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331 B ill Clinton’s 1992 election to the White House raised high hopes in the environmental community. To many, it seemed the stage had been set for a return to the heyday of environmental politics in the 1960s and 1970s, when a coordinated environmental movement, a friendly Congress, and a proactive White House worked together to advance an active agenda for environmental reform. But those expectations faltered in 1994 when Republicans captured the House and Senate for the 104th Congress, only to be revived during Clinton’s second term, and dashed again by George W. Bush’s election to the White House in 2000. Consider how quickly events turned: In August 1993, Clinton’s new secretary of the interior proposed raising grazing fees on the public lands from $1.86 to $5 per animal unit month (AUM) as part of an environmentally minded overhaul of grazing policy; two years later most reforms had been blocked and grazing fees dropped to $1.61 per AUM. In the meantime, angry westerners hung environmentalists in effigy and vandalized Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) offices. In July 1994, President Clinton protected 75 percent of the Ancient Forests important to the spotted owl from logging; the next year, Republicans passed legislation—a salvage logging rider—that temporarily opened some of the same forests to expedited logging with limited environmental reviews and appeals. That led more than a thousand people to march in the streets of Seattle in protest. In 1994, Congress rejected a Republican proposal to protect 1.8 million acres of wilderness across Utah; two years later, President Clinton took executive action to protect that much federal land in a single national monument in southern Utah. Utahns came to the signing dressed as if for a funeral wake. And, in January 2001, President Clinton protected 58.5 million acres of national forest roadless areas in response to the public support of more than one million Americans; but within months, newly elected President Bush took the first steps to undo that protection, signaling the first of many challenges to public lands protection. What explains this seesaw of environmental politics? Political scientists 10 / The Paths to Public Lands Reform 332 chapter 10 Christopher Klyza and David Sousa point to one crucial factor underlying the dynamics of environmental policy in the 1990s and 2000s. As congressional gridlock intensified, they argue it “channeled tremendous political energies down other policymaking pathways, creating considerable instability in policy as policymakers and interest groups have pursued their agendas—sometimes momentous policy shifts—in other venues.”1 Despite pursuing very different policy goals, the Clinton administration, Republican leaders in Congress, and the Bush administration shared a willingness and an ability to circumvent the traditional legislative process to pursue alternative policy pathways, such as executive action, administrative rulemaking, and congressional appropriations. Such strategies were not new, but what had been a trend in the 1980s became a defining characteristic of environmental politics in the 1990s and 2000, especially in the case of the public lands. Equally important was the increasingly contested and expansive agenda for public lands reform that had emerged since the mid-1980s. The most active proposals were not incremental policy changes, but more ambitious reforms of grazing, logging, and wild lands protection policies that directly challenged the western communities and industries dependent on the public lands. A disjointed network of interest groups struggled to effect legislative reform in Congress: the rifts between national groups like the Wilderness Society and the New Conservation Movement had political consequences, especially in the early 1990s, as they divided over strategy for public lands reform. The Clinton-era roadless rule exemplified these changes. It represented the fruition of efforts to protect the national forests that dated back to the Wilderness Act and before. But the strategies central to the roadless rule campaign suggest that instead of being the last great wilderness campaign of the twentieth century, it was the first national campaign of a new era of public lands reform. The core rationale for the roadless rule was the fiscal unsustainability of existing forestry policies and the ecological importance of roadless areas. Instead of pushing this agenda through Congress, a strategy that had proven politically impossible since the late 1980s, public lands advocates looked to the Forest Service to advance this policy nationally through an administrative rulemaking process. Although the Clinton administration and the Forest Service have been credited most publicly for the roadless rule, a coalition of public lands groups and...

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