READER'S VIEW BOULDER-WHITE CLOUDS WILDERNESS BILL
This fall, along with other residents of Custer County, I received a slick, taxpayer-funded brochure from Mike Simpson's office. It named 15 trails in the Boulder-White Clouds that would be forever motorized by Simpson's CIEDRA legislation. It named four areas in the BWC forever open to snowmobiles, and named the federal lands that would be given to Custer County for its general fund and for affordable housing.
It's safe to say that Simpson will not send the same brochure to the rest of Idaho. A wilderness dissected by motorized corridors is not a wilderness, it's a marketing device for trophy-home developers. Gifts of federal land to Custer County and its cities transform a public trust into congressional pork.
Simpson says CIEDRA is "a perfect compromise." True, but only if you exclude from the discussion the many thinking Idahoans who see it as a perfect start to the privatization of Idaho's federal lands.
Simpson has said the bill doesn't establish precedents, ignoring the fact that precedents are always discovered by lawyers going over a bill after it's been passed. He has said that the land being given away is mostly sagebrush, which is true. Similar sagebrush, with worse views and more zoning restrictions, goes for more than $2 million per acre in the Wood River Valley.
I am not a free-market true believer like Simpson, but even I know that artificially devaluing trophy home lots for "affordable housing" creates backroom deals that end up denying that same housing to working Idahoans.
In the seven years since the Idaho Conservation League and Simpson cooked up CIEDRA at a Redfish Lake retreat, the world has changed. We are about to run out of cheap energy. Our country has gone deeply into debt. Human costs aside, the Simpson-supported war in Iraq will cost the future Custer County - and the future Idaho - far more money than CIEDRA could ever bring it.
These national issues directly affect Idaho's environment and its recreation industries. The electricity-generating Columbia Basin dams will never be breached once oil hits $200/bbl. Neither will "locked-in" recreational gasoline survive the rationing that $200 oil will bring. Saddling the Forest Service with CIEDRA's unfunded mandates in a time of war will promote greater control of federal lands by pay-to-play private contractors.
All this time, Simpson has been the congressman with the nation's premier energy research laboratory in his district. The time and tax money he's put into CIEDRA could have been far better spent on INL research into solar, geothermal and wind energy, as well as on developing safer nuclear power. If time is a natural resource, Simpson has wasted a lot of it.
The ICL is claiming Frank Church's legacy, but they're promoting a crippled wilderness at the cost of privatizing SNRA land. The Sawtooths and Boulder-White Clouds remain wild and untrammeled not because of the Wilderness Act but because SNRA private-land easements have kept Sawtooth Valley from becoming another Wood River Valley.
SNRA private-land policy is the reason the banks of the Salmon River remain public space, and the reason the real estate under the Sawtooths has not been carved into ever smaller and more expensive bits.
If the ICL truly wants the mantle of Frank Church, they could do worse than to leave the lands he protected with PL 92-400 alone.
