we have demonstrated in several instances a willingness to engage in serious conversations. Unfortunately with the current bill, we were not invited to have similar input, even though I think there were opportunities for that, even opportunities within a week of the time that the bill was filed. Mr. CANNON. When you say the current bill, you are talking about the Pilot Range— Mr. YOUNG. Correct. Mr. CANNON. Okay; right, because you have been in conversation with our Centerfield guy Mr. YOUNG. Absolutely. Mr. CANNON. —for a year now, right? Mr. YOUNG. Absolutely. Mr. CANNON. Good; but moving to the Pilot Range; now, in fact, I want to ask one other question before I get to the current bill. Are you familiar with the theory of the recreational opportunity spectrum? Mr. YOUNG. That is a new one to me. Mr. CANNON. Okay; let me ask you this: do you view the wilderness designation as a recreational designation or a land protection designation? And I do not know if you have a policy-I have talked to several members of SUWA who view it as recreational. So if you can answer for SUWA and for yourself, I would appreciate that. Mr. YOUNG. For SUWA and for myself, the values inherent in wilderness extend far beyond recreation itself. Those values include protecting a range of resources: archaeological, scientific, wildlife. They include values of basic spirituality; so a range of values that extend far beyond recreation itself. Mr. CANNON. Thank you. I see my time has expired and yield back. Mr. HANSEN. [Presiding] Do you want some more time? Mr. CANNON. Yes, actually. Mr. HANSEN. Well, I will give it to you in just a minute. [Laughter.] Mr. HANSEN. Let me ask you this: and I am very grateful to see this. I did not think I would ever see the day where you were working intensively with county commissioners in Emery County on San Rafael. Mr. YOUNG. Yes; it was not a process we initiated. We think that the most appropriate way to resolve this issue is with a comprehensive, statewide bill. With the West Desert Initiative between the Governor and the Secretary, we sought to be productive in our involvement. In the San Rafael Swell area in Emery County, we have sought to be responsible and productive in our involvement. And so, even though these are not our bills, and they are not-it is not a process that we would construct in this particular fashion, we have tried to go to the table and be strong advocates for protecting what wild places remain but also engage in responsible conversation. Mr. HANSEN. Well, you have made an abrupt change from the memorandum that I have received that says that you would not involve yourself in that, and we tried to get you folks to do that many, many times. Was it Ken Rait who was on Take Two with the then-Director of Natural Resources Ted Stewart and said they did not do it? And then, I was on Take Two with another one who said they would not do it, and no one ever responded to our correspondence when we asked you, the Governor and I-not you; I am referring to the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance-to work with us on this wilderness bill that we introduced, which was statewide, which you have now said you would rather go statewide. Would it not have been better if you had come to the table instead of taking that hard line position? And we could have worked that out possibly, maybe the Governor and Babbitt and SUWA and the Sierra Club and the cattlemen and the ATVs and the Backcountry Pilots? We could have all sat down and worked it out. That is how we did the 1984 Wilderness Bill that passed. That was the only way we got it to go. But we could not get you folks to do it. Now, you come and tell this Committee that that is what you want to do. What caused the change? Mr. YOUNG. Two responses to that: the bill in the 104th Congress, as introduced, was deeply flawed. We sought to participate in a series of public hearings that were conducted throughout the state. We sought to submit public comment. But the resulting product fell far, far, far from the vision that the conservation community has and was unacceptable. Mr. HANSEN. Who did you talk to? I was the author of that bill. No one came to me. I had people come to the hearing that criticized it. We even asked. I remember Governor Leavitt in Nephi asking to have people come and sit down and talk about it. Not one person showed up. And then, we got this-was it Ken Rait? Am I saying it right? Mr. YOUNG. Yes, you are; that is Mr. HANSEN. Mr. Rait put a memorandum out, and I am sure you have got a copy of it. If you do not, I will furnish it to you. It said we will not do that. Now, you are telling this Committee today that you now intend to sit down and become players on these things. Is that correct? Mr. YOUNG. What I am telling you is that since January 1999, we have sat down in two different settings: first in the West Desert, second in the San Rafael Swell area, and we have sought to engage in constructive conversations. These are not bills that we are