Sacrificial lands.

• Author: Hess, Karl Jr.

Bruce Babbitt, secretary of the interior, is gunning for environmental change on the nation's publ television's chivalrous Paladin in Have Gun Will Travel, his sights are set on rescuing the American from a long history of exploitation. A white-hatted cowboy in what many consider a savaged land, he determined to right the environmental wrongs of the Reagan-Bush years. He plans to stand the legacy Watt on its head, to transform the Department of the Interior from a patsy for natural-resource deve a staunch defender of arid rangelands and endangered species. Babbitt's reform proposals include a complete revamping of the National Park Service, more-vigorous endangered species, and a thorough revision of the laws governing mining on federal lands. But these initiatives in a bold program to recolor the public domain green. Even more sweeping changes on fede expected as Babbitt takes his crusade to the very headland of the American West. He has the intent, authority, to raise the grazing fees charged to the wealthiest public-land ranchers, to give "incent fees for land improvements, and to rewrite federal policy to the singular advantage of small stockme

Higher fees that are cushioned by "incentive" credits will presumably stem the massive depletion of desert grasslands caused by decades of overgrazing (plus save taxpayers millions of dollars). And policy breaks to small ranchers, which may ironically include lower grazing fees, will supposedly curb the power of large stockmen and make the federal range a more inviting home to the family ranch. All in all, the hopes of an entire environmental generation ride on Babbitt's shoulders. He holds the key to the protection and restoration of the Western range, the bulk of which is owned lock, stock, and barrel by Uncle Sam and which, until the end of World War II, was best known as "the lands that nobody wanted."

The lands that nobody wanted are the hundreds of millions of acres managed by the departments of the Interior and Agriculture; they include most of America's national forests and all of its desert rangelands. Except where bisected by major highways, they are distant, remote, and unknown to the vast majority of citizens. Yet those same lands comprise almost a third of the nation's territory, embracing a resource-rich and beauty-laden landscape that is almost three times the size of the original 13 colonies. And like the 13 colonies, they are peculiarly emblematic of American freedom and democracy.

Who does not recall Huckleberry Finn's flight from the confines of civilization to the freedom of the Western frontier? And who has forgotten the key role that Western public lands were to play in the making and extension of Thomas Jefferson's virtuous agrarian republic--a republic spacious enough "to employ an infinite number of people in [its] cultivation"? And is there anyone who does not secretly revel in environmentalist Edward Abbey's homage to public lands "as a refuge from authoritarian government [and] political oppression"?

American mythology has made the American West the repository of the nation's most noble sentiments. Sadly, noble sentiments cannot transform public lands into the citadel of freedom they never were or disguise the fact of their century-long abuse. America's emblem of freedom and repository of untouched wilderness has been tarnished and ravaged by a long and tumultuous history of government mismanagement.

During the last 130 years, a series of political agendas have relied on government might to capture and exploit public lands. Sweeping ideologies that I call landscape visions have driven those agendas, prescribing precisely how Western landscapes should look, be used, and be managed. Successful land-policy reform will mean breaking that pattern by replacing a grand, coercive landscape vision with a diversity of visions based on choice and voluntarism.

In one sense, every man and woman who ever settled on the Western range came with visions of how best to mold the land to his or her individual taste and ambition. But the landscape visions that have most affected America's public lands are the handful that successfully hitched the power of the state to their causes. They are the visions of intolerance, the visions that have fed on political power to forcefully spread their agendas across the Western landscape. They became, and in some cases remain or hope to be, state policy. And they explain why public lands are neither citadels of freedom nor monuments to pristine nature, but rather mere prizes-sacrificial lands-in a contest of ideological wills.

The first of a triad of Western landscape visions bears the mark of its spiritual founder, Thomas Jefferson. Agrarian democracy, the religion of the yeoman farmer, sought a West peopled by cultivators. Prosperous farms and virtuous farmers would forge from America's Western wilderness a secular paradise, a City upon a Hill, where democracy and independence would be the principal harvest. The vision became law in 1862 with the passage of the first of many Homestead Acts.

But 160-acre homestead units (eventually upgraded to 640 acres) were woefully inadequate on lands too arid for crops and too sparsely vegetated to support more than a handful of cows per section. As a result, the landscape vision of a farmer's paradise degenerated into chaos as land-starved settlers fought over the open and unowned range. In the words of Albert F. Potter, first director of the Forest Service's Grazing Section:

"Flocks passed each other on the trails, one rushing in to secure what the other had just abandoned as worthless...