The Nation's Largest Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West by James R. Skillen

Author:James R. Skillen [Skillen, James R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Land Use, United States, Public Affairs & Administration, Political Science, State & Local, West (AK; CA; CO; HI; ID; MT; NV; UT; WY), History, Law
ISBN: 9780700616718
Google: d0t2PgAACAAJ
Goodreads: 6631515
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2009-01-15T11:22:21+00:00

BLM NATIONAL MONUMENTS AND THE CLINTON LEGACY

As Secretary Babbitt traveled throughout the West, on the run from a Republican Congress, he found a new opportunity to reshape some public lands management around the ecosystem management approach: the designation and planning of BLM national monuments created largely for ecosystem or landscape protection.89 Babbitt had started his tenure with an attack on the most powerful symbols of the BLM’s nineteenth-century legacy, grazing and mining fees, with mixed results; he ended with national monument designations that symbolized what he saw as the BLM’s twenty-first-century mission.

Under the Antiquities Act of 1906, the president is authorized to designate federal lands as national monuments and to place new land use restrictions on the monuments in order to protect “objects of historic or scientific interest.”90 Although Congress most likely passed the act to protect small archeological sites, it contains no acreage limitations or clear definition of what qualifies as an object of scientific or historical interest. What is more, national monument designations require no public notice or participation and no congressional approval. President Theodore Roosevelt demonstrated the act’s expansive power in 1908, when he created the more than 800,000-acre Grand Canyon National Monument in order to stop development on the canyon’s rim. He argued that the entire canyon was an object of scientific interest. The record in terms of size goes to President Carter, who, as noted in the previous chapter, designated roughly a dozen national monuments in Alaska totaling 54 million acres.91 Most other presidents have used the act to help build the national park system, to stop specific types of development, and to break congressional gridlock.

Prior to the Clinton administration, the BLM had never managed a national monument, although many National Park Service monuments had been created from the public lands. BLM employees had often lobbied against national monument designations in order to keep lands under BLM management and had lobbied against a number of other special land designations, like wilderness, in order to maintain maximum management flexibility in the field. For many people in the BLM this pattern reinforced the idea that the BLM lands were the leftovers suited largely for commercial use.92

The idea of a BLM national monument, then, certainly did not come from within the agency, nor did it come through a carefully crafted plan from the Interior Department. Instead, according to Secretary Babbitt, the idea came from one of President Clinton’s campaign strategists, who noticed that environmental issues were beginning to poll higher in 1995 and 1996 and argued that the president needed a dramatic environmental gesture that would grab news headlines just before the election.93 Since the administration wanted to keep it a secret, the Antiquities Act was a perfect tool for a dramatic land conservation gesture without prior congressional debate or public notice.

According to Secretary Babbitt, the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument idea rose to the top of the list immediately.94 It is a vast, remote, and rugged area in southern Utah that is ringed by national parks and other national monuments.

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