impediments to oil and gas drilling in Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico.

The directives were characteristic of the administration's clever strategy for pushing through unpopular decisions giving special interests the reduced land protections they want: avoid hearings, floor debates and other bothersome democratic trappings that come with getting bills passed in Congress.

Instead, issue an obscure rule change or acquiesce to a giveaway legal settlement, often just before newsrooms thin out for a weekend or holiday.

Spectacular wilderness-quality landscapes, such as Colorado's Roan Plateau and Utah's Book Cliffs region, are now targeted for boom-and-bust fossil fuel extraction.

Consider the two cases of Otero Mesa in southeastern New Mexico and the Rocky Mountain Front in northwestern Montana. Both places feature rare ecosystems. Both are in the cross-hairs for oil and gas drilling.

Otero Mesa is a 1.2 million-acre expanse of Chihuahuan Desert grassland that is home to both hard-scrabble ranchers and desert-hardened wildlife, including a genetically pure herd of pronghorn and more than 250 species of songbirds. It's a great place to go quail hunting.

The Rocky Mountain Front is a spectacular junction of rugged peaks, cold rivers and wild grasslands south of Glacier National Park. The Front is one of the few places where grizzly bears can still be seen on their ancestral Great Plains stomping grounds. Elk, cougars and wolves roam the Front also.

The Bureau of Land Management has announced an oil and gas development plan for Otero Mesa. Sportsmen and conservationists are skeptical that BLM will adopt or enforce strong safeguards to reduce the impacts.

Same story with the Front: the BLM is conducting environmental reviews that could lead to drilling on old leases. The possible demise of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule could lead to oil and gas development in areas of the Front managed by the Forest Service.

The noise and fumes that are inevitable byproducts of oil and gas production would debauch the unspoiled grandeur of such places. But once the compressors have shut down for good and the acrid fumes have dissipated, the roads will still be there. And that's a problem that spans generations.

Roads have few rivals as a long-term scourge of wild ecosystems. Roads fracture big game habitat and erode sediment into trout streams. Roads serve as invasion routes for off-road vehicles spreading noise, weeds and engine exhaust.

Roads also are a burden on the taxpayers. The Forest Service can't take care of the roads it has. The agency faces a $10 billion backlog of maintenance and capital improvement projects on its 380,000-mile road network. Keeping roadless areas off- limits to bulldozers would save the taxpayers $15,000 per mile in planning, design and oversight costs the Forest Service ponies up for road construction.

The first rule of conservative fiscal management is to cease digging when one is in a hole. The administration, however, is ready to hand the Forest Service another shovel.

The Roadless Area Conservation Rule is broadly popular. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress support legislation to codify the rule. The administration, however, has had designs on the rule since taking office. The Tongass National Forest, with 9.3 million roadless acres, was dropped from its remit late last year and the Chugach is likely next.

For the lower 48, the administration is poised to float a rewritten rule that would allow governors to request exemptions for national forests in their states.

Not all governors are likely to take up the offer, but the rule would set a dangerous precedent allowing individual states to dictate management of lands owned by all American citizens. Imagine if the governor of Utah could get the federal government's blessing to punch a highway
through Zion National Park.

Come to think of it, such a travesty could happen, thanks to another one of those obscure rule changes. Last year, the administration adopted a "disclaimer" rule that could literally pave the way for road construction in national parks, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges and unprotected wildlands.

The disclaimer rule allows the BLM to validate highway right-of-way claims crossing federal lands under RS 2477, the shorthand name for an 1866 law that grants rights of way for highways across public lands not otherwise reserved for other uses. The law was repealed in 1976 but valid existing claims were grandfathered.

Who wants to build roads to nowhere in back country wildlands? Anyone who doesn't want them designated as wilderness. Roads disqualify lands from the National Wilderness Preservation System because they would no longer be "untrammeled" according to the 1964 Wilderness Act's eloquent definition.

That's why off-road vehicle interests have long seen RS 2477 as a wrench for breaking open protected areas now closed to dirt bikes and ATVs. Local governments seeking expanded commodity production on federal lands see similar utility in RS 2477. Moffatt County, Colo., for example, has asserted right-of-way claims that crisscross Dinosaur National Monument and other protected lands.

Of course, not every claim is likely to be approved. And courts can stop politically driven decisions that harm our natural heritage, as U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan did last month when he blocked the Interior Department's astonishing reversal of a decision to phase snowmobiles out of Yellowstone National Park.

Sullivan's ruling included pointed commentary that gaves judicial force to what the park's supporters knew already: The Interior Department's reversal was a premeditated giveaway that ignored laws, executive orders and management policies spelling out clearly that conservation trumps all other considerations in national parks management.

But hoping for judicial knuckle-rapping is a haphazard way, at best, of preventing the administration from turning public lands management into a flea market for special interests. Only an outraged citizenry that spans the political spectrum can protect the heritage lands that all of us own.

There are promising signs. Hundreds of hunting clubs appealed for continued protection of the Tongass National Forest's roadless areas. Sportsmen's groups whose leaders met with President Bush can take credit for putting the kibosh on a proposed Clean Water Act rule that would have ended protection of prairie potholes, playa lakes, vernal pools and other isolated wetlands. Local governments and landowners are fighting the coalbed methane rush.

But many more voices need to raise a lot more hell about the favors being given to what Theodore Roosevelt used to call the "land grabbers."

There isn't much time. The administration is barreling through America's public lands sporting one of those bumper stickers that say, "We're spending our children's inheritance."

A conservation legacy that took a century to build could be frittered away in much less time.

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