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Washington vs. Utah: The Environmental Divide

TIME Magazine

Rogue road builders are scarring a wilderness in Utah, rushing to mark the pristine land before Washington can turn it into a monument.

By Jeffrey Kluger

(TIME, February 10) -- Ken Rait is on a road to nowhere, and he's none too happy about it. Jouncing along in a Jeep Cherokee through the Southwest wilderness, he points with disgust at the freshly dug track he's following. It meanders into a streambed, emerges from the other side and then stops abruptly. In just one afternoon Rait, an environmentalist with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, will find several more such dead-end trails, ranging from a mere quarter mile to a few miles long. Not one of them goes anywhere at all. "They're cutting roads all over the place out here," he says wearily.

These desert detours may not look like much, but they pass through the brand-new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah--a 1.7 million-acre tract that many consider the most beautiful spot in the U.S. The trails that crisscross it are scars from the latest tactic in one of the region's most bitter land wars.

The battle began in earnest during the fall presidential campaign, when Bill Clinton headed west and ceremonially conferred monument status on this huge stretch of Utah real estate. Tourists and locals could continue to use the area for hunting, camping and grazing, he said. But he wanted disfiguring activities like mining forbidden.

Thanks for nothing, say many people in Utah. "This is the most arrogant gesture I have seen in my life," says Bill Howell, executive director of the Utah Association of Local Governments. In the town of Kanab, just outside the monument, shops and schools closed in protest, and residents released black balloons into the air. Local artists were more blunt: a popular cartoon circulating for a time pictured the President mutely mooning the state of Utah.

The problem, as the people of Utah see it, is that the unspoiled land being placed under the federal bell jar is not just any unspoiled land. Locked in its rocks are as much as 62 billion tons of coal, 2 trillion cu. ft. of natural gas and 2 billion bbl. of oil--resources that could be worth billions of dollars and hundreds of jobs. So Utah, which has been scrapping with the Federal Government since statehood, is fighting back. Lawmakers are contemplating various legislative counterattacks, including enacting laws that guarantee continued access to the land, reducing the boundaries of the disputed plot and, if all else fails, prohibiting the kind of unilateral action that allowed the President to sequester it in the first place.

Back home, Utahns have been trying to drive their road graders through a loophole that exempts land from some federal protection if there is sufficient development to indicate the land is being put to use. They are thus taking to the wilderness and cutting roads across the protected acres before the government completes its formal three-year assessment of how the monument should be managed. Every mile they mark could be a mile unfettered.

If there's one thing both sides agree on, it's that the land is worth fighting over. The Grand Staircase began forming 250 million years ago as colliding land masses lifted the Colorado Plateau while rivers carved into it. The result is a series of gigantic "steps," each more than 900 ft. tall and named after the characteristic color of its rocks: Pink Cliffs, Gray Cliffs, White Cliffs, Vermilion Cliffs. The monument's center is so remote that ambient noise can drop below the threshold of human hearing.

Despite the otherworldly beauty of the place, President Clinton's decision to single it out for protection fell like a hammer blow in Utah. Segments of the local economy were already faltering, and with the ranching and logging industries falling on hard times, mining always seemed like a promising alternative. The coal from just one site in the monument could earn the state $3 billion. An additional $1 billion would flow into Utah's education system under a century-old provision that requires the state to use a percentage of all revenue from public lands to build and maintain schools.

Putting these riches beyond reach amounts to a "felonious assault" on Utah students, says Phyllis Sorenson, president of the state's education association. According to environmentalists, however, that is the only way to protect the land. Coal mining requires not just mines but also related aboveground structures, such as office buildings and parking lots. In addition, coal mined at the Grand Staircase would have to be hauled to the nearest port--in this case Los Angeles--in as many as 400 truckloads a day over highways that in some cases do not yet exist. Building such a modern-day Silk Road might cost up to $100 million.

Of course that outlay seems insignificant compared with $4 billion in coal revenues, but whether even so princely a sum is a fair price for Utah's mineral riches is uncertain. The developer that was closest to signing a mining agreement before Clinton's announcement--and the one with whom Utahns still want to cut a deal--is the Andalex mining company. Recently, though, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and other environmental groups have publicized the fact that Andalex is based in the Netherlands. The net profits from any dig--beyond the $4 billion--would thus not even remain in the U.S., never mind Utah. The coal itself would also be headed overseas, mostly to the Pacific Rim.

The Clinton Administration, citing these revelations, remains committed to protecting the disputed land. It promises to compensate local mining interests by swapping federal lands of equal value for those that lie within the monument. Utah Senator Bob Bennett sniffs at this, insisting that there is no land of equal value. Bennett is also unimpressed with Clinton's promise that all the current uses of the region, except mining, would be unchanged by its new status. The Senator wants that pledge written into law. "We'll see how sincere they are," he says.

Many in Utah are similarly unpersuaded by the suggestion that they will benefit from an increase in free-spending tourists. Rancher Dell LeFevre, whose land is surrounded by the monument, was told by an entrepreneur that he could get $5 million if he sold his spread to a developer. "I don't give a damn if they offer me $10 million," he asserts. "I just want to be a cowboy."

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has taken pains to respond to sentiments like this. Last month Interior officials flew to Utah to begin consulting with the Governor and other officials on how to protect both the monument and the local economy. Such joint planning has rarely been tried before in land-use disputes, and Babbitt has high hopes for it. "This is a brand-new model," he says. "We want to live together out there."

But many Utahns have no interest in cohabiting with the Federal Government, and for them the most effective means of protesting the monument remains road building. The more dirt lanes that vein the area, the more probable it becomes that at least those minimally developed patches will no longer qualify as wilderness. Though mining would still be forbidden everywhere, these nonwilderness tracts would be subject to reduced government scrutiny. Counties and towns, aware that development on the land is already restricted, insist they are not building new roads but "brightening up" existing ones--a murky term at best.

Environmentalists have been trying to block this rash of public works since September, and in November they won a victory when a federal judge ordered counties to give the Bureau of Land Management in Washington 48 hours' notice of any scheduled roadwork before the land-grading equipment actually rolls. In theory this would buy officials time to assess whether the planned development falls within the law. In practice, however, no one pretends that federal agents can effectively police 1.7 million acres of wilderness, and many suspect that the court ruling is being flouted.

For now, no easy solutions are in sight. If the House and Senate remain as partisan as they've been in recent years, no congressional compromise is likely. Unless the courts follow up with a final injunction--a ruling environmentalists are pursuing--the fate of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument may be determined not by legal action but by a group of ad hoc highway crews, tying up a package of land twice the size of Rhode Island with ribbons of roadway.

--Reported by Dick Thompson/Kanab


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