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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Watchdogs keep eyes on White House

Like a snowshoe hare that turns white before snow covers the ground, America’s public lands have been especially vulnerable this fall.

Record-high fuel prices are etched in our memories. The economy is in a shambles.

And the Bush administration is pumping to make good on promises to the oil and gas industry before the changing of the guard in Washington, D.C.

The good news is that conservationists from within the ranks of Democrats and Republicans as well as sportsmen and tree huggers are stepping up as watchdogs for public lands.

The bad news: There aren’t nearly enough of them to protect all the assets, including precious winter range for big game.

Last month, for example, the White House approved a rule that will ease constraints on environmentally damaging oil shale development throughout the West, despite objections from Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, who called the decision “hasty and I would even argue reckless.”

The number of oil and gas drilling permits has exploded during Bush’s second term, from 3,802 five years ago to an annual average of 7,200 in the past four years, according to a June report by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources.

With time running out on the industry’s sugar daddy, the pace has been accelerated, even though oil and gas companies already have leased the rights to develop more than 91 million acres of federal land.

If you haven’t yet noticed energy development on a prized piece of public land, brace yourself. The oil and gas industry is producing on only about 25 percent of the federal land it’s leased.

This is a fire sale of public land rights that may never be retrieved, and fish and wildlife resources are getting burned.

Some bright lights are shining through the smog.

In October, an uncommon group of conservationists and media gathered in Montana to find common ground on critical wildlife issues.

NRA types were sitting next to the Patagonia company’s save-our-planet types. A Beretta firearms rep was at the table with the owner of a fly-fishing company.

Unabashed liberals rolled up their sleeves with others in a spectrum of political affiliations along the Missouri River in a modest old farm building owned by a wealthy southern Republican attorney.

Jim Range has been described as “a legislative cowboy” and “a southern, tough-talking, Jack Daniels-drinking, boyishly handsome, charismatic lawyer who long ago made the right connections.”

He’s also a fly-fishing and bird-hunting maniac.

Unless you’re a D.C. insider, you might not know that Range, former chief counsel for Sen. Howard Baker, R-Tenn., helped Congress find common ground to pass some of the nation’s most important environmental laws, including the 1977 Clean Water Act and the 1980 Superfund law.

He’s hard-nosed. Yet tears welled up in the eyes of the D.C. bulldog as he explained the need to shed the baggage of political stereotypes in the effort to protect critical wildlife habitat.

Range is chairman of the board for the non-profit Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.

He introduced the small staff that works with individuals, organizations, corporations and legislators to advance policy solutions on natural resource management issues of common concern.

Some of the discussions over three days were, shall we say, vigorous, but never so hot they couldn’t be cooled with a beer and a handshake.

Range and the TRCP staff rammed home the importance of sportsmen and other conservationists speaking in a single voice on key issues in the conservation debate, including a spectrum ranging from the Conservation Reserve Program to revising the woefully outdated 1872 mining laws.

“Lawmakers listen to consensus,” he said.

Today the TRCP is likely to announce it is joining conservation groups, including the Mule Deer Foundation, to file a legal protest to some of the leases in the huge sale to be offered Dec. 19 by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Utah.

Earlier protests have forced BLM to withdraw acreage from lease sales in Montana, New Mexico and Wyoming and more recently, 40,000 acres of leases that would have allowed gas and oil development within sight of Utah’s Arches National Park.

“But there’s still close to 275,000 acres up for grabs in this Utah sale, and from a sportsman’s perspective, they include some of the most critical winter areas and corridors for elk, mule deer and other wildlife,” said Katie McKalip, TRCP spokeswoman based in Missoula.

Why should anyone in Idaho or Washington care?

“These are public lands and a heritage that belong to all of us for hunting, fishing and recreation,” she said.

Serious reflection on the efforts of standout conservationists, including Theodore Roosevelt, should bring any sportsman to his knees in thanks that they weren’t concerned only with preserving fish and wildlife in their own backyards.

“In a sparsely populated state like Wyoming, a lot of sportsmen are compromised because they’re also connected with the energy companies,” McKalip said.

But TRCP staffers even got support from union groups when they spread out the maps and made it clear they were looking for responsible energy development opportunities, not a kibosh on the industry.

“The union support makes us feel like we’re on the right track,” McKalip said.

You can contact Rich Landers by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5508, or e-mail to richl@spokesman.com.