How Wendy Van Asselt and her friends made 26 million acres disappear

By: Ron Arnold
Examiner Columnist
September 28, 2010

Environmental activist Wendy Van Asselt was at the World Resources Institute in 2003 when officials from the Wilderness Society made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.

They wanted her to lead a huge project to remove 26 million acres of federal land in the National Landscape Conservation System (NLCS) from oil and gas production, grazing, timber harvesting, mining for strategic minerals, off-road recreation, and providing rural jobs.

Van Asselt was a logical choice for the job since she had shown in her position at WRI — and previously at the Mineral Policy Center, with its shrill “No Dirty Gold” campaign — that she had a decided preference for stopping natural resource development, especially on federal lands.

The Wyss Foundation would fund the new project, thanks to a Wilderness Society board member, Hansjorg Wyss, a Swiss entrepreneur whose net worth was estimated at $6 billion. The Hewlett Foundation would also give $1 million to the project.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which managed the NLCS, would be cooperative, too, since stopping all those productive activities would require real authority for the system, authority that would give it a real budget, and it didn’t have either of them. The BLM would need help in persuading Congress to go along.

That was because Bruce Babbitt, President Clinton’s secretary of interior, had created the NLCS in 2000 by bureaucratic decree without first getting congressional approval. His “system” was really just a bureaucratic name for more than 800 existing BLM areas, each authorized separately, all created for various purposes, at various times, under various laws, with various budgets.

So, Van Asselt’s new job would be to get Congress to authorize Babbitt’s NCLS and give it a real budget. The graduate of Smith College (economics) and Harvard (master’s in public policy) would soon prove very much up to the challenge.

By the end of 2004, Van Asselt had organized a coalition of 50 anti-development groups to cover the NCLS’ far-flung units. She had also tapped a former colleague to help wangle the National Trust for Historic Preservation into putting the entire NLCS on its popular “Most Endangered Places” report card. That in turn prompted an invitation from the National Academy of Sciences to co-author an article for its main publication.

Since 2005 was the fifth “birthday” of NLCS, Van Asselt used it for a celebratory blitz and a forum to keep up her finely tuned attack on developers who opposed stopping development on the 26 million acres Van Asselt was eyeing. She clearly understood the game and made things happen.

It was a classic Washington iron triangle: The TWS folks loved her; the funders loved her, and the BLM loved her. Soon, some key members of Congress would love Van Asselt, too.

The BLM’s Elena Daly, director of the NLCS, began working closely with Van Asselt. Daly’s official appointment book includes multiple entries indicating she and Van Asselt regularly shared lunch and other meetings.

By 2006, BLM, TWS, and the funders (who ultimately poured more than $5 million into the campaign) knew Van Asselt was a political whiz kid. With Van Asselt’s close ties to the BLM, she could do what BLM couldn’t, which was informally tell Congress what the agency sought for NCLS. It had to be done discreetly, however, because few congressmen were likely to vote for the kind of NCLS that Van Asselt and her allies at BLM really wanted.

Multiple congressional sources point to creation of the NLCS Caucus in Congress in 2006 as the key development in Van Asselt’s campaign, convinced that it was suggested by her to Arizona Democrat Rep. Raul Grijalva, the ultra-green chairman of the National Parks, Forests and Public Lands Subcommittee of the House Natural Resources Committee.

Grijalva, who was Van Asselt’s most important congressional ally, convened the bipartisan caucus, selected three co-chairmen — Reps. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., and Rep. Rick Renzi, R-Ariz. — and grew the caucus into an instrument of power.

Regardless who suggested the caucus, Van Asselt was clearly counting votes on the Hill, as shown in a June 27, 2006, e-mail from her to Daly in which she gleefully reported that Rep. Sue Kelly, R-N.Y., had just joined the newly formed caucus.

“Bring on the Rs!” Van Asselt crowed. “Keep ‘em coming!”

Then, on April 4, 2007, Van Asselt left TWS to work for House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., as a member of the panel’s Democratic legislative staff. It was the perfect position from which Van Asselt could guide NCLS across the finish line, because the job put her at the coordinating center of the iron triangle pushing for the project.

Shortly after Van Asselt was hired by Rahall, Grijalva introduced the first NLCS bill, which was barely a page long, with only a vague paragraph authorizing the new system, and listing Bureau of Land Management areas to be included.

Republican legislators were horrified. “This bill goes well beyond a codification of what already exists,” their bill report said. “The [NLCS] is to be managed “in a manner that protects the values for which the components of the system were designated. The term `values’ is a wholly new concept to the BLM,” plucked from a national parks bill “to purposefully mandate broad and vague new management practices” with “this nebulous, malleable term.”

The National Park Service enforces things like “viewscapes,” “soundscapes,” and “smellscapes” — indefinable concepts inappropriate for productive BLM lands.

“For us to pass legislation to enforce legislatively undefined ‘values’ on a vast, resource rich part of the country is an unacceptable abdication of our responsibility as the policy setting branch of the government,” the Republicans concluded.

Grijalva’s 2007 bill went nowhere, but Van Asselt’s work as a Rahall legislative staffer in keeping information flowing to the interested parties within and without government paid off two years later.

In January 2009, Grijalva’s NLCS bill was lumped into the grab bag Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, which passed Congress and was signed into law March 30, 2009, by President Obama.


Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/OpEd-Contributor/Ron-Arnold--103896534.html#ixzz10oY4ghiy

Scientists use conservation lands as 'outdoor lab'

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - In the Robledo Mountains of southern New Mexico, an international team of scientists spent the past week toiling under the desert sun, searching for clues to help them better understand what life was like along a prehistoric shoreline.

