Obama & Salazar Selling Out the West

[Grumpy]

Obama, Salazar selling out West?The New Mexican

Posted: Saturday, June 04, 2011 - 6/5/11



For a presidency that got off on the right foot for environmental protections, the Barack Obama administration has made some potentially disastrous about-faces lately:

From week to week, it seems, the White House has wavered between concern over extractive-industry shoddiness and tossing caution to the winds when it comes to drilling for gas and oil. At the moment Big Oil is getting the go-ahead to sink wells in some precarious places on land and undersea.

And in a matter of months, Obama Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has gone from champion of "wild lands" and advocate of "wilderness study areas" to lapdog of industries dedicated to tearing up the American West.

Last week, Salazar issued a memo saying, in effect, forget what I said half a year ago about wild-land designation for certain stretches of public land; instead, I bow and scrape before a Western Republican gang of laissez-faire representatives and senators — and, of course, to the money that put and keeps them in office ...

Those lawmakers, as part of their strong-arm tactics toward the federal budget, had already handcuffed Salazar by preventing him from spending money developing a wilderness policy. But now, instead of holding his plans in abeyance, the secretary has caved in. Unless he reverses his field again, the West is back to the George W. Bush days of no-more-wilderness; gentlemen, start your engines.

Is this the same Ken Salazar who, upon entering the Interior building (now named after Santa Fe's immortal Stewart Udall) — rolled back a gas-and-oil giveaway along the fringes of Arches National Park and near Dinosaur National Monument? It is indeed the former Democratic senator from the San Luis Valley — but now he sounds like the regional Republicans with whom he once crossed swords.

What he had proposed, in the face of GOP gains in the last congressional election, wasn't all that radical: Just before Christmas, he declared a couple of hundred million acres throughout the West, including Southern New Mexico's Otero Mesa, would be studied with an eye to giving some of them federal wilderness protection.

At the same time, he announced plans to designate some stretches as "wild lands," separate from "wilderness study areas" — the name Congress applies to lands under consideration for wilderness protection. As for what would be allowed on "wild lands," that was yet to be determined, and Salazar had in mind a public planning process.

But that's out the window — and coming in will be pleas to plunder public lands that make up so much of New Mexico and the rest of the West.

Will Salazar resist such petitions? Perhaps — but the petroleum industry, and mining interests made greedy by soaring mineral prices, have him and his boss on the run.

What Obama and Salazar might gain from this sell-out is difficult to determine; maybe some independent voters listening today to the likes of Mitt Romney or Republican presidential aspirants off to Romney's right. As for disaffected liberals, where would they go? The cynicism in the White House is so thick it would take a sharp knife to cut it, and that could keep some enviros from voting at all, instead of for Obama.

When or if Obama is re-elected, will he and his Cabinet stiffen their spines? Or might Congress, if Democrats regain control, come to its senses?

For the sake of the West, they'd better. This is looking more and more like a reprise of the '80s — the 1880s heyday of trashing the West, and with cheap labor to boot. What little was at last saved by Teddy Roosevelt and successors is under siege, and it'll take lots of courage to lift it.