Utah wilderness

On Thursday, a congressional subcommittee will hold a hearing for “America’s Red Rock Wilderness” bill, the latest try by New York Democrat Maurice Hinchey to set aside 9.4 million acres of land in Utah as federally protected. (Read the bill here.)
I’ve been writing about this issue for most of the 20 years it has been under consideration, and I have yet to see any real movement toward any serious resolution of the issue.

Three representatives of environmental groups visited the Deseret News editorial board Monday to give their side of this issue. They stressed the need to keep off-road vehicles from indiscriminately destroying the landscape.
That’s an issue on which I would presume there is a lot of consensus. There are plenty of public lands in Utah where ORVs are allowed. They don’t need to venture onto sensitive lands.
I think there also ought to be a consensus on the need to protect areas that are particularly beautiful or fragile.
But I also think a 9.4-million-acre bill from a guy in New York isn’t the way to do it. Not one of Utah’s congressional delegation supports the bill. No one has since Wayne Owens left office.
We’re running an op-ed by Rep. Rob Bishop on Wednesday that says the issue isn’t so much whether to protect certain lands. It is “whether the top-down approach taken in the Hinchey bill is the best way to do it.”
He thinks the process used to pass the Cedar Mountain and Washington County bills is a far better approach.
True, those bills were small wilderness increments that took awhile to pass. But the Hinchey bill (or versions of it) has been floating around Congress since 1989 without so much as an inch of progress.