Protection for the Desert

Sen. Alan Cranston’s (D-Calif.) proposed California Desert Protection Act is on the calendar of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee for the scheduling of a hearing and action that would send it to the full Senate. Whether the bill gets a hearing this year, and an opportunity to pass the full Senate, probably depends on California’s other U.S. senator, Republican Pete Wilson.

Wilson has studied the measure for more than a year now, has visited areas of the desert that would be affected and has met with proponents and opponents. He is expected to announce soon whether he will oppose or support the Cranston bill and under what conditions. The Cranston bill is an ambitious measure that plows considerable new ground in the nature of parks and wilderness areas, and it has drawn opposition from miners, ranchers and off-road-vehicle interests. But the Cranston bill also is a farsighted measure that has important ramifications for the future of Southern California, when massive increases in population will put great pressures on the state’s remaining wild and natural areas.

The Cranston bill deserves Wilson’s support and congressional approval. Cranston and Wilson worked together effectively several years ago to draft a successful bill creating new wilderness areas in national forests in California. The wilderness bill was not all that environmentalists desired, but it was an adequate compromise. They should follow the same process on the desert bill.

The issue is not so much whether the desert ought to be protected, but how. Even more specifically, the question is whether the management of the best and most vulnerable areas of the desert should be left with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management or turned over, as it would be under the Cranston legislation, to the National Park Service. The record of these two Interior Department agencies over the years supports the Cranston approach.

The bureau is not happy with that idea, of course, and it has been quite vocal in opposing the Cranston bill, although it is inappropriate for one federal agency to lobby so publicly and vigorously against such legislation. The bureau has gone to great lengths to rebut alleged myth-making by proponents of the Cranston bill, including the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. But the bureau is the real myth-producer in trying to justify its continued custodianship of the desert.

A major impetus for the Cranston bill is the bureau’s inability to protect critical areas of the desert from misuse, overuse and vandalism. The official BLM response from the office of state director Ed Hastey is: “The desert, in fact, is being adequately protected by the California Desert Plan.� The plan is the document developed by the bureau over a number of years for its multiple-use management of the region.

But even the BLM’s friends take issue with that statement. Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Highland), whose district includes portions of the disputed lands and who is an opponent of the Cranston bill, said in a recent newspaper article that “it is no secret that, given insufficient funding and a lack of personnel, the BLM has had considerable difficulty in implementing the Desert Plan.� The bureau has had 22 rangers to patrol more than 12 million acres.

The Bureau of Land Management should stay out of this argument and allow Congress to decide how the desert should be protected for the future. The next major step in that process is for Wilson to join Cranston as a co-sponsor of the measure.