Message to Babbitt:
'No land lock-ups!'

SELMA, Ore. -- Grass-roots opponents of an environmentalist proposal that would lock up one million acres of federal land in southwestern Oregon as a national monument will be out in force today when Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt arrives for a visit with local conservationists and a morning hike along the Illinois River.

The reason for the visit has not been made public, but suspicions are running high locally that the secretary is scoping out the area -- and perhaps others -- with an eye to making recommendations to the president for some last-minute monument designations, via the 1906 Antiquities Act.

If true, the rugged, forested area on the Oregon-California boundary, dubbed the Siskiyou Wild Rivers region, would be high on the list of possible designations for the state. Babbitt has not officially recommended the area to the president for monument status but such a designation is strongly promoted by a dozen powerful national environmental organizations.

Officials at the Department of Interior will neither confirm nor completely deny the possibility of such an action by the secretary, an attitude that has done little to quiet community concerns. A media release -- filed after hours on Friday -- said only that Babbitt is here "to consider management options for the Siskiyou wild rivers area."

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He will also make an announcement at a press conference to be held at an undisclosed location, but details of that, too, have not been released. The stopover is a leg of a whirlwind tour of western states that began yesterday with a visit to Yellowstone National Park for a briefing on the wolf re-introduction program.

Today's visit -- like most of the tour -- is shrouded in secrecy but, whatever the reason, hundreds of protesters are assembling to send a loud and clear message, not only to Babbitt and the president, but to the American public and the incoming administration that they are adamantly opposed to these designations, the locking-up of resources and denial of access that inevitably result.

The protest is sponsored and coordinated by the local chapters of Frontiers of Freedom/People for the USA, and comes on the heels of a highly successful rally Saturday, a week ago. The organizers of that event only learned of Babbitt's pending visit just a few days ago and have spent almost every minute sending out announcements and burning up the phone lines and the Internet in an effort to muster their allies.

"We aren't waiting for an invitation," said Katherine Van Tuyl, media coordinator for FF/PFUSA in Medford, Ore. "We're not waiting to see what the new administration will do. And most of the community here feels that way. So we're going to be out there with our signs and placards, wearing black armbands. The whole notion that they're arranging a tour for Babbitt with people from the preservationist side only -- with nobody representing the landowners or resource users -- is very wrong. So we plan to go out there and intercept them."

"It's public land, after all," she observed. "They can't tell us to bug off."

As WorldNetDaily reported in August, obtaining monument status for the area has been a long-time project of the powerful, well-funded environmental lobby, working through a coalition of national and local groups including the World Wildlife Fund, the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, and the Wilderness Society.

A multi-colored brochure prepared by the Siskiyou Project promotes the monument plan as a way to "protect, preserve and restore the globally important objects of scientific and historic interest found in Oregon's Siskiyou Mountains."

Designation is viewed as a complement to the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument to the east, which Clinton established in June. This is a 92,000-acre area, with 52,000 acres of BLM land and 40,000 acres of private land. Supporters of both designations describe the existing monument as a "loading dock" for the yet-to-be designated "Ark" -- the Siskiyou Wild Rivers ecosystem.

But monument designation, say critics, would put the entire area off-limits to mining, cattle grazing, farming, development, timber cutting and most forms of recreation.

If the plan for a mega-size monument doesn't make the final cut, a much-scaled-down version has also been proposed: the Rough and Ready Creek National Monument, a 33,400-acre area within the boundaries of the larger Siskiyou Wild Rivers monument. And a third candidate has been offered recently by environmentalists for consideration: Medicine Mountain National Monument, north of Crater Lake.

Though none of these sites has been officially recommended by Babbitt, the secrecy surrounding the visit to Oregon suggests to locals that something is afoot. It was kept so quiet, even the local county commissioners and congressional delegation knew nothing about it until the last minute. Nor were they invited to accompany the secretary on his walk in the woods.

"No, we were not informed -- we learned about it from media reports and I know Congressman Walden was not invited to attend," said Jeff Eager with
Rep. Greg Walden's office in Washington. The Oregon Republican, whose district covers much of the state and includes the areas that would be affected by any proposed designation, has been an outspoken opponent of monuments created by presidential proclamation.

