USA: Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act introduced by NY Congresswomen Maloney
A New York congresswoman has again introduced a wide-reaching
wilderness protection bill that would ban logging, oil exploration and
other development on 23 million acres across five Northwestern states.
As in previous years, the proposal by Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney
drew criticism from some Western lawmakers who view it as an intrusion
on their turf.
The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act would designate millions of new wilderness acreage in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, and add smaller amounts of wilderness in eastern Oregon and eastern Washington. No member of Congress from any of the five states has agreed to co-sponsor the bill, which Maloney has pushed in congress since 2003. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., is a co-sponsor of the latest version. Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., called the bill a “top-down approach” that does not account for impacts on the local economy or adequately protect access for hunting, fishing and other forms of recreation.
“Many of America’s most precious natural resources and wildlife are found in the Northern Rockies,” she said, adding that the wilderness proposal “would help protect those resources by drawing wilderness boundaries according to science, not politics.”
The measure would also mitigate the effect of climate change on wildlife by protecting corridors that allow grizzly bears, caribou, elk, bison, wolves and other wildlife to migrate to cooler areas, she said. The plan would forbid most development across broad swaths of public land in the five states.
It calls for the removal of more than 6,000 miles of existing roads, primarily within national forests. Old logging roads would be removed, and habitat restored in most of those areas, creating about 2,300 jobs and leading to a more sustainable economic base in the region, said Michael Garrity, executive director of the Montana-based Alliance for the Wild Rockies, an advocacy group.
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why the hell does a congresswoman from new york think she can decide what we do with our land? our wilderness is still here because of us, not because some ignorant new yorker told us how to manage it.
It is a canard to speak of federal land as owned by any one group of citizens more than any other. Federal land belongs equally to all U.S. citizens. Each citizen has an equal say in planning and use of federal lands, and consequently each citizens representative has an equal right to address the management of those federal lands. This same issue arose during the Alaska Wilderness bill of 1980, and was shown then to be a false premise.
The reason the congresswoman from NY thinks she should influence the management of these resources is that she has the right to represent the interests of her constituents as they apply to the federal lands in all parts of the country. Those interests, and her right to affect federal land management through legislation, reach to all federal lands. It is the rights of her constituents in which she acts to affect the management of all federal lands, not just those lands in her district, or lands that are in proximity to her constituents.
I for one am glad that this bill would approach conservation from a predominantly scientific point of view and that the overall effect would be to preserve vital ecosystems in sensitive and important areas. For too long we have whittled away at these sensitive ecosystems, making them non-functional through fragmentation, patch size reduction, and interruption of natural processes. The allocation of these wilderness areas would serve the vital function of restoring wildlife habitat and populations and natural ecosystem patterns and processes.
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