National group backs county plan for lands

Benjamin Grove

Monday, Sept. 23, 2002 | 11:07 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- A national environmental group today endorsed a Clark County public land use plan pending in Congress that aims to protect undeveloped wilderness.

In a report released by the Campaign for America's Wilderness, the group also specifically cited the McCullough mountains, an area extending southeast of Las Vegas to the California border, as an egregious example of how urban sprawl is creeping over the boundaries of the nation's wild land areas.

"The attributes of wilderness shrink before the insatiable pressures of this growth," the report, "America's Wilderness in Crisis," said.

The report says that a 323,000-acre area of the McCullough Range identified in 1961 has been reduced to about 200,000 acres by encroaching street grids of urban Las Vegas and Henderson.

The report cites a road that was plowed 10 miles into a protected area by the Nevada Power Co.,which spent $400,000 to remediate damage. The report also says bobcat sightings in Las Vegas neighborhoods point to displaced wildlife.

About 4.7 percent, roughly 105 million acres, of the nation is designated protected wilderness; about half of that is in Alaska, the report said.

But the group is focused on roughly 319 million wild land acres in the West that are not "protected," meaning that the lands are vulnerable to new road construction , off-road vehicle use; drilling and mining; and suburban growth, according to the group's report.

Public land use and protection is often highly controversial as environmental groups clash with an array of organizations and companies that aim to use federal public lands for recreation and underground resources.

Nevada's lawmakers in Congress have laid out a comprehensive plan for public lands in Clark County that aims to set aside 444,000 acres as wilderness, and open up 183,000 acres for other uses, in some cases development.

The Campaign for America's Wilderness generally supports the wilderness provisions of the plan, said Douglas Scott, policy director for the group. He said the group was working with the Nevada Wilderness Project and Friends of Nevada Wilderness in support of the local groups' efforts to protect lands.

"Our job is to help," Scott said. "We're about adding resources, adding expertise to the wealth of expertise that already exists there in Southern Nevada."

Local groups also support much of the Clark County wilderness legislation pending in Congress, which designates part of the McCullough range as national conservation and protected wilderness areas. But parts of the alluvial slopes of the mountains are not protected in the legislation, said Shaaron Netherton, executive director of Friends of Nevada Wilderness.

"One of the things that frightens us is the constant appetite to dispose of public lands so more growth can happen," Netherton said. "Wilderness designation is one of the only ways to stop that growth."

The Campaign for America's Wilderness formed to help stem the loss of protected wilderness, director Mike Matz said. The nation now has 7 million miles of roads and no place in America is more than 20 miles from a road, he said.

"This unprotected wilderness is being whittled away, and at an alarming rate that well merits the word 'crisis,' " Matz said.

The report identified five examples of how wilderness areas are in danger in five states, including the McCullough Mountains. The other areas: the Owyhee-Bruneau canyon land of southwest Idaho; the San Rafael Swell of Utah; the Arctic lands of northern Alaska; and central California's High Sierra.