Editorial from Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

Editorial

Most of the controversial “policy riders” on the spending bill for the remainder of the federal fiscal year disappeared in the final negotiations between Congress and the Obama administration late last week. However, one remaining rider is of special interest to Alaska.

The rider blocks a new federal “Wild Lands” program — for a few months at least.

That’s appropriate. The secretly written policy was a disaster for the Obama administration, which did right by ceding ground to congressional opponents. Federal officials should accept the signs and repeal the public land order that established the policy.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar established the “Wild Lands” policy for the Bureau of Land Management in late December. Salazar’s land order tells the BLM to identify its lands with wilderness characteristics. These lands “shall be managed to protect their wilderness characteristics” — unless BLM decides it’s appropriate to do otherwise, the order states. But even if compromising the lands’ wilderness values is appropriate, the agency must consider ways to minimize the effects.

The BLM manages more than 75 million acres in Alaska, a state with a total land area of about 375 million acres. BLM’s job, in general, is to manage for multiple uses, unless a specific area within its portfolio has been designated for greater protection.

Several BLM areas and river corridors in Alaska have been set aside for extra conservation, but the agency manages no official wilderness in Alaska and much of the agency’s land remains without special designation. Environmental advocates who have the ear of the current administration want that changed.

The new policy does not establish official wilderness. But it creates a baseline assumption that undisturbed BLM lands will be designated as wild land and managed as wilderness. It requires a positive determination by the agency to overturn this assumption.

That assumption creates yet another barrier to transportation and economic enterprise on the public lands in Alaska. The barriers are already substantial. In 1980, Congress blanketed almost half the state with national parks, refuges, forests, preserves, monuments, wild and scenic rivers and conservation and recreation areas.

The federal government should not be allowed to administratively bulk up this blanket with potentially tens of millions of additional acres. Alaska’s lands have all the federal care and comfort they need.