Near-Miss in Congress For Wilderness Study Areas

More than 2,100 square miles of protected lands in California will keep that status for the time being, as a move to strip wilderness study areas of protection failed Wednesday in the U.S. Senate. Senate Amendment 166, which had been tacked on to the bill approving the Keystone XL Pipeline, would have stripped protection from all wilderness study areas managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service unless Congress agreed within a year to grant those areas full wilderness status. The amendment, which fell ten votes shy on Wednesday of the 60 it would have needed to become part of the Keystone bill, would have effectively ended protection on 80 California wilderness study areas managed by the BLM, covering more than 1,360,000 acres throughout the state. Millions of acres across the country are currently included in wilderness study areas. Wilderness advocates are breathing a sigh of relief, but they point out that this amendment, offered up by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, is just one of the first salvos aimed at public land protection by an increasingly conservative Congress. A pair of bills pending in both houses of Congress, S.228 and H.R.330, for example, would restrict the White House's ability to use the Antiquities Act to designate National Monuments...more

Here's the language in the amendment:

SA 166. Ms. MURKOWSKI (for herself and Mr. SULLIVAN) submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by her to the bill S. 1, to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline; which was ordered to lie on the table; as follows: At the appropriate place, insert the following: SEC. X. RELEASE OF CERTAIN WILDERNESS STUDY AREAS. (a) Bureau of Land Management Land.--With respect to Bureau of Land Management land identified as a wilderness study area and recommended for a wilderness designation under section 603(a) of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (43 U.S.C. 1782(a)), if, within 1 year of receiving the recommendation, Congress has not designated the wilderness study area as wilderness, the area shall no longer be subject to-- (1) section 603(c) of that Act; or (2) Secretarial Order No. 3310 issued by the Secretary of the Interior on December 22, 2010. (b) Fish and Wildlife Service Land.--With respect to land administered by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service that has been recommended by the President or the Secretary of the Interior for designation as wilderness under the Wilderness Act (16 U.S.C. 1131 et seq.), if, within 1 year of receiving the recommendation, Congress has not designated the land as wilderness, the land shall no longer be managed in a manner that protects the wilderness character of the land.

The amendment failed, with 50 yeas and 48 nays.  Heinrich & Udall both voted nay.  The Republicans who voted nay were all from the east except for one: Gardner from Colo.

Here's some excerpts from Senator Murkowski's floor statement

 According to the Congressional Research Service, as of the beginning of this year, Congress has designated 109.8 million acres of Federal land as wilderness. Just over half of this wilderness is in my State of Alaska. We have over 57 million acres of wilderness in Alaska. Ninety percent of the wilderness under the management of the Fish and Wildlife Service is in Alaska.
   As a practical matter, there is more out there. There are more acres that are proposed for wilderness designation. For example, the Bureau of Land Management manages 528 wilderness study areas containing almost 12.8 million acres located primarily in the 12 States in the West as well as Alaska.
   We also have the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has a wilderness study process through its land use planning to identify areas to be proposed as wilderness.
   There is some history as to how we got to dealing with these wilderness study areas. Areas that are identified by agency officials as having certain wilderness characteristics--as identified under the 1964 Wilderness Act--were classified as wilderness study areas. BLM received specific direction in the Federal Land Policy Management Act of 1976 to inventory and study its roadless areas for wilderness characteristics. By 1980 the BLM completed field inventories which designated about 25 million acres of wilderness study areas. Since 1980 Congress has taken a look at some of these. Some have been designated as wilderness and others have been released for nonwilderness uses. The BLM has also taken it upon itself to designate wilderness study areas through its land use process.
   The point here is that once an area has been designated under the BLM or the Fish and Wildlife Service study regime, it effectively becomes de facto wilderness. The designation then limits and restricts the ability to do just about anything for fear that it might impair the suitability of the area for preservation as wilderness.
   Until Congress makes a final determination on a wilderness study area, the BLM or the Fish and Wildlife Service manages these areas to preserve their suitability for designation as wilderness. Even if Congress has not acted--because it is Congress's purview to do so--the agencies have designated it as de facto wilderness.
   My amendment says we are going to change this, and we have to change this. Congress needs to reassert itself into this equation. As the final arbiter of what is or is not designated as wilderness, Congress can and should make the decisions in a timely manner about the wilderness status.
   What my amendment does is pretty simple. If Congress doesn't act within 1 year to designate as wilderness an area recommended for wilderness, the designation is released. It just goes back to multiple use. That way the agencies are not managing areas to preserve a possible wilderness designation as an option for Congress. Instead, they can get on with looking at a broader range of options for how to manage that land with the local people and other interested stakeholders through the land-use planning process that applies to each of the agencies.
   Some may argue that Congress needs more time on this. I would say we have had plenty of time to review these areas. Some of the wilderness study areas have been pending since the 1980s. That is plenty of time to figure out whether they should be put in wilderness status. Congress needs to make decisions.