Layer after layer, the mudstone at Prehistoric Trackways National Monument has offered up the tracks of reptiles and jumping insects and even the imprints of jellyfish. There are fossil logs and plants that predate the dinosaur age by tens of millions of years.

"We see this as a window to a lost world," said Jerry MacDonald, who was a student at New Mexico State University when he stumbled upon the trackways in 1987.

The monument contains some of the most scientifically significant early Permian trackways in the world. It's one of dozens of units within the National Landscape Conservation System that scientists are using as a vast outdoor laboratory.

The National Landscape Conservation System, or NLCS, is celebrating its 10th anniversary.

Officials have planned a weeklong symposium in Albuquerque to highlight discoveries made within the system - from the prehistoric tracks in southern New Mexico to the fossils of new dinosaur species at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah.

"We're trying to get the word out and hopefully get people to start thinking about these lands in a different way," said Marietta Eaton, science coordinator for NLCS in Washington, D.C. "They're not just out there so you can go out and recreate. They have some amazing, amazing resources and discoveries left to be made."

Covering more than 27 million acres, the system includes 886 federally recognized areas in 12 Western states - national monuments, national conservation areas, wilderness, wild and scenic rivers, scenic and historic trails and conservation lands.

It's all managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

Eaton said the conservation system guarantees that special places will be protected for generations and scientists like MacDonald won't have to worry about development or other variables interfering with long-term research projects.

Kevin Mack of The Wilderness Society said the system's simple mission statement focuses on conservation, protection and restoration of significant landscapes. The key, he said, is that it recognizes lands that have scientific value.

"What we know about the world is much different now than it was 100 years ago. These places give us a chance to continue to do that research and take a glimpse back and see the world maybe as it was and maybe learn some new things," he said.

Mack pointed to the Snowy River cave passage in southern New Mexico, where researchers have found what is believed to be the world's largest continuous mineral cave decoration - a solid river of tiny white calcite crystals that stretches more than 4.7 miles.

On the cave walls is a black manganese oxide crust that's inhabited by microorganisms.

Scientists are looking to the cave to learn more about the region's climatic history, the mysterious microbes and the relationship between ground and surface water sources.

"You've got a cave there that is unlike anything else ever seen in the world, and it's revealing dates for events that have happened climatically for tens of thousands of years. That's very profound to have that kind of information," Eaton said.

Back at the trackways monument, MacDonald recalled the first time he cracked open a slab and found a handful of consecutive tracks in pristine condition. He knew on a summer day more than 20 years ago that he was on to something.

His work paid off last year, when the area was designated as a national monument and added to the conservation system.

MacDonald was joined over the past week by scientists from England, Germany, the Smithsonian Institute and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History. Their interests ranged from animal tracks to fossil plants.

"You get all of these guys coming to this new national monument and they're all working together, studying different types of fossils, and it's just really exciting," MacDonald said. "We've got all of it in one place."

Preservationist: More must be done to save lands

Public lands protected by legal designations such as "national monument" aren't necessarily fully protected, a recognized conservation expert said Thursday in Great Falls.

"Satan never sleeps," said Edward M. Norton, a senior environmental adviser to TPG Capital, L.P., a private equity firm in San Francisco. "Somebody always has a bad idea and wants to do something."

Norton was the keynote speaker Thursday at the 7th Annual Statewide Preservation Workshop sponsored by the Montana Preservation Alliance, the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation and the Great Falls-Cascade County Historic Preservation Commission.

Norton, 67, spent three decades working to protect areas from development for groups such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation and The Wilderness Society.

He currently is chairman of the National Conservation System Foundation. The foundation is designed to protect, restore and expand National Landscape Conservation System Lands, a class of 27 million acres managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management.

The system was initiated under the watch of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in the late 1990s. Norton called it the "last of the great land conservation systems of the United States" and said it would be up to groups such as the Friends of the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument in Montana to protect these places.

"They're not protected unless there's somebody there watching out for their protection," Norton said.

It is a misperception that laws lead to protection of land, Norton said. In fact, it is local organizations and residents that "grind it out year after year" pressing for preservation who truly protects land, he said.

Even after laws are enacted, watchdogs need to "ride herd" on land managers who write the plans managing the protected areas, Norton said.

Though threats exist, Norton said he is impressed with land protections in the United States, as well as with how the country explains the historical and cultural context of special places. He pointed to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls as an example of the type of education about areas provided in the U.S. that is absent in countries such as China and Indonesia.

The conference drew about 75 people, including public land managers, farmers, ranchers and conservationists, said Chere Jiusto, executive director of the Montana Preservation Alliance.

The theme of this year's conference was "Preserving Montana's Signature Landscapes."

Jiusto said the state of Montana was the only one in the nation to set aside $4 million in federal stimulus funding for preservation grants.

Gloria Flora, the former supervisor of the Lewis and Clark National Forest, who is now the director of Sustainable Obtainable Solutions, shared the keynote address with Norton.

When she was forest supervisor, Flora made the decision to ban natural gas and oil exploration on the Rocky Mountain Front, one of Montana's premier large landscapes.

Places such as the Front have ecological values that exceed what any human can put on the landscape, said Flora, recalling that developers with "glossy brochures" tried to convince the U.S. Forest Service to allow development on the Front.

"Absolutely incredible landscape," she said.