Conservation Catches Some Breaks

June 22, 2006

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne climbed atop his department’s headquarters building this week, faced a bank of microphones, and said, “Never mind.” Or words to that effect.

A few short weeks after replacing Gale Norton as overseer of America’s public lands endowment, Kempthorne dumped a disagreeable set of proposed revisions in national park management policies that had been drafted by Norton’s underlings. Instead of going along with a small-minded proposal to turn America’s greatest natural treasures into tawdry, noisy playgrounds, Kempthorne proposed a new set of policies that, if finalized, would appear to restore the traditional conservative philosophy of national parks management – recreation is fine, but conservation always must come first.

Kempthorne’s proposal is undergoing internal review and will be put out for formal public comment in a few weeks.

The Bush administration is on something of a conservation tear – relatively speaking, of course. The week before Kempthorne’s rooftop announcement, President Bush used his authority under the Antiquities Act to establish the largest marine preserve in the world: the Northwest Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument. It was a spectacular way to celebrate the centennial of a bedrock conservation law.

Covering nearly 90 million acres, the new preserve is a wonderworld of coral reefs, monk seals, spinner dolphins, thousands of tropical marine species, and priceless archaeological sites showing the mark of the ancient Hawaiian culture. No resource extraction will be permitted in what is now America’s largest national monument, and commercial fishermen who use the area will be bought out.

Meanwhile, over at the Department of Agriculture, the administration has accepted petitions from the governors of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina to protect roadless national forest lands in the three states. Detailed management regulations for the roadless areas still await drafting, but great wild places in the Appalachians, North Carolina’s coastal plain, and South Carolina's Low Country are safe for now.

To be sure, the administration has a lot to make up for on the environmental front. The list of mistakes and missed opportunities is distressingly long. Our national parks are still starved for money. Dumb decisions are still being made, such as a pointless timber sale going forward in a roadless area of Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest. The administration is sticking with its weak-kneed approach to global warming. Nearly five years after 9/11, America still lacks a coherent energy policy, even as the geopolitical, economic, and environmental reasons for getting off the oil addiction treadmill converge into an open-and-shut case for a dramatically revised energy strategy.

Still, you take good news when you can and give credit where credit is due.