Salazar must reverse bad trend toward 'no more wilderness'

But nearly two years into his term, and in spite of his recent orders to federal land managers to make conservation their primary focus, the secretary appears to be twiddling his thumbs while the worst of policies from Bush and from Salazar's predecessor Gale Norton rolls merrily along: That's the "no more wilderness" agreement struck between then-Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt and then-interior secretary Gale Norton back in 2003. It was to have affected only the Beehive State -- and that would've been bad enough, given eastern Utah's gorgeous-but-threatened vistas. But next thing environmentalists knew, this ya basta policy applied nationwide to Bureau of Land Management jurisdiction. That could be devastating to our part of the country, where wildernesses -- those officially designated and those dying to be -- are most often found. A century and a half after serious industrialization of the West began, there are still stretches that need saving; Otero Mesa, south of Carlsbad, that stretch of Chihuahuan Desert grassland where antelope and other animals often struggle to survive, is a prime candidate. It's also a prime target of the drill-and-despoil lobby. Ideally, Secretary Salazar would rescind the Utah agreement, which has all the high-handedness of the Ulysses Grant-administration giveaways of the American West. But if he can't see his way to doing that, he must clarify Interior Department policy to say, loud and clear, that whatever deal was cut with Utah is not -- repeat not -- department policy. Gov. Bill Richardson, standing up for the environment in the fading days of his term, has written to the secretary asking him to rescind his predecessor's deal and her policy. For good measure, he's asking Salazar to make use of his department's wilderness-study powers while there's still wilderness to save...more