In The Northwest: Lawmaker running roughshod over Wild Sky bill

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Wednesday, July 21, 2004

In The Northwest: Lawmaker running roughshod over Wild Sky bill

By JOEL CONNELLY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

When the pew oceans Commission released a study that America's coastlines were in trouble, House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo sneered that the report was a $5.5 million "coffee-table picture book."

The Republican congressman from California, tapped to head a committee that oversees our public lands, loves to decry "radical environmentalists" and their "frivolous, politically motivated lawsuits."

Pombo is the real radical, and a beautiful corner of our state is hung up because of his intransigence.

The House Resources Committee holds a hearing tomorrow on a bill that would create a 106,000-acre Wild Sky Wilderness Area amid sharp peaks, forested valleys and salmon streams of eastern Snohomish County. It has twice passed the U.S. Senate on unanimous votes.

Pombo has said, however, that the legislation is dead on arrival at his committee.

He has rebuffed GOP Senate hopeful Rep. George Nethercutt, who worked out an understanding with Democratic sponsors that 2,688 acres of land would be deleted from the wilderness.

To justify his position, Pombo has taken it upon himself to unilaterally rewrite the 1964 Wilderness Act and establish new "criteria."

The 1964 law has been used to protect places from pristine valleys in Alaska to old wagon tracks in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Pombo has resurrected the argument that past human use -- old roads, culverts, cut-down trees, irrigation dams, etc. -- disqualify federal lands from designation under an act designed to preserve areas "untrammeled by man."

What a pile of horse pucky!

Hikers bound for the Enchantment Lakes in our Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area pass old irrigation dams at the Snow Lakes. Once, in the Blue Ridge backcountry, I happened on a group of Army Rangers retracing a flanking maneuver by Stonewall Jackson in the Civil War.

Two architects of the Wilderness Act were the late Sen. Henry Jackson of Washington and Republican Rep. John P. Saylor, senior Republican on the House Interior Committee (predecessor to the Resources Committee).

In a statement for the hearing -- which he cannot attend -- Jackson's son Peter says: "This is an issue I feel strongly about: Scoop Jackson was adamant about what he dismissed as the 'purity theory.' "

Sen. Jackson once described the "purity theory" as an artifice cooked up by wilderness foes that threatened "the strength and broad application of the Wilderness Act."

Saylor, the Republican, addressed the subject with passion.

"I fought too long and too hard, and too many good people in this House and across this land fought with me, to see the Wilderness Act denied application," he told colleagues, "by this kind of obtuse or hostile misinterpretation or misconstruction of the public law and the intent of the Congress."

The Wild Sky country is, well, wild. Still, it is accessible: Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., showed as much by strolling a nature trail two years ago.

Some land in the proposed wilderness, north of the Stevens Pass corridor, shows evidence of man's intrusions. A few old roads remain. Second-growth forest has filled up where logging took place more than a half-century ago.

With a Wild Sky Wilderness, an unbroken expanse of protected national forestlands would extend from state Route 20, the North Cascades Highway, to U.S. 2 near Index. We would be protecting critical wildlife habitat and recreation country close by the state's fastest-growing population centers.

Sens. Murray and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., have shown their skill in getting the Senate to pass this legislation under both Democratic and Republican control. It won plaudits from conservative Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, a timber-industry ally.

What about the Republicans? The Grand Old Party has a storied history of protecting places in this state.

Armed with a picture book, Gov. Dan Evans went to the Oval Office in 1976 and persuaded Gerald Ford to sign into law the Alpine Lakes Wilderness -- over veto urgings from Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz.

Republican senators from Washington and Oregon got Ronald Reagan to sign both states' wilderness bills. The bills protected nearly 1.9 million acres. They were termed "outrageously excessive" by Agriculture Undersecretary John Crowell.

Then-Rep. Sid Morrison took enormous abuse when he helped craft the Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area.

Rural residents were inflamed about false claims that their property rights would be trammeled and the land "locked up." Similar falsehoods are being spread about Wild Sky. Pombo's staff has stacked the witness list at the hearing in order to spread them further.

Where are the Republicans this year, pray tell?

Rep. Jennifer Dunn, R-Wash., did co-sponsor the Wild Sky bill. Dunn has done nothing to move the legislation. One wonders about all those puff pieces on her influence in the House.

Nethercutt has tried: Evans took him up to the Wild Sky and made a convert.

He has, however, been roughly treated by Pombo. The committee chairman knows that Nethercutt will no longer be a House member come January, and he need do him no favors.

In a letter sent to Nethercutt yesterday, Pombo said 16,000 acres in the Wild Sky bill have "non-wilderness characteristics" and "I cannot, in good conscience, move a bill that ignores this fact."

He is, however, ignoring 40 years of history as well as the intentions of the Wilderness Act's authors.

A California politician is making hash out of the tradition that Northwest lawmakers work out federal land decisions in their states.

We've reached the time for heavy lifting, as with Evans on Alpine Lakes.

Will Nethercutt bring George Bush to play with the House leadership to overrule an extreme and intransigent committee chairman that they put in place?

P-I columnist Joel Connelly can be reached at 206-448-8160 or joelconnelly@seattlepi.com

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