Conservation groups split on wilderness bills

BOISE – Idaho groups that worked with Republicans to craft two wilderness protection plans pending in Congress say they’ll stick with those proposals despite overtures from other conservationists to hold out for better bills under new Democratic leadership.

“I would ask my colleagues to reflect back on the last time Democrats were in charge,” Rick Johnson, director of the Idaho Conservation League, said Monday from Washington, D.C. “Remember, nothing happened with Idaho wilderness then either.”

Craig Gehrke, The Wilderness Society’s Idaho director, added that while Democrats prevailed in congressional midterm elections Nov. 7, Idaho remained firmly Republican.

“You’ve got to go to the dance with the one who brung you,” said Gehrke. “We tell our D.C. office they can celebrate the Democrats’ victory, but remember we’ve worked for years with people who are not Democrats; our sponsors are Republicans and we are going to respect that.”

The Wilderness Society and Idaho Conservation League support H.R. 3603 from U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, to create wilderness in central Idaho’s Boulder and White Clouds mountains and S. 3794 from U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, to designate new wilderness in southwestern Idaho’s Owyhee canyonlands.

But a coalition of 80 other environmental organizations have asked the ICL and TWS to withdraw support for the two bills now that Democrats have won control of both the Senate and House. Groups such as Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Wilderness Watch, Selkirk Conservation Alliance and Western Lands Project oppose the measures because they say the bills include too many exemptions and trade-offs in return for too little protection.

“Why in the world would you continue to push these deeply flawed bills that dispose of public lands when there’s been a tectonic shift in the political landscape?” said Katie Fite, of the Hailey-based Western Watersheds Project. “They have sunk so much money and ego into this we-must-accommodate-every-special-interest-group-in-order-to-get-what-we-want strategy that they can’t act on common sense.”

Simpson and Crapo have both said they hope to find ways to pass the Idaho wilderness bills in the remaining days of the Republican-led Congress. Because 10 critical federal spending bills remain unfinished, attaching one or both of the Idaho land bills as a rider to an appropriations measure is a possibility.

But Gehrke said The Wilderness Society would revoke its support of Simpson’s Boulder-White Clouds bill if it gets attached to any measure with another bill introduced in both the Senate and House to create wilderness in Washington County in southwestern Utah.

“We are on record opposing the Washington County, Utah, bill and we are not in the business of wadding bad stuff with good stuff to get it passed,” Gehrke said.

Johnson is working on Capitol Hill this week to help muster support for both bills during the lame-duck session, focusing on U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho. As a member of both the Senate Energy and Natural Resources, and the Senate Appropriations committees, Craig wields considerable influence over the measures but has not said whether he’ll support them.

“Given the shake-up on Nov. 7, I think a lot of members have a clarity of purpose right now and there is an opportunity to perhaps get something through with Senator Craig’s committees,” Johnson said. “No matter how the election went, I did not expect Larry Craig to disappear and you simply have to work with the people who are going to advance your mission.”

Fite argues that the mission of ICL and TWS has strayed far from what her coalition sees as the true principles of wilderness protection.

“ICL and TWS are just enabling these head-in-the-sand, ostrich-type Republicans to continue to be anti-environment,” she said. “It’s like saying, ‘I’m sticking with (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld come hell or high water.’ Bush has awakened, why haven’t they?”