Background: Grandeur on a Rare Scale

North of the Colorado River and of the Grand Canyon, and very much a part of its ecosystem, lie three million acres of public land in northwestern Arizona. The Grand Wash Cliffs, Paria Canyon and the Shivwits Plateau are fabled parts of it. So are buttes, volcanic rocks and colorful vistas, laid up like confections across the landscape.

The land’s archaeological treasures are a match for its scenery. Sites represent thousands of years of human history, from Ancestral Puebloan cultures to Spanish explorers and more recent Mormon settlers.  Despite the harsh high-desert environment, wildlife flourishes there as well: bighorn sheep, mountain lions, desert tortoise and a range of raptors.  Condors again ply desert updrafts. The area also boasts a fossil record reaching back a billion years.

In proclaiming the monuments in 2000, the President directed protection of objects of scientific and historical interest and “natural splendor and a sense of solitude.”  The BLM was given management of these monuments as part of its National Landscape Conservation System, a collection of lands and waters that comprise the gems of our public lands.

Wild and Remote or Roaded?

Taken together, this three-million-acre expanse, anchored by the Grand Canyon Parashant and Vermilion Cliffs National Monuments, with the rest of the Arizona Strip in between, constitutes some of the wildest, remotest and loveliest land in the American West.

Unfortunately, the BLM’s draft Resource Management Plan (RMP), which covers the monuments and the Arizona Strip, comes nowhere close to doing it justice.

The draft favors ORV access at the expense of wildlife, cultural resources and wilderness.  Though the plan does propose to protect wilderness characteristics on just under 300,000 wild acres, it ignores another 700,000 acres of land that the Arizona Wilderness Coalition inventoried, found suitable for wilderness and proposed for permanent protection.

The plan, though, doesn’t ignore roads.  The BLM’s preferred alternative calls for 1700 miles of ORV routes in the two monuments and another 1000 miles in the Arizona Strip.  Many of the routes are unsafe and lead nowhere.  They disrupt the region’s wild and primitive character, threaten wildlife populations and leave cultural and archaeological resources open to vandalism and theft.

Indeed, the BLM proposes two “open” ORV play areas, places where ORVs can churn cross-country, with no stay-the-trail restrictions.  That use destroys vegetation, soil, wildlife and cultural resources.  One of the two is directly adjacent to areas intended to protect a Puebloan archaeological site and an endangered cactus.

Please Take Action Today!

The plan now in process will guide management of the monuments and the Arizona Strip for the next 20 years and more.  It is crucial that the agency know that we want these monuments managed as the quiet, remote and wild places they are today, not as ORV playgrounds spider webbed with roads, its silence rent by the sounds of motors.  You can send that message immediately from this action center. 

Your own comments in your own words will be by far the most effective.  Below is contact information and a sample letter you can use for the most important points.  Remember, the deadline for comments is Friday, March 17!t

To view our recent press release and fact sheets on the Arizona Strip RMP, go to http://www.wilderness.org/NewsRoom/Release/20060307.cfm

You can find a copy of the plan at http://www.blm.gov/az/LUP/strip/strip_plan.htm

Contact information

Regular Mail: Diana Hawks, Planning Team Leader

              BLM Arizona Strip District Office

              345 East Riverside Dr.

              St. George, Utah 84790

              Subject line: Arizona Strip RMP Comments

Email: Arizona_strip@blm.gov

Sample letter

Dear Ms. Hawks:

Arizona is known around the world for its astonishing natural beauty.  Even against this spectacular backdrop, the Grand Canyon-Parashant and Vermilion Cliffs National Monuments and the Arizona Strip are exceptional.

The Bureau of Land Management is required to manage these areas specifically to protect their scientific and historical importance.  Unfortunately, the preferred alternative in your draft Resource Management Plan will not achieve this protection either in its basic direction or in the methods it proposes to rely on.

At the threshold, while I don’t object to providing road access to the monuments, you propose far too many roads.  By now, we all know that roads and ORVs can cause a range of impacts, such as spreading noxious weeds, allowing vandals too-easy access to cultural sites and disrupting sensitive wildlife, such as the threatened desert tortoise.  Please adopt the conservation community’s proposal of 630 miles of road in Grand Canyon-Parashant and 191 miles in the Vermilion Cliffs, a total less than half what you propose.

The BLM has full authority to manage lands to preserve wilderness characteristics and I urge you to use that authority to protect wilderness characteristics on the nearly one million acres of land the Arizona Wilderness Coalition has inventoried and proposed for permanent wilderness protection.  While your roughly 300,000-acre proposal is welcome, it is grossly inadequate. Too many roads and too little wilderness will be a deadly mix for the long-term survival of many native species such as pronghorn, bighorn sheep, mountain lions and tortoise.

The draft plan proposes to use “monitoring” to control damage to wildlife and cultural resources.  But it presents no details. Today there are 3 law enforcement rangers for the entire 3 million acres of the Arizona Strip.  Given today’s budget realities, the likelihood of substantially increasing that number seems very remote.  More to the point, it is hard to conceive of a number of rangers, even if you could afford them, sufficient to effectively patrol this vast area, at even present visitation and use. Your plan utterly ignores the impact of the region’s explosive population growth on the Strip’s remarkable resources, particularly when coupled with parsimonious wilderness protection and a proliferation of roads.

If monitoring is the preferred tool for protecting monument resources, the details are critical: how, where and at what scale.  Anything short of that is an empty promise.

Please present a new alternative for public consideration that offers the prospect of genuine protection of these monuments.  They are an outstanding part of our National Landscape Conservation System and deserve the most sensitive possible management.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment.

Sincerely,

(Your name and address)