Mary Mostert
August 18, 2003
Hope for intelligent environmental policy with Mike Leavitt
By Mary Mostert

The ink was hardly dry on banner front page headlines in Utah’s newspapers announcing that the state’s Governor Mike Leavitt had been chosen by President Bush as his nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency when we started were hearing negative statements from folks in Washington and other concrete jungles around America about how awful he would be as head of the EPA.

The Associated Press dug up someone named Lawson LeGate, Southwest senior representative for the Sierra Club, complained that Leavitt is someone “who's too willing to cut deals on issues like road building and oil and gas drilling on federal lands.” Heaven forbid that we should have roads in America.

Then MSNBC quoted Sierra Club director Carl Pope who accused Leavitt of working “behind closed doors ... to open up Utah’s wildlands to polluting industries” — a reference to the Clinton-era wilderness declaration that was shelved. Environmentalists’ fear that those areas will be opened to drilling.

A Washington Post editorial ridicules Leavitt’s announced goal to bring EPA policies “in balance.” In a clear demand that the policies remain unbalanced the editorial points out: “It is hard to see how Mr. Leavitt is going to go about ending the polarization of the environmental debate, which has indeed divided the relevant parties into increasingly bitter and antagonistic camps. Getting everybody to sit at the same table to negotiate is a pointless exercise if the most powerful negotiator at that table is constantly looking for ways to avoid an honest discussion of the issues and of its record.”

So, why are they so worried that Leavitt might bring rational, normal people together to create a less polarizing environmental policy? I think they are worried that it has dawned on many people in the past few drought years in the west that the radicals claiming to be “environmentalists” have forced policies that have blocked all efforts to preserve the national forests. Any effort to care for the forests through proper management to cut down on the millions of acres of trees that should have been thinned that burn down every year in forest fires and labeled “anti-environment” by the Sierra Club and much of the media. This is preserving the environment? I don’t think so.

Actually, Governor Michael Leavitt has a great record in environmental accomplishments and strengths too long to list in this article. Since it doesn’t appear the networks plan to ever mention them, you might check Leavitts accomplishments on the subject here.

All this reminds me of President Clinton designating 1.5 million acres of Utah lands, that really belonged to the children of Utah for their education, as a “national monument.” During the election year 1996, to help his buddy Suharto in Indonesia who had a competing source of low sulfur coal and curry favor with the Sierra Club, Clinton, without even INFORMING, much less consulting with Utah congressmen and Senators decided, seized total control of the 1.5 million acres of land in Utah to keep the low sulfur coal from being mined and competing with Suharto. The boundaries of the “monument” were drawn to prevent any access to the 52 billion tons of environmentally friendly, low sulfur coal that was about to be mined in Southern Utah.

When Utah became a state, those lands 106 years go, so cavalierly seized by Bill Clinton, were in trust for the education of the children of Utah. Utah’s Margaret Bird, the State Office of Education's trust-lands specialist said in 1996 when Clinton seized the lands: "I'm sorely disappointed for the children of Utah and for all of us that a resource producer would pull out of the largest, untapped energy reserve in the United States," she was quoted as saying, "The next time the lights go off in California, it's the result of decisions that have been made by people at the national level who haven't even bothered to come to Utah to get the facts before making this monument declaration."

Since I lived in California at the time, I was curious about what the lights going out in my state had to do with Utah. As it turned out, a whole lot of California’s energy and a lot of its water comes from other states, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Arizona. In fact, if the environmentalists had gotten their way and had managed to tear down the Glen Canyon Dam, which is down something like 50% in this 5th year of drought, the people in Los Angeles might have discovered by now that without the dams, there would be no water coming out of their faucets.

By seizing the entrance to the Kaiparowits Plateau coal field area, Clinton deprived Utah of literally billions of dollars which would have gone to educate the children. As Senator Orrin Hatch said at the time in response to Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ) who spoke in favor of keeping the coal fields from being developed. "You should worry about one matter, which was not discussed in any great detail yesterday, and that is the presence of State school trust lands now captured within these wilderness study areas." Sen. Hatch said, "They are owned by the State of Utah on behalf of and for the benefit of Utah's school children—not New Jersey's school children, Utah's children. The Utah School Lands Trust is not a recent development.

"The Utah State Legislature has made a commitment to improving the management of the trust lands. These trust lands must produce more revenue if the State of Utah is going to meet its challenges in education. ... Education financing continues to be our major concern. Two years ago, the legislature organized a new State body whose specific reason for being is to gain the greatest benefit from the school trust lands."

So, here we are, seven years later, with a crisis in Utah in funding education and a crisis in California with Gray Davis being recalled because of the mess he’s made in energy matters, the Governor of Utah nominated to oversee the lands seized by Clinton, two Utah Senators in powerful positions in the U.S. Senate and the anti-people radical environmentalists in the Sierra Club who want to get rid of dams and intelligent forest management having a fit.

This could get really interesting.

© Mary Mostert

 

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Mary Mostert

Mary Mostert is a nationally-respected political writer. She was one of the first female political commentators to be published in a major metropolitan newspaper in the 1960s... (more)

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