This Sovereign Land: A New Vision For Governing The West

faithfulness.

Introduction

The Lay of the Land

The American West has long been viewed, by its residents and by others, as standing apart from the rest of the United States. Since the early days of America’s history, the West’s distinguishing characteristics and its relationship to the rest of the country have been subjects of analysis, celebration, misunderstanding, and conflict.

This book focuses on the interior West, also known as the Rocky Mountain West, a region that is bordered by but does not include the Great Plains to the east and the Pacific Coast region to the west. Wallace Stegner described the region in relation to its neighbors in terms that fit well with the perspective of this book:

So—the West that we are talking about comprises a dry core of eight public-lands states—Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—plus two marginal areas. The first of these is the western part of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, authentically dry but with only minimal public lands. The second is the West Coast—Washington, Oregon, and California— with extensive arid lands but with well-watered coastal strips and also many rivers.¹

Stegner might have added that the coastal states also have a substantial amount of public land, as does Alaska. For that reason, the dry core must be prepared at least to make political alliance with the Pacific states over public land issues and with the prairie states over a broader range of rural issues. For some purposes, then, both the Plains and the coast are part of the West, as is Alaska, and in some instances this book will treat them as such. But the core of the West, particularly the West whose issues occupy this book, is a region dominated by these features: mountainous terrain, aridity, and public lands.

If any one feature sets the West apart from the rest of the country, it is the power and presence of its landscape. The West is about land, and about the relationship of people to land. No other region comes close to the West’s expansiveness of landscape in proportion to the number of its people, as figure 1 illustrates. But that relatively low population density is only one dimension of the dominance of land and landscape in the region. Land is ubiquitous in every dimension of western life. Ask people why they live in the West and the answer will most often have to do with landscape, far more often than would be the case in any other region. Attend ten public meetings in the West and see how many more of them involve land than would similar meetings anywhere else.

This dominance of land and landscape makes its presence felt in public policy, largely because so much of the West is publicly or tribally owned. In fact, if you map America’s public lands, you have essentially mapped the West, as figure 2 shows. More than 90 percent of all federal land is found in Alaska and the eleven westernmost states of the lower forty-eight—Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Cali f o rnia, Oregon, and Washington. These federal holdings are so vast that they dominate not only the geography but also the politics of the West. Geographically, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) alone own more than 411 million of the roughly 1.2 billion acres that make up Alaska and the eleven lower western states—about 34 percent of the total land area. Nationally owned lands take up an astounding 83 percent of Nevada’s total land base, more than 60 percent of Idaho’s and Utah’s, and more than 45 percent of the land base in four other western states. These lands are owned by the national government and run by its agencies in Washington, D.C. The BLM, the Forest Service, and increasingly the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service have been given primaryresponsibility for managing these vast western acreages.

Figure 1 Population Density by State

Figure 2 United Steate Federal Government Lands

The West is also Indian country, as figure 3 demonstrates. Indian tribes govern roughly one-fifth of the interior West, and as devolution comes to their lands, they control them with less and less federal interference. More than 1 million Indians live in the eleven lower western states, roughly half of them on reservations. Arizona contains the largest percentage of Indian land, with roughly one-third of the state covered by reservations. The largest western reservations are the size of some eastern states, and they are governed at a very high level of complexity and sophistication. Forty reservations maintain their own fish and wildlife operations, for example; twenty-five are members of the Council of Energy Resource Tribes; and thirty offer and regulate casino gambling.²

As figure 4 shows at a glance, by the 1990s the interior West had become (and was expected to continue to be) the country’s fastest-growing region. In terms of percentage of change in population, the five fastest-growing states in the 1990s were all located in the interior West.³ Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho ranked first through fifth, respectively, in percentage of population increase during that decade. New Mexico ranked twelfth and Montana twentieth, with Wyoming trailing the regional pack as the country’s thirty-second fastest-growing state. The regional growth affected both city and countryside. Between 1990 and 1998, the region’s metropolitan areas grew by 25 percent and its rural areas by 18 percent, both rates significantly higher than elsewhere in the United States.⁴ The relentless wave of migration into the mountains puts steadily increasing pressure on all western land, including public land. It also creates growing challenges in terms of regional identity as relative newcomers, less familiar than old-timers with the region and its traditions, become a more dominant force in the West.

Despite the increasingly diverse demographics of the West, by the end of the twentieth century the political geography of the region had become remarkably homogeneous. Whereas much was made in the 1990s of the southern domination of the Republican Party, far less attention was paid to the fact that Republicans exercised even more solid control over the interior West. The maps of districts of the U.S. House of Representatives and of governorships shown in figures 5 and 6 tell that part of the regional story very clearly. Following the 2000 elections, three-quarters of the congressional districts in the interior West were held by Republicans. The story with governorships was even more telling. There were Democratic governors in Missouri and Iowa and in the Pacific Coast states, but none—not one—in the giant, 1,200-mile-wide swath in between.

Figure 3 Tribal Lands in the United States

Figure 4 United States County Population Growth and Decline, 1990–1999

These statistics and maps present a snapshot of the West at the turn of the twenty-first century, capturing some of the features that set the region apart from the rest of the country. But this is a snapshot of a rapidly changing region. Some of the maps may already be outdated by the time this book is published, and others soon after. In fact, what this book predicts is that the map of the West will be substantially redrawn in the coming decades—including the map of the public lands. Such a degree of change can be frightening, and the West sometimes seems nearly paralyzed by the currents sweeping through and around it. But the West has always prided itself on its ingenuity and adaptiveness. The following chapters are offered in that spirit, as a fresh way of understanding where the West has been so that it can more intelligently decide where it should be headed.

