Dan Berman, E&E Daily senior reporter

Last fall, a coalition of 80 environmental groups urged the large conservation community to stop working with the GOP-controlled Congress on wilderness bills that included land exchanges or exceptions for certain recreation activities. The groups had a simple premise: With a Democratic takeover of the House or Senate possible, why compromise?

The Democrats now control Congress and the legislative calendar, so experts expect the tenor of the wilderness debate to change as committee chairmen who have expressed a greater desire to set aside public lands for future generations assert their authority.

In other words, wilderness bills will be a priority for the Democrats in a way they were not for the Republican leadership.

"They're going to expect wilderness bills and welcome them," said Mike Matz, executive director of the Campaign for America's Wilderness, of Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), House Natural Resource Committee Chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) and House Parks Subcommittee Chairman Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.).

Republican committee heads had other priorities or ideological objections and only got involved in wilderness "because members came to them and said, 'I want to do this, I want to do that,' [and] they had to respond," Matz added.

About 107 million acres of federal land are protected as wilderness in areas managed by the Interior Department and Forest Service, prohibiting any motorized activity, timber harvest or natural resource development. Since each wilderness area is created by an act of Congress, exceptions are often made as the legislation is developed and revised, and wilderness bills often take years to reach the president's desk as community groups, local officials and the state's congressional delegation attempt to reach a consensus everyone -- or nearly everyone -- can live with.

But with wilderness sponsors no longer needing to convince a skeptical Republican Congress, the days of consensus may be over, said Bill Dart, land-use director of the Off-Road Business Association. "The wilderness bills in the past few years under Republican control of the House and Senate were win-win type bills," Dart said. "There was wilderness area for wilderness advocates but also things for other interest groups as well."

New wilderness areas are often opposed by motorized recreation and industry groups such as ORBA, who fear a loss of public access and economic fallout from the designation. "We're back to the old big-wilderness, winner-take-all type of legislation," Dart added.

For its part, the Bush administration has generally supported wilderness designations, often making suggestions on acreage, boundaries and management concerns to the committees and sponsors.

"The agencies are interested in doing things," Matz said. "People within the political appointees are pragmatists. They're not going to be knee-jerk opposed. They are going to raise questions or concerns if they have them as we go through the process."

Under Republican leadership, the 109th Congress sent wilderness bills creating over 1 million acres in six states and Puerto Rico to President Bush. This included a 275,000-acre designation in Northern California and the 11,000-acre Ojtio wilderness near Albuquerque, N.M.

Top Dems concerned

Toward the end of the 109th Congress, the lawmakers who now chair the authorizing committees questioned the connection between wilderness designations and land-exchanges or other land-management provisions.

"I understand any wilderness proposal involves compromise and tradeoff," Bingaman said last year. "I think this balancing has become complicated in recent years in that wilderness proposals are packaged with land sales" and other controversial provisions.

"It's a troubling trend," he added (E&E Daily, Sept. 28, 2006).

On the House floor in November, Rahall praised the New England Wilderness Act for not including extraneous provisions.

"Wilderness is standing on its own here, the benefits of wilderness designation to the local economy, to hunters and fishermen, and to our heritage and future generations of Americans, is on display for all to see," Rahall said. "It is not being coupled, or being debased, with other matters such as the disposal of public lands as the price of obtaining some wilderness designation, as we have seen with a number of other bills considered by this body in recent months."

Janine Blaeloch, executive director of the Western Lands Project and a leader of the effort last fall to convince conservation groups to stop supporting controversial wilderness bills, said the jury is still out on the Democrats. Critics of bills proposed for Nevada, Idaho and Utah last year said the bills were indicative of a quid pro quo approach forcing environmentalists to accept undesirable provisions to get a wilderness or Wild and Scenic River designation. And Blaeloch and others connect such provisions to failed attempts to sell public lands in the House, such as the plan in 2005 from House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) and Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-Nev.) related to the 1872 Mining Law.

"It was not a good thing to have environmental groups promoting privitization bills at the same time they were opposing Pombo's bills. Nobody could mistake the inconsistency," Blaeloch said.

