[MCN] Outside Mag's In-Depth Look at "Collaboration" & Wilderness/Public Lands Protect

[Matthew Koehler]

This new Outside Magazine article is a must read for those who love
America's public lands and Wilderness legacy and are worried about recent
'collaborative' efforts that weaken, undercut and compromise that legacy.

Missoula is well-represented in the article with comments and insights from
George, Nickas of Wilderness Watch, Dr. Martin Nie, director of the Bolle
Center for People and Forests at the U of Montana and Chris Barns, a
longtime wilderness expert who recently retired from the BLM.

The Massive Land Deal That Could Change the West ForeverUtah congressman
Rob Bishop, a conservative Republican who has long opposed federal
management of western lands, has emerged as the unlikely architect of a
grand compromise, one that would involve massive horse trading to preserve
millions of acres of wilderness while opening millions more to resource
extraction. Is this a trick, or the best way to solve ancient disputes that
too often go nowhere?
By: Christopher Solomon
<http://www.outsideonline.com/1740586/christopher-solomon>

Feb 22, 2016


SOURCE:
http://www.outsideonline.com/2056806/devils-grand-bargain-rob-bishop-western-lands

SNIPS:

But some environmental watchdogs, wilderness specialists, and academics
worry that the [collaborative] approach is also setting dangerous
precedents. In their pursuit of land preservation and wilderness, critics
charge, environmental groups frequently horse-trade inappropriately with
the public’s lands—shutting out dissent, undercutting their conservation
mission, and even eroding bedrock environmental laws....

And why not? “Collaboration” sounds great. It suggests consensus and
compromise—the idea that everyone will be heard and their ideas made part
of the finished product. But as George Nickas, executive director of
Wilderness Watch, has said, compromise sometimes means “three wolves and a
sheep talking about what’s for dinner.”

In short, whether collaboration is a good thing or not depends a lot on
where you stand—and what you stand to gain. A 2013 study found that the
groups most likely to collaborate are large, professional environmental
organizations that often represent diverse agendas. According to Caitlin
Burke, a forestry expert in North Carolina who has studied collaborations,
if such trends continue, “we will see a marginalization of smaller,
ideologically pure environmental groups [whose] values will not be included
in decision making because they are unable or unwilling to collaborate.”
....

Despite appearances, collaborations are undemocratic, argue critics like
Gary Macfarlane of Friends of the Clearwater, an environmental group in
northern Idaho. The public already has a process for how changes can be
made to our public lands, Macfarlane says: the 1969 National Environmental
Policy Act. Macfarlane describes it as “a law that tells federal agencies
to look before you leap” and says you have to allow all interested parties
to participate. The act also mandates that the best available science be
considered. Collaborations don’t have to do that, says Randi Spivak,
director of the public-lands program for the Center for Biological
Diversity.

Then there are the concerns about wilderness. Designation of new wilderness
areas has often been a centerpiece of collaborations over the past 15
years. But in order to push wilderness through, the big environmental
groups have been willing to make sometimes disturbing compromises, critics
say—even to the Wilderness Act itself.

Compromise has long been a central part of wilderness politics, of course.
The 1964 Wilderness Act took eight years and 65 bills to become law, and
the final act grandfathered in some grazing and mining. But the old
compromises were largely about boundaries—what’s in and what’s out. The new
deals embrace a more insidious type of compromise, not just about where
wilderness will be, but also about how it will be managed.

“Our fear is that some conservation groups look at the 1964 act as the
place to begin a new round of compromises,” says Martin Nie. That shift, he
adds, “could threaten the integrity of the system.”

In collaborative efforts, large conservation groups that badly want to
protect wilderness must deal with groups that sometimes loathe the idea, so
conservationists increasingly feel pressure to make wilderness more
palatable to opponents—and that means watering it down, says critic Chris
Barns, a longtime wilderness expert who recently retired from the BLM.

The number of special provisions—exceptions added to a wilderness bill,
almost always leading to more human impact—has increased in the past
several years, according to a 2010 study in the International Journal of
Wilderness. The Lincoln County deal was saddled with a raft of such
provisions. The Owyhee deal, given a thumbs-up by such groups as Pew and
the Wilderness Society, lets ranchers corral cattle using motorized
vehicles, which is supposed to be forbidden in wilderness. The result of
such compromises, Barns and others say, are areas known as
WINOs—”wilderness in name only.”

Another problem with these exceptions is that they become boilerplate for
future bills, Barns says. A provision that first appeared in 1980 has since
turned up in more than two dozen wilderness laws. Such changes might seem
small, says Barns, but they erode, bit by bit, America’s last wild
places....
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