Figure 5 Congressional Districts, 107th Congress

Figure 6 Party Affliations of Governors, January 2001

Chapter 1

The Lost Trail

A big wild country just perfect for big wild critters like bears and loggers.

—People for the West

Mandated by the Endangered Species Act of 1973 to increase the number of grizzly bears in the northern Rocky Mountains, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the 1980s identified the Selway-Bitterroot region of Idaho and Montana as one of the few remaining areas big enough and wild enough to sustain a viable population of the wide-ranging, civilization-averse animals. In July 1997, the agency released its draft environmental impact statement (EIS) on grizzly bear restoration in the Selway-Bitterroot ecosystem, giving initial preference to a proposal called the Citizen Management Alternative, which had been drafted by a coalition of conservationists, timber producers, and labor unions. Under this approach, the governors of the two states would appoint a team of citizens to monitor and manage an initially small but then steadily growing population of grizzlies in the Selway-Bitterroot.

Public hearings were duly scheduled on the draft EIS in Salmon, Idaho, and in Hamilton and Missoula, Montana. Among the hundreds of people who showed up to testify, only a handful supported the Citizen Management Alternative. Instead, the bulk of the testimony came alternately from those who opposed the presence of bears in the mountains under any conditions and those who supported wilderness-like protection for most of the northern Rockies, under the theory that with enough habitat free of roads and logging, the bears could and would take care of themselves. The no bears people were dead set against that approach for two reasons. First, it clearly aimed to stop or sharply curtail logging throughout the region, putting even more pressure on the already beleaguered timber-dependent communities in both states. The second threat was even more visceral: it came from the bears themselves. Many threatened and endangered species (think of the northern spotted owl) have themselves come to be seen as threatening to resource-based industries and communities, but few of those species actually eat people. Sometimes grizzlies do, but even when they do not, they scare the daylights out of folks. Not for nothing is this species named Ursus arctos horribilis.

Between the threats of bodily and economic harm, the grizzly reintroduction issue was tailor-made for the politics of fear, and the gears of that politics were duly and instantly engaged. As soon as the Fish and Wildlife Service released the draft EIS, Republican senators Larry Craig of Idaho and Conrad Burns of Montana, declaring that the national government was forcing grizzlies on an unwilling populace, persuaded the Senate Appropriations Committee to add a rider to an appropriation bill preventing any reintroduction of the bears, pending further study on population viability.¹ The real intent, well understood in all quarters, was to put pressure on the Fish and Wildlife Service to keep bears out of the Bitterroot Mountains. Senator Burns’ often-repeated question throughout this phase of the controversy, clearly intended to help the agency see the light, was, What part of ‘No’ don’t the feds understand?²

While conservatives attempted in this way to prevent by federal action any federal action at all, several environmental groups were rousing equally powerful emotions on behalf of the bear by supporting a full-scale invocation of the Endangered Species Act through what they called the Conservation Biology Alternative. At its heart lay habitat.

Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks are the best-known homes of grizzlies in the lower forty-eight states, in part because of news stories of periodic grizzly attacks on sleeping or hiking tourists. But there is also inhabited grizzly country adjacent to the two parks, most notably next to Glacier, with Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park to the north feeding grizzlies into Glacier from the well-populated habitat of the Canadian Rockies, and the Bob Marshall Wilderness and Flathead Indian Reservation extending Glacier’s grizzly habitat southward. To the west, the protected wilderness of the Cabinet Mountains provides another link to the Canadian Rockies.

It was these sizable but scattered pockets and chains of grizzly habitat that underlay the Conservation Biology Alternative in the Selway-Bitterroot. The great dream of conservationists in the northern Rockies had long been to create a continuous chain of linked wildlands through the mountains, from Yellowstone to the Yukon, as a recent recurrence of this dream has begun to put it. The grizzly is the central, indicator species by which the success of this strategy has always been intended to be measured. If the grizzly can travel (or, more important, meet and mate with other grizzlies) from Yellowstone National Park to the Yukon Territory, the ecosystem will be essentially whole. And if not, then not.

Within that picture, the Selway-Bitterroot is an indispensable link, but it will be able to provide the linkage only if logging is sharply reduced and further road building halted in most of the national forests in the greater northern Rockies ecosystem. For years, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies had pursued this goal by drafting a bill to create the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) and repeatedly persuading eastern representatives to introduce it in Congress. For the same number of years, Montana and Idaho congressional delegations, responding primarily to timber companies, sawmill workers, and timber-dependent communities, had made sure NREPA never emerged from any committee. Then, as the Fish and Wildlife Service ground its administrative way through its mandate to expand grizzly populations, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies saw a chance to achieve its grand objective without congressional action. The Conservation Biology Alternative for grizzly bear recovery was wilderness by way of endangered species protection; it was NREPA in administrative clothing. And, of course, its opponents, including Senators Burns and Craig, knew it.

What was surprising about the grizzly controversy, though, was that the senators and the rest of the no bears contingent paid no attention to the make it all wilderness people, who paid them just as little attention in return. Instead, both sides concentrated their opposition on the Citizen Management Alternative. Conservatives opposed it because it would bring bears into the Selway-Bitterroot; environmentalists, because it did not protect enough wilderness and because it took management of the bears out of federal hands and turned it over to Montanans and Idahoans. In both cases, the issue was about territory and, finally, about sovereignty over that territory. If you turn a forest over to bears, you automatically reduce human dominion over that forest. With grizzlies around, humans cannot walk or sleep as sovereignly in the woods as they had before, and given the bears’ legal status as a threatened species, they cannot cut as many trees or build as many roads either. These fears of losing control over the forests were matched from the other end of the political spectrum by the environmentalists’ fear that if locals were allowed to begin managing western forests, the big federal stick of environmental protection would be splintered. From this perspective, the aggressive exercise of national sovereignty appeared crucial to protection of the