"He has a long record of standing against monument designation and against willy-nilly exclusions of the land," said Eager, describing the congressman's record. Eager did not discount the possibility that a designation might be in the wind, even at this late a date.

"When the secretary is in Oregon on Sunday, the administration will have fewer than seven days left, and springing something like that at the last minute would be -- well, that's the kind of thing we've come to expect from this administration," said Eager.

Even environmentalists claim to be out-of-the-loop.

"I don't know much about it," said Dominick DellaSala, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Klamath-Siskiyou Regional Program. DellaSala said he did not know as of Friday afternoon whether he would be invited to attend. Assessing the possibility that the monument he has worked for would not be designated, he said he'd be "disappointed," but was optimistic that it might happen in the coming week. If not, "we'll have to reassess our priorities."

Department officials have issued qualified denials that the purpose of the stop involves monument designations, and the press has furthered this denial, observing that creation of new monuments in Oregon is "unlikely" because of the lateness of the hour.

Time "may have run out" for the Siskiyou Wild Rivers National Monument, according to the Medford Mail Tribune, a local daily newspaper, which says the plan "looks dead."

Indeed, news reports predict that the announcement Babbitt makes is that there will be no further monument designations, at least not for Oregon.

Perhaps so, but the protesters and event organizers remain skeptical and, in fact, increased their efforts to bring out a crowd.

"When they [public officials] started last week claiming there would probably be no monument designation, my radar went off," said Van Tuyl. "I figure they may not do Siskiyou Wild Rivers but could do Rough and Ready Creek."

Jim Nolan, vice president of the Illinois Valley chapter of FF/PFUSA, agrees. He has discovered that Babbitt will be doing a fly-over of the Rough and Ready Creek area as well as a tour on the ground. "This suggests it's this area that could be declared a monument," Nolan said. "We didn't think Rough and Ready was under serious consideration [as a separate monument], but it looks like we may have been wrong."

Nolan, an electrical engineer who designs business communication systems, has spent much of the past six months fighting the monument proposal -- ever since he learned about the plans being made behind the scenes for his community by environmental groups and the administration.

"He began talking to his neighbors about fighting it and discovered Ron Smith," reported Joseph Farah, in a WorldNetDaily report last August.

"Both Nolan and Smith are lifelong Illinois Valley residents, equally passionate about local control and a self-supporting, economically viable community. In a matter of days, the two of them had managed to build a local chapter of People for the USA and establish weekly meetings attracting up to 500 opponents of the monument plan."

Those weekly meetings and other public education efforts quickly bore fruit. Cave Junction's city council came out against the plan, then the Chamber of Commerce. The commissioners of Josephine, Jackson and Douglas counties -- apprised of the negative consequences of monument designation -- likewise passed resolutions of opposition.

Enthusiasm also spread to other neighboring, more urban communities.

Last weekend an estimated 1,700 people descended on the city of Medford, Ore., to rally against monument designations, vent pent-up frustrations and show their support for public access to public lands.

"We had one helluva party," said Larry Tolle, northwest director for
FF/PFUSA. "It was bigger than anything we exected. We figured there would be 30 vehicles in the parade, but there were over 175 -- stock trailers, trucks, SUVs, motorcycles -- you name it."

Plus, there were representatives of at least 23 groups, including the American
Land Rights Association, of Battleground,
Wash.; the Idaho-based BlueRibbon Coalition, a nonprofit that supports public access to public lands; the Oregon Cattlemen's Association,
state and local chapters; and various miner and timber organizations -- to name a few.

"I think we had representatives from every group that has an interest in the woods up there," Tolle recalled.

After the parade, some 1,200 people reassembled at the Red Lion Hotel to listen to brief remarks by group representatives. The crowd filled the auditorium and spilled out into the street where loudspeakers were set up.

Each group had three minutes to speak -- "and each [representative] got up and talked about their group and what they were mad about," said Tolle. "We got a lot of interest out of a lot of groups and all the groups worked together."

"The biggest thing we did was put the troops on the ground. We didn't twist any arms -- we just turned them on," he said.

See earlier articles:

President locks up 1 million more acres

More opposition to Oregon monument

Opposition builds to new land grab

President targets more monuments

355,000-acre 'land grab' on fast track