A federal bill that would designate 5 million acres as wilderness in Wyoming has little chance of becoming law this year, but some say it could eventually lead to strengthening protections for millions of acres in Greater Yellowstone.

Called the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, the bill would protect a total of roughly 22 million acres of Forest Service and national park lands in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Washington and Oregon, including roughly 4 million acres in Grand Teton National Park, Yellowstone National Park and the Bridger-Teton National Forest. Similar legislation has been proposed a number of times in the past.

The bill, introduced April 20, would also remove about 6,000 miles of roads and set up protected wildlife corridors that would allow movement of animals like bears and wolves from Greater Yellowstone to Glacier National Park and central Idaho. Further, the plan would designate hundreds of miles of Wild and Scenic Rivers.

But conservationists who see wilderness designation as the salvation of increasingly developed forest lands, or those who promote development, logging or motorized use of such reserves, should have little reason to believe the act would become law under this Congress, experts say. Not only does the act have little support from congressional delegations from the states it would affect, usually a key ingredient for successful passage of wilderness bills, but it also is questioned by conservation groups because of its widespread impacts.

The bill would protect federal lands under the Wilderness Act, which prohibits development, road building, logging, oil and gas development, dam building, mountain biking, paragliding and motorized use, and aims to keep the land in its natural state. Already there are national forest wilderness areas around Jackson Hole, including the Teton, Winegar Hole, Jedediah Smith and Gros Ventre wildernesses, plus a number of wilderness study areas.

There also are recommended wilderness areas in Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks, but over several decades, no action has been taken to protect them in Congress. The bill appears not to target major BLM holdings in Wyoming.

According to Alliance for the Wild Rockies director Michael Garrity, closing the roads would not only help ecosystems, but would create more than 2,000 jobs and save about $245 million taxpayer dollars.

The plan, in part, makes up for some weaknesses of the Clinton Roadless Rule, which the Bush administration has made attempts to weaken in recent years, Garrity said in a telephone interview from his Montana office. “The Bush administration has demonstrated that the Clinton Roadless Rule wasn’t effective in protecting these wilderness areas,” said Garrity, adding that the plan encompasses principles of conservation biology.

“Parks like Yellowstone aren’t big enough for some species to survive,” he said. “They need to be connected in order to survive. In the long run, you can’t say that if you protect one small patch of land, that it will help wildlife.”

Scientists say that grizzly bears in Yellowstone, for example, don’t have a diverse enough genetic pool and would need to breed with bears from Glacier National Park to have a sustainable population. That is among several reasons conservationists have said they intend to sue the federal government over its decision to stop protecting the bear under the Endangered Species Act.

In Jackson, Franz Camenzind, executive director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, agreed that the bill would help protect corridors. “We see it as corridor protection as much as anything,” he said. The bill also has “the potential to buffer some of our core wilderness areas.”

The plan comes at a time when the Forest Service has started leasing controversial portions of the Bridger-Teton National Forest to energy companies for oil and gas development, especially the Wyoming Range (see related story page 2A). Scientists say declines in wildlife, such as mule deer, antelope and moose near wells in the Upper Green River Valley, will likely also occur in forested areas if development is allowed there, too.

“We have to recognize that just about everything in the Bridger-Teton is important not only for our wildlands, but because of the vulnerability to oil land gas leasing,” Camenzind said. “Any time we can bring the dialogue forward and emphasize the importance of these lands, we’re moving in the right direction.”

But he reiterated the improbability of such an act passing in Congress.

“I think, realistically, they don’t have much of a chance this time around,” Camenzind said. “I think momentum is building and these things take time.”



Wyo. legislators pan bill

Proposed by U.S. Reps. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Christopher Shays, R-Conn., the plan has drawn the ire of Wyoming politicians who say that any effort to designate wilderness should begin at home, not with “East Coast liberals.”

U.S. Rep. Barbara Cubin called the bill an “offensive attempt by East Coast liberals to create sweeping, overreaching laws for Western public lands without any public input ...”

Cameron Hardy, spokesman for U.S. Sen. Craig Thomas, echoed Cubin’s sentiment. “It’s always kind of suspect when you have a bunch of East Coast liberals who want to propose land management out in the West without consulting any of the delegations from the states that would be affected,” he said. “Nothing like that is going to fly in the Senate.”

Further, Hardy said the plan would burden already stretched federal agencies. “It’s kind of getting the cart before the horse to propose a major expansion before we get them enough money to manage the lands that we have now,” he said. “Expanding the purview of the federal government is always a concern.”

But Camenzind said that, for Jackson, the plan would be a boon to local business. “Our local economy at its very core is based on the wildlands,” he said.

Like Thomas, U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi said that Wyoming should have been consulted about the plan.

“It seems like every year legislators, whose districts are nowhere near Wyoming, come up with a bill telling Wyoming and other rural states how to manage our land,” he said in a statement. “Rural lawmakers won’t stand for it and will continue to deny such efforts.”

“The people who are on the ground know the value of the land and enjoy it every day,” Enzi continued. “The West won’t stand idly by while big-city legislators gang up on the minority states and try to choke off access to areas that were intended for the enjoyment and use of the entire country.”



Harm to recreation

Jack Welch, spokesman for the BlueRibbon Coalition, a pro-motor recreation group, said the plan would hurt recreational opportunities on public lands.

“It would impact a lot of recreation, both motorized and mechanized,” he said. “BlueRibbon would oppose this legislation mainly because it appears to be too sweeping. We think those decisions should be made at the appropriate local, regional or state levels with recommendations to Congress, if it requires Congress to act.”

Some environmental groups also expressed concern over the plan, saying that grassroots efforts, not sweeping legislation, are the appropriate approach. Craig Kenworthy, Greater Yellowstone Coalition conservation director, said the plan would limit some types of recreation is some areas where wildlife aren’t threatened.

For instance, Kenworthy said that areas for mountain biking and Nordic skiing on groomed tracks near the North Fork of the Shoshone would be shut down.

“We have some Nordic ski trails that don’t really have a lot of wildlife impacts in the winter,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to just take that area, turn it into wilderness and not be able to groom those ski trails if there aren’t a lot of ecological impacts.”

“The blanket approach isn’t necessarily the best approach,” Kenworthy continued. “It’d be great if we could move towards a grassroots-based approach ... rather than something that comes from Congress on such a broad scale.”

Chris Mehl, spokesman for the Wilderness Society, agreed that starting with local communities is a better way to designate wilderness.  “Because it’s happening in Wyoming, those communities have to be involved,” he said.