sponsors of. They are not bills that we are encouraging. But we are willing to sit down and see if there is sufficient common ground to fashion bills in these areas. Mr. HANSEN. I commend you for that. I hope that is the way you go, because you are never going to get this thing done-I will guarantee it; when we are both pushing up daisies, Mr. Young, unless people will sit down and talk. Mr. YOUNG. Well, one of the challenges Mr. HANSEN. There is part of your testimony that says come, let us reason together, and I think that if you folks would do that, this thing would have been done 10 years ago. But you have always taken that hard line. This is the most dramatic testimony I have ever heard from SUWA that you just gave, that you have changed your way of doing business; you will now sit down and work on bills. Now, you added another thing I kind of liked a minute ago: you said we should be civil in these things. I could not agree more. Mr. YOUNG. One of the challenges, from my perspective— Mr. YOUNG. One of the challenges from my perspective is we have so often a reification of images of one another. I have heard again and again and again that the only reason that SUWA exists is to raise money, that we are not interested in designated wilderness. It is not a true statement. It is not why I left my tenured professorship at Brigham Young University; took a pay cut in order to become executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. It simply is not true. Mr. HANSEN. Well, let me say this: let us go back to the civil thing. Do you think it is fair when we get into these issues for your people or our people to make personal attacks on you? Mr. YOUNG. You know, I always feel that we never make progress when we call somebody dumb. Now, their bill may be dumb, or their proposal may be dumb, and I think that is okay to say. But when we end up calling the person dumb, yes, I prefer not to do that. Now, do I control everyone who belongs to the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance? Absolutely not. Excuse me. Mr. HANSEN. Excuse me. Well, you would be surprised how many things we have traced, written in the paper, to Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and the Sierra Club. I wish it was just a mild word like dumb: accusing them of being on the take; accusing them of brown envelopes being shoved under their door and all that stuff; I do not think that is called for. I cannot think of a time when anyone on this Committee ever personally took you on, Ken Rait on, Clive Kincaid on or any of those people personally. Now, we will disagree with you. That is fair. That is the fun of it. That is the good part of it. It is like in a debate, being one of the old dogs here, I have been asked to tell a lot of Republicans how to run, and our first statement is do not ever get into personalities. Are issues fair? Absolutely, issues are fair. I think you folks have substantially hurt your cause by making personal attacks on a lot of people. I yield to whatever you want, because I am leaving, and I am going to give you this. [Laughter.] Mr. CANNON. Hallelujah! Mr. YOUNG. Mr. Chairman! Mr. HANSEN. He has been waiting to be a Chairman for-how long you been here now? Mr. CANNON. I thought I was going to make it this time, too, but not in this Committee. Mr. HANSEN. Let me thank you, Mr. Young. I appreciate your coming. Mr. Harja, thanks so very much, and you folks who have sat through this very interesting exchange. Mr. CANNON. [Presiding] And let me point out that this is not long. I am now 1 minute late for a meeting that will take me 2 minutes to get to. Mr. HANSEN. At the end, you have got to adjourn it, you know. Mr. CANNON. I think I can get those words. But I do have a followup that I wanted to do. I would encourage you to take a look, and we have some information on the recreational opportunity spectrum. It is an intriguing idea, because the concept is that what you are doing with the wilderness is designating a way to have recreation, and the array of recreation, one of those concepts is what you mentioned; I think you called it spiritual. Maybe people have different views, but it is the ability to be away from modern society. And it seems to me that there is a theoretical problem that I hope you will begin to struggle with. In fact, let me just divert, and I wanted to say this when Jim was here; but for the record, I wanted to be clear that since you have taken over, and it has gotten better as you have asserted your role there, the personal attacks and the personal offensiveness has declined dramatically. Now, we have differed very much on what the truth is, and I have been very direct with you when I believed that your organization had stepped over the line. But the civility of the discussion has not just been unilateral. I hope that I have contributed to that; you certainly have contributed to the civility of that discussion. But back to the recreational opportunity spectrum. There is a theoretical problem that