COLUMN: Environmentalists are allies of land use

One of my memories from long before Utah State University, one with which many readers will identify, was of my parents ordering me and my little brother to stop using their bed as a trampoline. How unfair! How dare they restrict our freedom to exploit the functional versatility of household furniture. What, damage our house? Impossible, we cried. We love our house just as you do, and there’s nothing wrong with playing around. Re-enacting the WWF is now out of style with us, but Utah politicians, interest groups and administrators still wrestle with identical issues on Utah’s public lands – the playground and backyard to USU students.

In the Jan. 28 issue of the Salt Lake Tribune, Ranier Huck of the Utah Shared Access Alliance showcases a psychology that has yet to progress beyond the playful 10-year-old and that is prevalent among those claiming to represent outdoor recreationists.

His chief target is a lawsuit filed by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) to force the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to prevent degradation of public lands by off-highway vehicles (OHVs) and to follow existing laws and regulations in managing OHVs. Even the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found in 1995 that OHV use was being monitored casually rather than systematically – problems were seldom being documented and corrective actions remained to be prioritized. This is not news to people who often visit redrock country and find a web of sacrificial zones and desert wounds that will fester for decades, if not forever.

Six years later, the BLM still struggles just to keep riders on the trail, and its recently released National Management Strategy is so toothless and non-committal, it’s purely academic and adds nothing local managers should not already do. Meanwhile, field staff watch helplessly as irresponsible riders trash the land and hesitate to even cite blatant violators, fearing backlash. While USU’s Ecological Coalition of Students worked on a new boundary fence last year in the San Rafael Swell, a burly, fierce-looking guy hauling a truckload of OHVs graciously informed our workers and BLM staff on hand there’s going to be bloodshed.

This plays directly into the hands of opportunist firebrands like Huck, who despise any interference with unfettered access to every square inch of public land. That in itself isn’t a huge deal. The problem is that thousands of responsible OHV-using Utahns, including USU students and their families, are suckered into believing our lands are at imminent risk of being locked up, shut down or some other mechanical metaphor for human exclusion. Many USU students I have spoken to are opposed to a non-existent epidemic of road closures and access restrictions on public lands.

In reality, access has never been greater. Tragically, these students inadvertently support an agenda that despises public access. The Blue Ribbon Coalition, for example, deceptively presents itself as a recreation access group, but is funded by Ketchikan Pulp Co. (timber), Crown Butte Mines, Boise Cascade (timber), the American Petroleum Institute (oil), Plum Creek Timber and Louisiana Pacific (timber). So, is it just a coincidence that BRC is a major foe of environmentalists?

If you love public lands, environmentalists are your greatest possible ally, not your enemy. The greatest threat to your recreation is not access restrictions, but industrialization by corporations that couldn’t care less about you. Look to your own ranks for your problem. It’s the Hucks of the world who refuse to obey simple rules, respect our soils, vegetation and wildlife and share with other land users, human and otherwise. It’s the faction that keeps jumping on the bed, no matter the resulting damage. It’s the faction that, in Huck’s words, claims to preserve the public right of access to many of Utah’s most beautiful areas, but seeks a nirvana of carefree irresponsibility that brings ruin for everybody’s experience. Let all who care about the land – hikers, responsible OHV users, young and old, SUWA users and nonusers and, most importantly, students – join in defense of our backyard against those who never heeded their parents’ warnings about misusing their surroundings, and the corporations waiting in the wings just behind Huck’s curtain.

Jim Steitz is president of the Ecological Coalition of Students. His columns appear periodically in the Statesman. Comments may be e-mailed to sl8mh@cc.usu.edu.