Editorial: Clinton poised to add to protected U.S. land

Monday, Dec. 6, 1999 | 9:10 a.m.

NEW YORK TIMES

For someone who paid no attention to environmental issues during his first year in office, President Clinton may wind up with an impressive legacy as a preservationist. In addition to his earlier programs to restore the Everglades and to protect Yellowstone, the forests of the Pacific Northwest and the redwoods in California, the president recently set in motion a plan that would, in effect, create 40 million acres of new wilderness by blocking road building in much of the national forests.

In recent months, his secretary of the interior, Bruce Babbitt, has been exploring the possibility of additional action under the Antiquities Act of 1906, a little-known statute that allows presidents, by executive order, to protect public lands from development by designating them as national monuments. If used intelligently, the act offers Clinton a useful tool to set aside vulnerable public lands before he leaves office.

Because it allows a president to act on his own authority and without engaging Congress, the Antiquities Act is an attractive weapon to any president whose time is running out and who wishes to quickly enlarge his environmental record. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter designated 15 monuments in Alaska, which in turn accelerated passage of a bill that added 47 million acres in Alaska to the national park system. But overuse could also divert support from even broader open-space initiatives, including what is expected to be another serious push to seek $1 billion annually in permanent financing for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Near the end of his first term, Clinton created the Grand Staircase-Escalante national monument on 1.7 million unprotected acres in Utah.

Babbitt is considering a dozen sites. The largest is one million acres on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Others include the Missouri Breaks, along 140 miles of the Missouri River in Montana, and hundreds of thousands of acres in Arizona, Colorado, California and Oregon. All the projects are worthy, but as a matter of caution he and the president need to winnow the list to sites most deserving of immediate protection. Western Republicans, complaining about a federal "land grab," are looking for any excuse to revive their attack on the act, which has survived in part because it has been used sparingly.

Within these limitations, there is no reason not to use the act, a statute with an honorable history that has produced illustrious results.