The Wilderness Wars

When the New York Times  recently editorialized in favor of the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, a lot of us here in the Northern Rockies rolled our eyes. The bill, introduced by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), would designate more than 20 million acres of the Mountain West as wilderness, but it has almost no chance of passing, mainly because of intense local opposition. And if you support NREPA, (as plenty of people in the West actually do) the Times editorial had the unfortunate effect of reinforcing one of the chief local arguments against the legislation: It’s the brainchild of high-minded liberals from New York who want to tell Westerners how to manage their backyards.

If the Times were less tone-deaf on Western issues, it would also have recognized that it was editorializing about the wrong bill. For anyone interested in the wilderness policy debate, the relevant piece of recently introduced legislation is not NREPA, but rather Montana Senator Jon Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act. The Tester bill’s designation of about 680,000 acres of new wilderness in Montana hardly shows the sweeping commitment to conservation embodied in NREPA, and many of Tester’s fellow Democrats are not too impressed. But it actually has a chance of becoming law – and represents an increasingly influential approach to conservation politics.