Public Lands

Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket. Clustered nearby are hangar-sized assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors -- each the size of a garage door -- are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California's eastern border.

CADIZ, Calif. - Three decades ago a group of businessmen pored over NASA satellite imagery as part of a worldwide hunt for large groundwater reserves they could tap to grow desert crops. They found the signs they were looking for here in the sun-blasted mountain ranges and creosote-freckled valleys of the Mojave Desert, 200 miles east of Los Angeles. The group, which founded Cadiz Inc., bought old railroad land, drilled wells and planted neat grids of citrus trees and grapevines, irrigating them with water that bubbled out of the desert depths at the rate of 2,000 gallons a minute.

CADIZ, Calif. - Three decades ago a group of businessmen pored over NASA satellite imagery as part of a worldwide hunt for large groundwater reserves they could tap to grow desert crops. They found the signs they were looking for here in the sun-blasted mountain ranges and creosote-freckled valleys of the Mojave Desert, 200 miles east of Los Angeles. The group, which founded Cadiz Inc., bought old railroad land, drilled wells and planted neat grids of citrus trees and grapevines, irrigating them with water that bubbled out of the desert depths at the rate of 2,000 gallons a minute.

Anticipating the bitter battle to come, governors from five Western states will meet in Salt Lake City on Friday to devise strategies to convince Washington to give them more control over federal land within their own boundaries. Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, who will host fellow governors from Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming, says Western states need unity in their stance against federal control of millions of acres of land. He says burdensome regulations restrict energy development and limit recreational access in states where the federal government owns a majority of the land.

We are grateful to The Times for mentioning the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund in your Nov. 4 editorial. Regrettably, hardly anyone knows about this excellent program, which helps consolidate our national parks and other priceless public lands that are so valuable to America's future. Lack of public awareness of the LWCF allows Congress to divert these special funds from their rightful purpose without the angry outcry that might otherwise be heard. Nearly $1 billion is collected annually from offshore oil revenue specifically for public lands, but only a paltry 15% gets used as authorized.

At Utah's 1.9-million acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the issue du jour is who controls the remote dirt roads popular with hikers. In August, a Kane County commissioner and the local sheriff pulled up 31 signs installed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management that banned ATVs and motorcycles. Commissioner Mark Habbeshaw said too many BLM restrictions were being placed on residents. "We need to rely on public access," he said. "Instead, we're being treated like a national park."

Re "GOP Drops Bill to Rein In Laws on Environment," March 6: A battle has been won, but the victory in the war against pollution is still up for grabs. The GOP House has found that the American public will not accept the gutting of our environmental laws. However, battles are still being fought in the federal and state budget processes. Even now, funding cuts to regulatory agencies are preventing those laws from being enforced. When you combine these yearly funding cutbacks with appointed agency heads who refuse to collect fees that go to help fund their departments, the air, water, land and wildlife of this country are still in danger.

The fastest-growing wildlife on U.S. public lands may be illegal drug producers. Two congressional subcommittees will hold a joint field hearing Friday at Wuksachi Village and Lodge in Sequoia National Park to investigate increases in drug production within the boundaries of national parks and forests. According to law enforcement figures, almost 600,000 marijuana plants, 187 meth labs and 120 meth dump sites were destroyed on public lands in 2002.

Re "Cabinet Official Norton Resigns," March 11 Gale M. Norton's five-year tenure as Interior secretary has irreparably damaged our country. Under her leadership, employees in the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service have been demoralized into leaving their positions -- replaced by people who don't mind giving away our public lands to the energy and timber industries. Our national parks are in their worst shape ever. Now Norton intends to visit her cherished Western mountains.

Staff writer Deborah Schoch's article "An Axle to Grind" (Oct. 23) was a fine example of why urban readers have such different attitudes about public lands than small-town and rural residents. While Schoch terms John Gatchell as an "investigative hiker," it's not for nine paragraphs that she finally gets around to mentioning that Gatchell is a green activist, hired by the Montana Wilderness Assn. in 1985 and now its conservation director. Unlike his opponents trying to retain access to public land for play and for work, Gatchell is paid for, as Schoch put it, his "preaching."

