Albuquerque Journal

Friday, November 13, 2009

By Nathan Newcomer
Associate Director, New Mexico Wilderness Alliance

“Land of Enchantment” was added to New Mexico’s license plates in 1941, a nickname that beautifully captures the diversity and richness of our state — the richness of our history and many cultures and the incredible diversity of our landscapes and ecosystems.

For decades now, those we New Mexicans elect to represent us in Congress have been working to gain the strongest possible protections for the wildest, most natural areas on the public lands across our state: legal protection as wilderness.

We recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of one important step in this work, for it was on Oct. 30, 1984, that President Ronald Reagan signed the “San Juan Basin Wilderness Protection Act” into law. That law is notable as the first to extend legal protection under the Wilderness Act to lands in our state administered by the Bureau of Land Management — what is now the nearly 40,000-acre Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness, an eerie, almost otherworldly landscape of badlands in San Juan County.

New Mexicans have long played leading roles in shaping America’s national policy to preserve wilderness areas. Eighty-five years ago this past summer Aldo Leopold, then an official in the Albuquerque regional office of the U.S. Forest Service, successfully advocated establishment of the world’s first wilderness area — the Gila Wilderness near Silver City.

Our longtime U.S. senator, Clinton P. Anderson, became the lead sponsor of the 1964 Wilderness Act, the historic act of Congress that established our national policy for wilderness protection. Forty-five years ago this past September, Anderson stood behind President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Rose Garden as he signed the Wilderness Act. Nearby was the lead sponsor of the legislation in the House of Representatives, Rep. John P. Saylor from Pennsylvania.

The 1984 law that extended Wilderness Act protection to the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness continued that bipartisan tradition, supported by our senators from both political parties — then-Sen. Pete Domenici and Sen. Jeff Bingaman. In the House, the lead sponsor was then-Rep. Bill Richardson, and the author of the consensus version in the committee process was then-Rep. Manuel Lujan, who later served as Secretary of the Interior.

All this New Mexico wilderness history illustrates important facts about how we go about protecting wilderness areas in this country. First, the lands that are designated as wilderness are federal lands. Second, these decisions are made by Congress, in a process that gives greatest weight to the views of the members of Congress from the state involved. Third, these decisions are wide open to public suggestions, which may come through planning processes of the agency administering the lands involved or, of course, as input from ordinary citizens like you or me to those who represent us in Congress. Not everyone may agree with any particular decision, but all have every opportunity to have their opinions heard.

The history of the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness demonstrates another feature of our national wilderness preservation policy: the provision that existing livestock grazing within these areas by neighboring ranchers shall continue.

As Anderson assured, that use was protected in the words of the Wilderness Act itself, and has been similarly protected as Congress designates additional areas as wilderness. That was done, for example, for the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness.

New Mexico now has a number of wilderness areas on lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management, including our state’s newest, the Sabinoso Wilderness, which was established by Congress earlier this year. And a number of new wilderness areas on such lands will be protected under current legislation championed by Bingaman and Sen. Tom Udall as part of larger conservation proposals to the El Rio Grande del Norte region northeast of Taos and major areas in Doña Ana County outside Las Cruces.

These wilderness areas are an anchor of wildness, each important in the larger fabric of conservation that protects what is so special about our Land of Enchantment for future generations.