EDITORIAL: Give wilderness committee a chance to work

Posted 12/1/16

However, we’re not the foremost experts on every local peak and valley. And that’s exactly why we’re glad that county commissioners have assembled a diverse panel of people who are.

We’d encourage everyone to keep their minds open and …

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EDITORIAL: Give wilderness committee a chance to work

Posted

As a Park County committee prepares to make some recommendations about how some of the area’s public lands should be managed, it might seem like a good time to lay out some ideas for them to follow.

However, we’re not the foremost experts on every local peak and valley. And that’s exactly why we’re glad that county commissioners have assembled a diverse panel of people who are.

We’d encourage everyone to keep their minds open and give the county’s advisory committee a chance to come up with a truly unique proposal for the county’s Wilderness Study Areas.

The local committee is part of a statewide Wyoming Public Land Initiative, led by county commissioners and aimed at resolving the up-in-the-air status of study areas all around the state. Wilderness Study Areas are places that look like they might have the naturalness to be protected as wilderness; they’re basically preserved in that state until Congress decides whether to make them into wilderness or release them for less restrictive management.

The trouble is that Wyoming’s study areas have stayed in that limbo for several decades, with no end in sight. As Wyoming County Commissioners Association Executive Director Pete Obermueller explained earlier this year, environmental groups can’t pass a bill protecting all the lands if there’s local government opposition and local governments can’t roll back those protections if national environmental groups are opposed.

This is where Park County’s advisory committee comes in. Commissioners picked around 20 different people to sit on the panel to represent interests ranging from conservation to energy development to motorized recreation.

They’ve basically been tasked with coming up with a plan that makes everyone happy — or at least not so unhappy that they’ll object.

Those serving on the committee are smart and passionate, and they represent a pretty wide range of views. That’s why reaching a consensus will be difficult.

Some commissioners — who will ultimately be able to kibosh any recommendations they don’t like — have openly expressed skepticism about the process and worried that environmentalists will unduly skew things toward a pro-wilderness agenda.

Of course, they’re not the only ones worrying. The Wyoming chapter of the Sierra Club has said the state’s commissioners appear to be participating in the Wyoming Public Lands Initiative to try reducing protections; the club has described itself as “skeptical of the likelihood of a successful outcome” for wilderness advocates.

We’re glad that, despite those worries, everyone opted to come to the table in Park County anyway. Call us naive if you must, but also count us as excited about the possibility of a compromise. There’s no need to treat public lands like a presidential election, where only one side can get what it wants.

Some of Park County commissioners’ initial unease stemmed from the possibility that the advisory committee might recommend changing more than just the management schemes in the two wilderness study areas (the McCullough Peaks south of Powell and the High Lakes area in the Beartooth Mountains). We say, why not think outside of the study area box? If it makes sense to trade some lands that probably shouldn’t be getting wilderness-level protections for others that should, who cares where they are? And frankly, if this group of bright and strongly opinionated locals can come up with any way to reach a consensus, why stand in their way?

We would offer one bit of advice to the committee, and that’s to try crafting a proposal that protects both the naturalness and uses of the land that we’ve historically enjoyed in Park County; we don’t want to see oil rigs mounted on top of the Peaks, nor do we want to see four-wheelers barred from routes that they’ve enjoyed for decades.

But most importantly, we’d encourage the committee to give it their best shot. Who knows when we’ll have another chance for an open dialogue like this.

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