is-responding the way that you did to your last question, the last question I asked, which is there are an array of values that are important in wilderness; it seems to me that that argument-if you are arguing that wilderness is important because it is recreational; because the concept is getting distance from modern mankind, that is the context in which you get the largest amount of wilderness, because you want to create places where you can actually get away. If, on the other hand, you are talking about archaeological or spiritual or recreational or other limited kinds of recreational, other kinds of uses of land under the designation of wilderness, then, you have the problem of complexity, and the problem with the wilderness concept is it is not complex. The wilderness process is a heavy-handed, harsh, clear designation and, in fact, is being used right now to impede the process of controlling wildfires in Colorado, where they are allowing chainsaws to go in but no dumping of slurry from airplanes or helicopters, and presumably, if we get firemen in danger, those firemen will be extracted by helicopter, but, you know, the rigidity of the act has been demonstrated under those circumstances. So what I want to do is give you an opportunity to respond to the complexity that you have indicated you think is important in the wilderness concept and how you deal with those with wilderness legislation or designation as opposed to a more complex legislative structure. Mr. YOUNG. Well, in the past 37 years, since the Wilderness Act was passed, we have I think entered approximately 104 million acres of land into the National Wilderness Preservation System. I may be off a few million acres but somewhere in that vicinity, and I think that we are a better nation for that. I think that the Wilderness Act, which provides statutory protection in the law, has served us very well. One of our concerns is when we create these wilderness bills with exceptions, with language that undermines genuine wilderness protection with unprecedented language like that contained in H.R. 2488 that we weaken the National Wilderness Preservation System. And we think that lands that are worthy of wilderness designation should be afforded the protection envisioned by the 1964 Wilderness Act. Mr. CANNON. If I might, with the forest wilderness that we have done in Utah, for instance, we have protected watershed. It is an incredibly important thing and very successful. But in your statement, if I might just point out, you are talking about preservation and protection of land in the context of wilderness, and I think the question I asked you is do you view this as protection of the land, or do you view it as a recreational? You answered it is complex. Do you want to readdress that? Are we dealing with protecting land, or are we dealing with the opportunity for human beings to have a different kind of experience that can only be had in the context of wilderness? Mr. YOUNG. Well Mr. CANNON. Then, again, how do we deal with the complexities that those two very different concepts hold? I do not know that you can answer that. I just want to suggest that the issue here is not one of philosophy purity; it is one of balancing the competing interests that are there. And moving away from that, I would like to ask just another question, and I may have missed this because I was not in here, but you have said that the Pilot Range has wilderness characteristics. At the same time, you are complaining about the overflights, which would be inconsistent with wilderness characteristics. Is your position that we ought to reclaim this from the overflights? In other words, are you going from the wilderness, the approach to wilderness backwards from what the concept originally was, which was to identify wild areas and saying we could reclaim these wild areas by eliminating overflights? Mr. YOUNG. I have stated already, and I do not think you were here, that we would be willing to accept military use language similar to that in the Arizona Desert Wilderness Act, the California Desert Protection Act. Our position, I think, is that wilderness is a place where the presence of man is largely unnoticed, and yes, it may be that on occasional days for a few seconds, there is a lowlevel overflight that is intrusive, but it is a fairly short-term intrusion, and the experience of wilderness is not fundamentally compromised. Mr. CANNON. So the idea that there are currently overflights in your mind does not discount the area as wilderness? Mr. YOUNG. We have felt very good about the capacity for wilderness study areas within the UTTR to retain their wilderness characteristic over the past 15 years or so that those two entities, wilderness study areas and the UTTR, have coexisted? Mr. CANNON. Great; thank you. Mr. Harja, do you have anything that you would like to add at all to this debate? Mr. HARJA. A little bit. One, I would just like to note for the record that Mr. Young mentioned Bettridge Creek at the south end |