On March 22nd, Sen. Bob Bennett [R-UT] and Rep. Jim Matheson [D-UT2] released the draft of their proposed legislation to create a water pipeline to Washington County from Lake Powell. Full text and a related map of The Washington County Growth and Conservation Act of 2006 are available at Bennett's Senate website and are mirrored on Zion Mojave Wilderness's site as well.

By combining the pipeline development with some national wilderness designation, BLM land sales (up to 25,000 acres, freeway construction, and off-road and recreational development, the bill is intended to bundle enough constituencies together to ensure quick passage.

One possible sticking point: the Utah Wilderness Coalition complained that the draft shortchanges conservation and wilderness issues at the expense of massive growth and development. In an open response to Bennett's draft, the UWC said that the public input and consensus building process originally begun under Governor Olene Walker had been abruptly halted in December 2004. Having been cut out of the drafting process, then the environmental groups are expressing serious reservations about the bill.

For his part, Senator Bennett says he wants to pair "responsible conservation strategies with Washington County's "phenomenal growth." In a press release, Sen. Bennett says, "This proposal is modeled after legislation authored by Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign of Nevada," and that successful bill, Bennett continues, can serve "as an example of how we can achieve the same kind of balanced growth in our own state."

Because if there's one thing Nevada and Las Vegas is known for, it's balanced growth.

Posted by red dirt ed. at 12:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the second edition of the short-lived Aspen Magazine, published in early 1966, an anonymous author lamented the impending destruction of a narrow 12-mile stretch of Glenwood Canyon in order to create the Glenwood Canyon Highway (now I-70).

Perhaps the time has come when we must practice conservation at our doorsteps, and not be content with merely preserving wilderness areas in isolated sections. In a way, the canyon is a symbol of the kind of decision communities all over the U.S. are having to make. Do we let the U.S. turn into a maze of mass habitation and transportation, allowing highways to blast through anywhere to speed us from one strip city to the next, letting urban sprawl ooze across the landscape like festering sores?
Or do we decide to preserve and treasure what we have not way off in the wilderness, but right in the midst of where people are living where it can be enjoyed daily. No wonder plans are afoot to flood parts of Grand Canyon and saw the Redwoods into lumber; if people won't get disturbed about what is going on right where they live, why will they care about destruction in remote areas?

Aspen No. 2, Item 6: Farewell To A Canyon [ubu.com]
Glen Canyon Dam [wikipedia.org]

Posted by red dirt ed. at 09:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This month's banner includes a landscape by Springdale-based photographer David Pettit. For nearly 30 years, Pettit has been working as a professional photographer, capturing what he calls the "essential landscapes" of the Colorado Plateau and Zion's, Bryce, and Grand Canyons and beyond.

This landscape, Gooseberry Mesa, looking back at Zion, is from one of his works titled, "John's View," which Pettit named "in memory of a friend and Zion National Park naturalist, John Etheridge, who was killed in a fall on the Echo Canyon Trail in the park."

See more of Pettit's images and order art prints at his website, David Pettit Photography.

Posted by red dirt ed. at 09:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)