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 * Xposted: msg originally in Sierra Club


   Yep, Stan Gloeckner wrote to All on 10 Jun 95  15:46:00 
    about:   U.S. Public Lands     1/3:

  WAR ON THE ENVIRONMENT --
  BATTLEGROUND WIDENS to U.S. PUBLIC LANDS 

  by B.J. Bergman 

  "The art of war is simple enough," said Ulysses S. Grant. "Find out 
  where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as 
  hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on." 

  General Grant -- who could not have guessed that the 1872 Mining Law,
  enacted during his presidency, would become a lasting legacy to 
  polluters -- seems to have anticipated the War on the Environment. 

  Some hundred days after storming the capital, the forces that struck 
  at environmental protection with the Contract With America are clearly
  moving on. In fact, if you live near a national park, forest or 
  wilderness area, you're probably in their line of fire. 

  Where the Contract aimed to roll back a quarter-century of public 
  health, safety and environmental safeguards via intricate "anti-
  regulatory" maneuvers, the mission now is to take control of publicly 
  held land: 

  -- Alaska's powerful congressional delegation has set its sights on 
  opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling, 
  and on stripping protection from Tongass National Forest. 

  -- Utah's governor and congressional delegation are banding together 
  to grant developers access to millions of acres of currently protected
  wild lands. 

  -- America's forests are under renewed assault in the House and 
  Senate, both of which have passed bills to substantially expand timber
  cutting and sales.  National parks are being targeted for further 
  development and possible closure. 

  -- The Endangered Species Act, including its provisions for 
  designating critical habitat for species in need of protection, is 
  threatened by funding cuts, a freeze on implementation and the 
  likelihood of a major overhaul later this year. 

  If such initiatives sound familiar, it's because they -- or measures 
  like them -- have been on anti-environmentalists' wish lists for 
  years. And, as they did in the successful fight to protect the Arctic 
  Refuge in 1991, Sierra Club and other activists have been working 
  vigorously for years to hold the line. The political landscape, 
  however, has been turned upside-down. 

  "The anti-environmental agenda is nothing new," observed Vicky Hoover,
  a veteran of numerous wilderness battles, including the Arctic Refuge 
  campaign. "Their ability to work effectively for that agenda, that's 
  what's new." 



  *Logging Without Laws' 

  Nowhere is the change more dramatic than in Alaska, whose three-
  member Republican delegation rose to prominence -- and dominance -- 
  with the GOP takeover of Congress last November. 

  In the Senate, Frank Murkowski now chairs the Energy and Natural 
  Resources Committee, while Ted Stevens is the No. 2 Republican on the 
  influential Appropriations Committee. Alaska's lone member of the 
  House, Rep. Don Young, heads what used to be called the Natural 
  Resources Committee; the new leaders of the House dropped "natural" 
  from the title. 

  The revised nomenclature is apt. Young, one of the nation's most 
  outspoken allies of the pollution lobby -- he recently termed 
  environmentalists "the most despicable group of individuals I've ever 
  been around" -- has made oil exploration in the 1.5 million-acre 
  coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge a pet project. He reportedly plans 
  to hold field hearings on the subject this summer, while Murkowski 
  means to send a bill to permit drilling to the Senate floor in 
  October. 

  Murkowski is also expected to sponsor a bill to privatize and open to
  logging nearly 650,000 acres of Tongass National Forest, in 
  southeastern Alaska. While the measure purports to benefit Native 
  Alaskans, environmentalists say it merely uses indigenous land claims 
  as a pretext for turning over public lands to private timber 
  corporations. 

  Murkowski, who introduced his bill on the final day of the 103rd 
  Congress, had threatened to bring it to the 104th by early March. To 
  date, it has not been reintroduced, a delay for which Pam Brodie, an 
  associate representative in the Club's Alaska field office, credits 
  grassroots resistance. 

  "We've been mobilizing opposition," Brodie said. Besides 
  environmentalists and many Native Alaskans, opponents include sport 
  hunters and fishers, who hope to preserve the fish and wildlife that 
  would be lost to clearcutting in the Tongass. 

  (Continued to next message)

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