CHAPTER 13 PUBLIC LAND ISSUES OF THE '90S: ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
| Jurisdiction | United States |
(Nov 1997)
PUBLIC LAND ISSUES OF THE '90S: ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
Holland & Hart LLP
Denver, Colorado
John A. Carver
University of Denver College of Law
Denver, Colorado
Thomas D. Lustig
National Wildlife Federation
Boulder, Colorado
Lois J. Schiffer
Environmental & Natural Resources Division U.S. Department of Justice
Washington, D.C.
Constance E. Brooks
C.E. Brooks & Associates, P.C.
Denver, Colorado
The command to submit a paper in advance of a "roundtable discussion" calls for some assumptions and a compromise. I assume that I have been invited because of my past experience with the topic of public land issues — to bring to the discussion some sense of the issues of the '60s as a backdrop for assessing the issues of the '90s. I am long out of the loop on the issues which Ms. Schiffer, Mr. Lustig, and Ms. Brooks deal with every day.
What I can contribute, if anything, to a discussion of the resolution of conflicts among competing uses, or to the prospects of mediation or consensus building to resolve public land use conflicts, is mainly historical. I can turn the calendar back to 1961, when I entered the business of public land management as Assistant Interior Secretary.
In that first year in the Interior Department (remember that by that time I had worked for the Secretary of War in the personnel business, had practiced law in Idaho for ten years, and had been Frank Church's Administrative Assistant for four years) I tried to articulate what I saw to be the public land issues of that era, as well as my reaction to and approach to the solution of those issues.
During my years in Interior, I averaged more than 30 speeches or presentations a year. Generally, I regarded these appearances as opportunities to learn and to communicate — to learn the issues, and to communicate the philosophy of the administration in which I served.
[Page 13-ii]
I've gone through the files of speeches for that first year, and the compromise I spoke of is the decision to extract from them passages which bear upon some of the issues of that era which seem to have their counterpart or still persist in the '90s. How I saw these issues and reacted to them is revealed in an appendix or attachment. This will fill out the paper, and still leave me free to follow the roundtable discussion in whatever direction it takes.
There are three themes I want to emphasize. One is that history has much to teach us, and though each generation of administrators may rightly believe that its problems are unique and uniquely difficult, we may gain perspective and some comfort from knowing how similar problems were handled in the past.
The second theme is that the "issues" are not capable of resolution except by the efforts of the personnel charged with administration, review, or oversight concerning them. I never believed that grazing fees or other tough issues could move toward resolution unless the people involved worked with a common understanding of the facts. As you will see from the selections in the Appendix (only a fraction of the speeches and presentations I made), I was making every appearance a learning opportunity and a teaching opportunity. I wanted the cattlemen, timber people, or whoever, to know that I was trying my best to see the situation as they saw it, whether I agreed or not. You don't deal with issues in the abstract — you deal with people.
The final theme is that government administrators ought to understand government, and believe in government. I don't mean that in any autocratic sense. The role of Congress (particularly in the light of Article IV, sec. 3, cl. 2, the Property Clause) must be fully respected; the responsibilities of the executive must be honored; and we must be governed by a rule of law. Fairness is everything.
This all may sound a little self-righteous, but I don't mean it to be. My years as Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Public Lands were the happiest and most productive of my life. I want people to know how I went about the tasks I then had, for I thought they were very important ones.
[Page 13-1]
APPENDIX TO SESSION "PUBLIC LAND ISSUES OF THE '90s ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION.
Excerpts from presentations of John A. Carver, Jr., Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Public Land Management, in 1961.
A. On the occasion of Jefferson's birthday, Jefferson Memorial, Washington, D.C., April 13, 1961.
***
Those of us with pride of Western origin share a special debt to Jefferson's strong conviction that the strength of America's future lay on the frontier. Those of us who are committed to the husbandry of our natural resources find our philosophical starting point in his pioneering views on the public lands to the West and the manner in which they should be developed for national greatness and human betterment.
The public land policies of the United States have been prominent among my interests for as long as I can remember; they have been of overwhelming interest and attention these last 83 days. Jefferson stands as a tower of strength to those of us who maintain that all of our natural resources in public ownership belong to the whole people to be exploited for the common good and preserved for future generations—generations which will honor us for protecting their heritage, as we do Jefferson today, or curse us for decimating their birthright.
***
In our complex society, human values, economic processes and property rights become so confused as to almost defy analysis even by the most informed among us. This tends to encourage pressure groups for simple solutions based on only one of the factors. Down this road we may well travel to the destruction of the liberties which Jefferson so articulately proclaimed. Our pluralistic society demands programs which serve the whole complex. Jefferson did not attack the institutions of private property, but he warned against its use as a single institution to the exclusion of all other values. But in the area of the public domain he was insistent upon its use to promote the ultimate development of the total community.
***
B. At the Annual Dinner of the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 12, 1961:
***
I confess that although I have walked many times by his likeness, which hangs in the long hall which leads to the office of the Secretary of the Interior, I did not, until I began to
[Page 13-2]
prepare for this talk, know more than the name, and certainly not the remarkable conservation contribution, of this newspaperman, revolutionary, patriot, orator, United States Senator, Civil War General, scholar, musician and pioneer in civil service reform, who also served as Secretary of the Interior. I take nothing from the luster of the memory of Gifford Pinchot when I say that Schurz, in my opinion, was as great.
The wisdom of Carl Schurz in the resources field is as fresh as tomorrow. President Kennedy's recent message to Congress warned that our forest lands present the sharpest challenge to our foresight because we are using up our old growth timber at an alarming rate and consumption will double in the next forty years.
Schurz put it this way in 1877:
"The rapidity with which this country is being stripped of its timber must alarm every thinking man."
***
This forthright and outspoken man, like an Ickes much later, could castigate the Congress for passing a bill he had opposed. He read them a lecture: "We are now rapidly approaching the day when the forests of this country will no longer be sufficient to supply our home wants, and it is the highest time that the old notion that the timber on the public lands belongs to anybody and everybody, to be cut down and taken off at pleasure, should give way."
Action followed. He whipped up public opinion, and he stopped the export traffic in logs from the public lands by administrative action, continuing to apply the needle to Congress. "...I regret to say that in spite of the repeated recommendation of the passage of a law to facilitate the prevention of the wasteful devastation of the public timber lands...almost all the legislation that has been had upon this subject consisted in acts relieving those who had committed depredations in the past of their responsibility, and protecting them against the legal consequences of their trespasses."
Schurz told Congress bluntly that it was falling down on the job of protecting Yellowstone. He reorganized the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He told the white people in the West they had to stop stealing Indian land. And while he was busy going around the country creating enemies by the hundreds, he was in the first rank of the conservation movement. "The waste and destruction of the redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) and "big trees" (Sequoia Gigantia) of California have been, and continue to be, so great as to cause apprehension that these species of trees, the noblest and oldest in the world, will entirely disappear unless some measure be soon taken to preserve at least a portion of them," he wrote, following his comments with specific recommendation for Presidential action.
[Page 13-3]
Gifford Pinchot found inspiration in Schurz' lonely battle, and gave him credit as the only Secretary of the Interior who had sensed the forest problem and tried to do anything about it.
This is heady wine. It is a tonic to a bureaucrat buried in papers to find the issues stated with such clarity and brevity. His annual reports bear his mark, and each is only fifty or so pages in length.
C. At the dedication of the Tioga Road, Yosemite National Park, California, June 24, 1961:
Tension mars...
To continue reading
Request your trial