More wilderness, please

Just 3.7 percent of Oregon designated for protection

For a state known for its pristine forests, mountains and rivers, Oregon has a surprisingly small amount of land designated as wilderness.

Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since the last major wilderness expansion in this state — when President Reagan signed the Oregon Wilderness Act, giving permanent protection to 930,000 acres. Since then, wilderness designations have come in smaller increments. Examples include the 13,000-acre Opal Creek area east of Salem and 170,000-acre Steens Mountain area south of Burns.

A mere 3.7 percent of Oregon is currently protected under the federal Wilderness Act, compared with 14.4 percent for California, 10.1 percent for Washington and 7.6 percent for Idaho. Those numbers make it clear the job of protecting wilderness is far from done in Oregon.

Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith recently tried to win approval of a bill that would have increased existing wilderness protections in the Mount Hood area by 125,000 acres and granted wild and scenic river protections to an additional 80 miles of Oregon rivers.

The bill should have winged through the Senate like an osprey down a river canyon. After lengthy negotiations and intense scrutiny, the Lewis and Clark Mount Hood Wilderness Act of 2007 was approved with robust bipartisan support on the Senate Committee for Energy and Natural Resources. The measure even has the support of a Bush administration that has shown dismayingly little interest in wilderness expansion.

But something went wrong when Wyden and Smith submitted their bill for what should have been perfunctory unanimous consent. That “something” was Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who blocked the Mount Hood bill, along with dozens of other Senate bills, that he says call for new spending without offsetting cuts.

Coburn is a serial obstructionist who richly deserves the opprobrium of his colleagues whose bills he has swatted down. Although he claims to act on principle, Coburn is an ardent supporter of an Iraq war that, as an editorial in The Oregonian newspaper recently noted, is being paid for by borrowed money without offsetting cuts. It doesn’t take much arithmetic to figure out which is contributing more to the federal deficit — an Iraq war that will soon have cost Americans $1 trillion or the Mount Hood wilderness bill, which would cost federal taxpayers $11 million over the next five years.

If Coburn refuses to withdraw his hold on the Mount Hood bill, and if Wyden and Smith are unable to bring it to a timely floor vote, Oregonians will be forced to wait until the next Congress. If that happens, lawmakers should seize the opportunity to make further additions to the state’s meager wilderness inventory.

In a recent letter to Oregon’s congressional delegation, Gov. Ted Kulongoski proposed the creation or expansion of nine protected Oregon wilderness areas. They include:

The 30,087 Badlands Wilderness 15 miles east of Bend.

The 3,800-acre Boulder Lake Wilderness in Wasco County.

The 13,700-acre Copper Salmon Wilderness at the headwaters of the Elk River in southwestern Oregon.

The 250,000 acre Kalmiopsis Wildlands, which includes the watersheds of the Illinois and Chetco and North Fork of the Smith rivers.

A 590-acre addition to the existing Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness.

The 23,000-acre Soda Mountain Wilderness, which lies within the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument east of Ashland.

The 8,286-acre Spring Basin Wilderness in the John Day River drainage.

The 25,452 Wasson Creek Wilderness in the northern Oregon Coast Range.

A 58,340-acre addition to the existing Wild Rogue Wilderness, along with the addition of 98 miles of tributaries to the Lower Rogue Wild and Scenic River system.

The time has come for a major infusion of wilderness in Oregon, starting with the Mount Hood Wilderness bill.

Reluctant lawmakers should reflect on President Lyndon Johnson’s exhortation, when he signed the Wilderness Act into law more than four decades ago:

“If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.”