For the birds Re " Seabird rescues up sharply ," March 7 So, oil seeping naturally from the ocean floor off Santa Barbara is to blame for all these oil-soaked birds. I have a hard time believing that's all there is to it. Oil companies have drilled many a hole into the sea floor over the last 60-plus years and have sucked out many millions of barrels of crude. Surely that wouldn't have anything to do with leaks? Growing up in Long Beach and surfing Bolsa Chica in the early 1960s, I got used to cleaning tar off my feet, but it seemed that Huntington was as far south as the oil drifted back then.

Like much else in government, U.S. public land policy is a vestige of the past, established in 1910 when America's population was just 92.2 million and a Western state such as Nevada had only 81,000 residents. Today our needs are much different and much greater. The United States can no longer afford to keep tens of millions of acres of "public" land locked up and out of service. Some of these lands have great commercial value; others are environmental treasures. We need policies capable of distinguishing between the two. Few Easterners realize the immense magnitude of the public lands.

Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket. Clustered nearby are hangar-sized assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors -- each the size of a garage door -- are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California's eastern border.

The military, like any other government agency, cannot allow people to install large religious symbols wherever they want on public property. Once in place for any length of time, those symbols (and usually that means a cross) tend to be seen as established markers, and proposals to remove them are wrongly viewed as anti-religion and, specifically, anti-Christian. That's what has happened yet again after two large crosses were set on a hill at Camp Pendleton. One was erected in 2003 by Marines who would later be killed in the Iraq war. That cross burned down in 2007 but was replaced a year later.

During my long career with the U.S. Forest Service, people frequently expressed their concerns about the management of public lands to me when I'd run into them at the grocery store or on a hiking trail. One of the main issues they brought up had to do with the relationship between timber harvests and county budgets. Here's the dilemma. Counties traditionally rely on property taxes to fund basic services and education. But local governments cannot tax national forest land, and many Western states have a high percentage of their land in federal ownership.

In a sunny park overlooking the beach in Santa Monica, where a cool breeze blows in from the Pacific, the so-called war over Christmas has found its latest battlefield. Over almost six decades, a collection of Santa Monica's Christian churches have re-created the sprawling, life-sized Nativity scenes of Jesus Christ's birth. But this year, there's no room in the park. PHOTOS: Battle over Christmas displays Atheist groups objected to churches' use of the public Palisades Park to espouse a religious message and applied to the city of Santa Monica for their own spaces.

"Bush Oil, Gas Bid Skirts Key Issues" (Aug. 12) misrepresented the Bush administration's intentions regarding oil and gas leasing on public lands. The administration has not called for the opening up of Western lands for energy exploration. We have not called for energy exploration in any of the national monuments proclaimed in the final months of the previous administration. The goals of this administration are clear: to develop a long-term energy strategy that protects our air and water quality, promotes more efficient use of energy and increases environmentally safe development of domestic energy, including renewables like wind, solar and geothermal.

A federal appeals court Friday upheld a Clinton administration rule that bans road-building and logging on roughly a quarter of the country's national forestland. The unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the 10th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals could settle one of the most contentious conservation issues of the last decade. The 2001 roadless rule, issued in the final days of the Clinton administration, generated lawsuits, conflicting court opinions and repeal efforts.

National parks and forests will waive entrance fees Saturday in honor of National Public Lands Day . It's a good time to hit the dirt and go exploring or pitch in for trail work or a cleanup somewhere near or far. The deal: The fee-free day means no need to pay $20 per car to go to Yosemite or Sequoia & Kings Canyon national parks or $5 for an Adventure Pass for Southern California's national forests. The free day applies to parks and forests nationwide. When: Free entry applies to Saturday only.