The 112th Congress could become the first since 1966 to designate no acres anywhere in the United States for protection under the Wilderness Act.

There are currently 27 pending bills that would designate wilderness in 13 states, including five measures that would protect public land in California as wilderness, four that would designate additional wilderness in Colorado, four that would protect additional wilderness in New Mexico, and three that would add more acres in Oregon to the National Wilderness Preservation System.

“Some of the bills that are being held up are wilderness-only bills,” David Moulton, the senior director for legislative affairs at the Wilderness Society, said. “Most of them are bills that combine wilderness with the protection of other uses.”

Moulton explained that bills designating new wilderness are bottled up in the House Natural Resources Committee.

“Right now, the sitting chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, Rep. Doc Hastings of Washington, is so ideologically opposed to adding any wilderness to the preservation system that he refuses to allow bills through his committee,” Moulton said. “So bills that have been proposed to protect wild areas in states represented by Republicans, where there’s broad support and [the bill is] introduced by a Republican, are going to the House Natural Resources Committee and dying there.”

Hastings, 71, issued a statement in Nov. 2011 that indicated skepticism about additional wilderness legislation, arguing that enough has already been set aside.

“The federal government already owns more lands than it can afford to properly manage,” Hastings said. “We must make thoughtful and careful land-use decisions that reflect our country’s current economic situation, keep our lands healthy, and exemplify the importance of ensuring public access to public lands for multi-use purposes.”

The prospects for wilderness designations by means of a large bill that wraps many smaller proposals into one probably aren’t any greater than they are for the individual wilderness bills, at least if Hastings’ views carry the day in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives.

In Jan. 2011 Hastings told the Seattle Times that the House Republican majority would not pass so-called omnibus land conservation bills.

Even if there were a reasonable chance for an omnibus bill to move through the House of Representatives before adjournment near the end of December, the Senate may find it difficult to find the time to take up such expansive legislation.

The chamber, like the House of Representatives, is intensely engaged in efforts to resolve the federal government’s fiscal crisis. “All I can say is that the Senate is an infinitely flexible place, so anything can happen,” Bill Wicker, a spokesperson for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said. “But, at the same time, lame duck is a very challenging environment for all legislation.” Wicker was using the phrase commonly applied to the period in which the members of the Senate and House of Representatives meet that occurs between an election and the start of the next Congress. The outlook is not uniformly bad for public lands legislation. A measure that would re-designate Pinnacles National Monument in California as a national park passed the House unanimously. The House version of the bill does not designate any new wilderness. Instead, it would re-name the existing Pinnacles wilderness to honor a pioneer family from the area. “Since all the land is already under the control of the National Park Service, it doesn’t add any costs,” Adam Russell, a spokesperson for the bill’s sponsor, U.S. Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., said. A companion bill introduced by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., that remains pending in the Senate would add an additional 3,000 acres of wilderness within the new national park.



Photo of Pinnacles National Monument courtesy Wikimedia.



Note: A version of this story also appears at Examiner.com.