Reporting from Arches National Park, Utah — Kate Cannon gazed across the high red desert to the snowy La Sal Mountains rising in sharp relief at the horizon. That view of uninterrupted nature is what draws nearly a million yearly visitors to this remote part of southeast Utah.
"Look at the mountains," said Cannon, superintendent of Arches and neighboring Canyonlands national parks. "You can see them. Part of the majesty of this country is the grand sweeping views. The visitors do love it."
Cannon has been focusing on this view after the federal Bureau of Land Management decided in November to auction oil and gas leases on 360,000 acres of public land in Utah, including 93 parcels on or near the boundaries of these parks and nearby Dinosaur National Monument.
The leasing decision was put on hold by a judge Jan. 17, after protests from the park service and environmentalists who complained that the view from the famed sandstone arches and spires would be despoiled by the new roads, heavy equipment, drilling platforms and veil of dust that would accompany the exploration for fossil fuels.
But it is only a temporary victory on the heels of what some in the park service see as a string of defeats in which the nation's parks often acquiesced to the encroachment of commercial interests and energy projects during the eight years of the Bush administration. Among the recently approved projects is a uranium mine two miles from a Grand Canyon visitors center.
Critics of the Bush administration -- former park directors among them -- say its emphasis on commerce over conservation left a legacy that the national parks could be grappling with for decades to come.
Though some of President Bush's actions could be erased with a stroke of his successor's pen, other policies, such as exploration and drilling leases, could take months or years of costly effort to undo -- and would probably be subject to legal challenges.
A hint of the new administration's approach came on President Obama's first day in office, when he put on hold a number of controversial, last-minute environmental rules rushed in by Bush administration officials.
Current and former officials say the National Park Service has taken an unaccustomed back seat to its sister agency, the Bureau of Land Management, which began calling the shots on public lands. The BLM handles the bulk of federal oil and gas leasing that Bush said was key to increasing the nation's energy independence.
