Quid Pro Quo Wilderness Bills

Updated September 29, 2009

On September 12, 2006, the Western Lands Project, Wilderness Watch, the Western Watersheds Project, and Friends of the Clearwater issued a press release titled "80 conservation groups urge colleagues to halt support for development/privatization bills."

This coalition of grassroots environmental organizations issued an open letter to the larger conservation community to stop current legislation that would harm public lands. "The undersigned conservation groups call on our colleagues to support a moratorium on bills currently pending in Congress that combine wilderness designation with harmful land and water development provisions," the letter said.

"This extraordinary request stems from our alarm regarding several bills detrimental to public lands heading toward fast-track passage in the U.S. Congress. Some support these bills for their wilderness designations, but the bills are laden with environmentally damaging provisions and land privatization schemes that have dire implications for future public-land and wilderness protection. In recent years, there has been a transformation in the approach both Congress and some wilderness advocates have taken to formulating and gaining support for wilderness legislation.

The new approach carries severely adverse consequences for both public lands and wilderness, and we believe the trend must be stopped now. We ask those organizations that have been supporting these bills to recognize the danger the bills pose to public lands and join with us in opposing their passage."

We ask for a moratorium on all wilderness legislation that contains non-wilderness-related provisions and special exceptions for uses inside wilderness."

Read entire letter at: http://www.westernlands.org/html/moratorium_.html

That was three years ago.

Thankfully the Boulder White Clouds (CIEDRA) bill has yet to be passed. The Owyhee Canyonlands bill passed as part of the massive omnibus "wilderness" bill earlier this year. It was improved upon before passage but still include detrimenal wilderness precedents.

Now, however, Senator Tester of Montana has proposed his own "Quid Pro Quo" bill entitled the “Tester Forest Jobs and Recreation Act of 2009.’’ This bill would mandate logging in public wildlands including in core grizzly habitat in the Cabinet Yaak bioregion. Most of the bill was designed in an exclusive behind closed doors process. The Tester bill logs roadless country and removes protection for several wilderness study areas including the Sapphire Mountains and the West Pioneers.

These kinds of bills circumvent environmental laws and public processes that normally guide such decisions and trade land and resources in one place for wilderness protection in another. Many of these "quid pro quo" proposals bypass the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a cornerstone of U.S. environmental law that provides for analysis, transparency, public involvement, and deliberative decision-making.

Get Ahead of the Curve

The complexity of these bill can unfortunately serve as a stumbling block for many of us. Here are a few resources to get up to speed on how "quid pro quo" originated and its major implications.

http://missoulanews.bigskypress.com/missoula/required-reading/Content?oi...

www.westernlands.org/download/Carving_up_the_Commons.pdf