"I would say that the public response to Pombo's schemes was as clear a message as anyone could ask for about public lands being given away," she added. "When you give it away with this drip drip drip of dysfunctional bills, and they're obscured by promises of wilderness and support of environmental groups, it's not the big monster of Pombo."

Even with Democratic leadership, there is, no guarantee the new generation of wilderness bills will please all environmentalists. "The chemistry is not as straightforward as one would hope," Blaeloch said.

For instance, Senate Public Lands and Forests Subcommittee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) introduced S. 674, which would create 128,600 acres surrounding Mount Hood as well as Wild and Scenic River designations to nearly 80 miles of river. The Government Accountability Office last year criticized two appraisals used to justify a land trade between the Forest Service and an Oregon ski resort (E&E Daily, Sept. 27 2006). The new bill would allow a new appraisal but still mandates the land trade, Blaeloch said.

"Here's Wyden. He's head of the Public Lands Subcommittee, and he's pushing one of the worst bills," Blaeloch said. "So what do the Republicans say to the Democrats when the Democrats are pushing the same sort of stuff."

Other bills with land exchanges are not disappearing. Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) has already reintroduced his Central Idaho Economic Development and Recreation Act, which the House passed last year.

H.R. 222 would create three wilderness areas in Central Idaho totaling almost 315,215 acres but also release 130,000 acres of land from wilderness study areas, create a motorized state park and cede over 5,000 acres for housing developments.

Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) says traditional designations under the 1964 Wilderness Act have "pretty well stalled out," making it necessary to include wilderness as part of larger public lands packages. "It is difficult to designate wilderness and wilderness alone," Craig said at a November hearing. "I'm not sure we move ahead if it's 'no to everything except wilderness'" (E&E Daily, Nov. 17, 2006).

Local concerns rule

At the end of the day, wilderness advocates say they will still have to organize local support for future designations.

"Each situation will be different," said Jon Owen, government affairs representative for the Campaign for America's Wilderness. "These things start from the ground up based on local efforts. That will help fix where when and how these things move."

Having a high-ranking member of Congress or senator behind the wilderness effort doesn't hurt either. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), now majority leader, has pushed through two wilderness bills -- both with land exchanges and other provisions -- in the past four years.

In the Senate, Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), along with Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.), introduced legislation that would set 2.4 million acres of the Golden State aside as wilderness. S. 493 and H.R. 860 would create new wilderness areas in pockets of national forest, national parks and other Interior Department-managed lands across the state.

Based on a Boxer bill from 2002, the California bill will be a test of how the Democrats handle wilderness designations, given concern from recreation and industry groups. "We're optimistic there will be some respect for local input on these things, but it remains to be seen," said ORBA's Bill Dart. "Are they willing to listen to other interests or will this just be controlled by interest from the California Wilderness Coalition and those types of groups?"

One bill that didn't make it in the 109th Congress -- or the 108th or 107th -- is the "Wild Sky Wilderness" in Washington state. The Senate has approved the bill in each of the past three sessions of Congress, but the bill never got past Pombo, who said about 13,000 acres did not meet the requirements of the 1964 Wilderness Act and should be removed from the final bill.

S. 520 and H.R. 886 would protect low-elevation, old-growth stands of the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest.

"We're very excited about our prospects," sponsor Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) told E&E Daily recently. "We now have a committee in the House that will consider wilderness bills."

Also in the first two months, bills for Georgia, Virginia and a long-shot in Alaska have popped up.

Rep. Nathan Deal's (R-Ga.) H.R. 707 would establish the 13,382-acre Mountaintown National Scenic Area in Georgia's Chattahoochee National Forest. The bill would designate an additional 8,448 acres of wilderness elsewhere in the Chattahoochee.

In Virginia, Sens. John Warner (R) and Jim Webb (D), along with Rep. Rick Boucher (D), introduced the Virginia Ridge and Valley Act (S. 570 and H.R. 1011) to create six wilderness areas totaling 55,000 acres in the Jefferson National Forest.

The most controversial bill of all might be H.R. 39 from Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.). The bill would set aside the coastal plain of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness, preventing oil drilling from taking place in the oft-debated 1002 area.

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