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[NOTE:
Versions of this article appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal
and the Salt Lake Tribune.]
April
30, 1997
ESCALATING
THE WAR OVER ESCALANTE
by
James V. DeLong
Just
before the election, President Clinton went to the Grand
Canyon in Arizona to designate 1.7 million acres of
the Escalante area of Utah as a National Monument.
Staying
out of Utah showed solid instinct for politics, since
the citizens there were not pleased with the decision.
The votes he was harvesting were several time zones
away in the cities of the two coasts, where people like
the abstract idea like of wilderness in the West and
assume that they personally will bear none of the consequences.
The
President was flanked by Robert Redford, movie star
and strong wilderness advocate. Redford is also a Utah
land baron, with almost ten square miles in his Sundance
Resort. The Utah legislature noted his presence, and
its House retaliated with a resolution to study the
possible designation of part of his land as wilderness.
The effort is a bit tongue-in-cheek, and the Christian
Science Monitor quotes its sponsor as admitting that
his primary goal is to make a moral point: "So
many people want to set aside land for environmental
purposes, but they want someone else to make the sacrifice.
The resolution allows [him] to put his money where his
mouth is."
Redford
is not amused, or converted. He defends the monument
designation as giving Escalante "back to those
who own it: The American people." As for the idea
that Sundance would make a nice wilderness, Redford's
people dismiss it with the comment that the resort contributes
a lot of taxes and jobs to the community.
Who's
Owns This Land?
Redford's
response is perfect because it frames the issues so
neatly. Just who does own this land, anyway? And how
do we reconcile ownership, wilderness preservation,
and economics? Environmentalists may find these questions
easy, but in fact they are hard, with a lot of history
behind them. In the early 19th Century, almost the entire
nation was public land. Until the Civil War this domain
was steadily sold off to private parties, the timber
was cleared, and settlement marched on. During the 1860's,
things changed. Congress decided that 160 acres was
a good size for a farm, and that the public domain west
of the Mississippi should go to homesteaders in blocks
of that size. This worked, sort of, for the territory
up to the100th meridian (about two-thirds of the way
through Kansas), where enough rain fell to make farming
possible. West of this line, the Homestead Act was a
disaster. You could not make a living on 160 acres or
on 20 times that much, and few people were foolish enough
to try. But the government had no mechanism for selling
off the land in blocks that made economic sense, and
as a result the land could not be disposed of at all.
A
"National Commons"
After
half a century of turmoil, the West emerged with a bastardized
system of land tenure, quite different from the system
of private property that prevails in the East. The federal
government retained ownership of half the land of the
ten western states, including 62% of Utah. To make up
for its refusal to sell its land in viable pieces, the
government guaranteed the people of the region, and
of the U.S. generally, reasonable access to use the
public domain for productive purposes, including grazing,
mining, and timbering to feed the industrial revolution
of the East. The preservationists got a share, in the
form of national parks and other reservations, and over
the years recreational users have asserted a growing
claim. As a matter of history, the public domain does
not belong to a baron called the federal government
which has the right to do whatever it wants on its own
property. The public lands are a National Commons to
which all of us, but especially the people of the region,
have a claim, and it is supposed to be administered
by the federal government as a trustee, with fair regard
for the economic patterns that this history imposed
on the West.
The
portion of the Commons called Escalante is worthless
for farming and has little timber. It is not much good
for grazing. Some of the scenery is spectacular, but
most of it is mediocre and for the most part it is not
pleasant hiking country. The one thing it has is fossil
fuels, in the form of coal and oil. The current battle,
since the basic monument designation is now a fact,
is whether exploitation of coal and oil resources should
proceed. The energy companies are actually by standers
in this fight. Conoco, which has the oil leases, would
much prefer to drill -- it is, after all, in the oil
business, and the fields are potentially huge -- but
if this is forbidden the company will get paid off.
The legal term of art is that the government must recognize
"valid existing rights," which means the oil
leases cannot be terminated without payment.
The
Real Stakeholders
The
real stakeholders in the fight include the school children
of Utah, since several sections of every township were
given to the state to use the revenues to support schools.
They need Conoco's royalty payments. Other stakeholders
include all of us who use oil. It is a little hard to
go out and drill your own well and refine your own gasoline,
so if you want your share of this National Commons you
must rely on an oil company as your intermediary. They
also include the residents of Utah, who have long relied
on jobs generated by economic activity on federal land.
All of these groups claim that oil, at least, can be
extracted with little environmental effect. The energy
resources are not in the scenic part, and, in any event,
modern techniques substantially diminish the footprint
of oil production. Many landowners in many places, including
the Audubon Society in Louisiana, are happily combining
environmental protection with oil revenues. Thus there
is no irreconcilable conflict between environmental
protection and energy extraction, except to the most
hard-shell wilderness purist.
In
the end, yes, wilderness devotees also have a claim
to some share of the National Commons. But this constituency,
overwhelmingly rich, urban, male, white, young, and
fit, does not qualify as "the American people,"
and can hardly claim a right to exclude everyone else.
In the end, their efforts look a lot like another tradition
of the Old West, the land grab, in which someone with
raw power simply took a portion of the public lands
for himself, driving others off with barbed wire and
pistols. The methods change. The morals remain the same.
JAMES
V. DeLONG
Washington
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