Congress is considering permanent protection for 26 million acres of beautiful and historic landscapes in the American West, but has quietly excluded millions of acres of California desert.
In a system that would rival the national parks and forests, the National Landscape Conservation Act would unify the management and funding for areas such as the original Pony Express National Historic Trail, Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, a million acres of Alaskan caribou calving grounds, 38 wild rivers, Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and a tiny ghost town near the Mexican border.
But more than half of the 10.6 million-acre California Desert Conservation Area, which stretches from the Mexican border to Mono Lake, has been dropped on technical grounds. Because the word "national" isn't in its title, the conservation area doesn't qualify, according to U.S. Bureau of Land Management attorneys.
Environmental watchdogs and some land bureau employees say the California area, created by Congress in 1976, is the cornerstone of the fledgling national system. They say the semantics hide political motives: Utility companies have proposed hundreds of miles of electrical transmission corridors through California's deserts, and off-road vehicle enthusiasts oppose further regulation of the area.
"I don't think this is a technicality at all . . . That's a huge hit to desert conservation in California and the Southwest," said Daniel Patterson, director of the southwest office of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which represents whistle-blowers in government agencies.
The bill does include the King Range National Conservation Area, the Headwaters Forest Reserve, the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument, and just under half -- 3.7 million acres -- of the desert conservation area. Not included are more than 6 million acres of desert. Some of the land has been used for mining and off-roading, but much of it remains pristine, wide-open space.
Patterson said that if the bureau's entire California desert system isn't part of the national system, its conservation designation "would be a protection in name only . . . The California BLM will lose funding, they will lose staff, they'll lose what conservation focus they might have."
