Editorial: Public lands

The deal reached in Congress to avoid a government shutdown produced a largely overlooked casualty: an Interior Department policy to reinstate the authority of the Bureau of Land Management to designate wilderness study areas. The agreement among Democrats, Republicans and the White House deleted funding needed by the BLM to do the inventory work on wilderness-quality lands in the West. That’s a gigantic leap backward for public land policy and a betrayal of President Barack Obama’s promise to protect open spaces, water and wildlife from rampant drilling on public lands. The policy announced this year by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar did not plow new ground. It was a reinstatement of legal authority granted years ago by the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which was overridden by a legally suspect agreement in 2003 between then-Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt and Bush Interior Secretary Gale Norton. Salazar rightly overturned that agreement. The new policy says the BLM can inventory lands for wilderness quality and then seek permanent protection for them...more