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or, for that matter, of
any of the Basin and Range deserts, in the National Park System. Which is all
the more reason to take an expansive approach to wilderness designations. There is another urgent argument for putting these desert lands into the wilderness system soon: they are rapidly being destroyed by vandalism, road building, and the scourge of off-road vehicles. Once damaged, the desert heals very slowly and sometimes not at all. In parts of Southern Arizona you can still see the rutted tracks where the old Butterfield Stage ran more than a century ago. In California the mysterious aboriginal figures traced in the desert surface have been effaced by off-road vehicles. In California a BLM plan to open the Panamint Dunes study area to off-road vehicles was stopped only by legal action. And road building has occurred in study areas adjacent to Death Valley and Capital Reef National Park. The Bureau does not understand these realities; it seems to know the subsidized price of everything and the long-term value of nothing. Here and there in the West, the Bureau has some top-flight managers. But the tone is set at the top, and in Washington the Bureau is held in thrall by energy companies, mining corporations, and livestock lobbies. And it is they who have turned the BLM wilderness process into a sham. The task for wilderness advocates is to mobilize direct political support for a congressional override of the BLM process. At Aravaipa and in the Arizona strip country north of the Grand Canyon we have already done just that, thanks to the leadership of Mo Udall. We intend to do the same for the balance of our state. The BLM wilderness recommendation for Arizona so far is a modest 523,323 acres. In response I have written our congressional delegation and the Bureau with a detailed recommendation for 1.5 million acres in 51 areas. The outcome of the BLM wilderness process will not be the result of a tidy technocratic process, full of statistics, reports, and endless evaluations. Instead, it is likely to be a political brawl, matching wilderness advocates against the traditional constituencies of the BLM. The verdict is still uncertain, but the West is changing and coming to terms with its true heritage. It is growing with people who came here to enjoy, understand, and protect the incomparable western environment. This time I'm betting that the good guys, with a lot of help from the rest of the nation, will win. BRUCE BABBIT is governor of Arizona. |
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| Several years ago I
hiked with my wife through a BLM holding in Southern Arizona called Aravaipa
Canyon. We started out on a languid October afternoon, following the headwaters
from Salazar Ranch down into the deep canyon that cuts across the Galiuro
Mountains. Along that sparkling stream, sunlight filtered through chalky white
sycamore branches, back-lighting great stands of golden cottonwoods and Arizona
Ash. We made camp that night in a thicket of ancient mesquite trees known as Horse Camp. In the early morning the sun lit up the cliffs above us, and there we saw five Bighorn sheep walking nonchalantly along the edge, profiled against the morning sky. Since I took that hike, the secrets of Aravaipa have become well known, and Congress responded in 1983 by designating 6,700 acres in the heart of the Canyon as wilderness. But that wasn't enough; the tributary canyons and rims must also be included. Last month the state of Arizona worked out a land exchange with the BLM that will place another 51,000 acres of that tributary and rim country within BLM's Aravaipa management unit. The story of Aravaipa is what ought to be happening all over the West. But Aravaipa is still the exception; it came to pass through the efforts of an uncommonly creative state BLM director named Dean Bibles, a lot of public support, and the good offices of two powerful elected officials, Congressman Morris Udall and Senator Barry Goldwater. In most of Arizona and the West, BLM wilderness is still a forlorn cause. Part of the problem is lack of public understanding and support for wilderness. It is partly an image problem: all too many people still think of BLM lands as the great American desert, the leftover scraps after the good lands were given to homesteaders, the Forest Service, and the National Park Service. The other problem is summed up in a |
western saying: BLM
means Bureau of Livestock and Mining. The mining companies, accustomed to
unimpeded and absolute access under the Mining Law of 1872, are fiercely
opposed to a change of status. Ranchers, whose use of the land would not be
terminated by wilderness designation, are nonetheless fearful of change and
increased supervision of grazing practices. Together, these two interests make
a formidable lobby that cannot be moved out of the congressional road except by
a strong show of public support for wilderness. There are special BLM places all over the West. In Arizona the essential West is contained in two areas, the Colorado Plateau and the Basin and Range Province. The Plateau and the Basin and Range country have no true counterparts anywhere on the planet; they are to deserts what Nepal and the Himalayas are to mountains. The canyonlands of the Colorado Plateau are the places described by Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire. Some of them-Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce, Arches, and Canyonlands-are in the National Park System. But out beyond the parks is an architectural fantasyland of hidden canyons and mesas, harboring precious water and wildlife, ancient cliff dwellings, and the rock art of vanished tribes. A generous BLM wilderness system would tie the isolated national parks and monuments together into an incomparable regional resource, unique in the world. Down below the Colorado Plateau to the west and south is the Basin and Range province, a land of flat desert valleys and rugged fault block mountains. In Arizona, we call it the Sonoran Desert. Joseph Wood Krutch wrote a book, The Living Desert, that taught us to see in this land a profusion of perfectly adapted interdependent plant and animal life. The symbol of Arizona, carnegiea gigantea, the Saguaro Cactus, grows here and nowhere else. There is not much of the Sonoran Desert, |
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| Reprinted by permission of the Wilderness Society | WILDERNESS SUMMER 1989 |