Journals
Spring 2002, Vol. 42, No. 2
Essay – The Politics of Wilderness Preservation and Ecological Restoration
Max Oelschlaeger
Protected Areas and Intergovernmental Cooperation in the St. Elias Region
Ryan K. Danby & D. Scott Slocombe
Ecosystem-based management is now recognized as the central approach in protected area planning and management. However, objective analyses and assessments of the types of interagency partnerships and collaborative relationships necessary for successful implementation of such an approach are limited. This article provides a detailed description and analysis of cooperation occurring between government agencies in the St. Elias region of Alaska, Yukon, and British Columbia. Cooperation in the region is characterized using a relative scale based on formality and complexity. Generally, complex interagency cooperation is accompanied by formal agreements while informal agreements are most often used in situations with few actors or less pressing management issues. Despite having similar management goals and objectives based on preservation, as well as sharing a collective designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, cooperation and coordination of activities between the four primary protected areas in the region are largely limited to informal communication—particularly across the international border. Factors that have acted to limit cooperation are examined and potential approaches for removing these barriers and expanding collaborative activities are discussed.
Changing Legal Regimes and the Allocation of Water Between Two California Rivers
Ruth Langridge
Water is the most essential and fought over resource in the western United States. Struggles over how to allocate water are framed by legal regimes that encompass the body of established laws and the institutions that administer these laws. But as values change, new regulations and new court interpretations can conflict with established law, and new legal requirements and institutional jurisdictions can encroach on one another. This tension is visible in the new doctrine, regulations, and agencies affecting water allocation decisions today as compared with a century ago. The history of the Potter Valley Hydropower Project, an inter-basin diversion facility in Northern California, provides an ideal arena to explore the struggle for control over water in the west and how changes in legal regimes affect water allocation decisions. Situated at the center of two linked rivers, the hydropower project and its diversion of Eel River water into the Russian River embody many of the tensions common to water allocation disputes throughout California. The project was generally supported at the time of its construction in 1905, but the continuation of its water diversion is highly contested today. New environmental regulations and case law are challenging established water rights, there is increased friction between expanding sets of local, state, and federal agencies; there is new case law supporting efforts by Indian Tribes to access their federal reserved rights to water; and there are restrictions on water imported from a different basin. This article highlights the water rights history of the project juxtaposed against the framework of the broader legal regime, and it discusses how today’s complex legal system for allocating water operates in the present negotiations. I propose that the present legal process for allocating water disperses decision making among multiple federal, state, and local agencies. While this has resulted in friction and inefficiencies, agency pluralism has also provided new political opportunities for previously ignored claims, creating the potential for greater equity in future decisions.
Evicting People from Nature: Indigenous Land Rights and National Parks in Australia, Russia, and the United States
Robert Poirier & David Ostergren
The authors compare Australia, the United States, and Russia to provide a cross section of political and cultural circumstances impacting indigenous people as these countries recognize the value of protecting wild natural areas. All three nations initiated protected area systems in the late 1800s that excluded indigenous populations. Throughout most of the 1900s, indigenous people were separated from the land by legal, political, and cultural barriers. We conclude by demonstrating that within the context of international agreements, all three nations have slowly recognized the rights of indigenous peoples and their role within, or next to, national park lands.
An Analysis of Northwest Forest Plan Land Use Allocations
Michael C. Soules
This study uses regression techniques to analyze the allocation of land uses to federal forestland under the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan (the Plan). The federal forests of the Pacific Northwest were allocated to different land uses under the Plan, and this study describes which factors influenced the geographic distribution of those uses. Two primary analyses were conducted to test the effect of ecological, economic, political, and other variables on the Plan’s land use allocations. The results indicate that ecological factors had the greatest influence over the Plan’s land use allocations and that the presence of marbled murrelet sites had a greater effect over the allocations than did northern spotted owl sites. The results also suggest that counties with the largest amount of timber-related economic activity, rather than those most dependent upon the timber industry, received the greatest surplus of harvestable late-successional and old-growth forest.
Administrative Wilderness: Protecting Our National Forestlands in Contravention of Congressional Intent and Public Policy
Brandon Dalling
Preservation of our forestlands has been a hotly contested issue over the last half century. Congress passed the Wilderness Act of 1964, granting it the exclusive power and authority to protect public lands as wilderness. At the behest of President Clinton, however, the Forest Service instituted an administrative rule-making process to protect roadless public forestlands in a wilderness-like state. While laudable in its aims, the Forest Service’s "roadless" rule usurped the power and authority reserved in Congress under the Wilderness Act to create and set aside public lands as wilderness. As a result, the "administrative" wilderness created under the Forest Service’s roadless rule lacks permanence, adequate research, public input and participation, congressional oversight, and authority. Several Western states have challenged the Forest Service’s authority to create the roadless rule in federal district court. Because of these shortfalls in the Forest Service’s roadless rule, the rule should be invalidated and the Forest Service should be admonished not to create wilderness protections for public lands, as Congress is the sole governmental body with power and authority to create wilderness.
Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw and the Increasingly Broad Standard for Citizens Standing to Sue in Environmental Litigation
James M. Noble
In Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc., the United States Supreme Court created a framework through which citizen groups may sue those who violate environmental protection statutes such as the Clean Water Act. The Court held that citizens may obtain "standing" to bring an enforcement action if (1) they are "injured in fact", even if that injury amounts to no more than "concerns" about the polluter’s activities; (2) the polluter "causes" that concern; and (3) the harm can be "redressed" by forcing the polluter to pay a fine, even if the proceeds are not paid to the plaintiffs themselves. This decision created a broad standard that will allow more private citizens to enforce environmental laws when the government fails to do so. The Court could have reached the same result in this case, however, without defining injury so broadly. This decision also missed an opportunity to clarify the causation requirement. Perhaps the most well-reasoned and significant holding of this opinion is that fines paid to the government will satisfy the redressability requirement because of their deterrence value to the polluter and others.
The State of the Natural Resources Literature – On Environmental Thought at the Turn of the Century
Scott M. Davidson
