Lands Worth Leaving Alone (NYTimes Editorial)

The conservationists have reason to worry, for what we are seeing is the unhappy confluence of two states of mind. One is the administration’s indifference to the value of wilderness — indeed, Ms. Norton has essentially renounced her authority to recommend more lands for wilderness protection. The other is the durable fantasy that the nation can deal with oil dependency and natural gas shortages if the drillers are let loose on public lands.

The net result has been a strategy of fast-tracking oil leases throughout the West, most conspicuously in areas that the Interior Department regarded as worthy of wilderness designation in the days before the Bush administration. …

Fully 88 percent of the public lands in the Rocky Mountains are [already] open for oil and gas drilling; in Wyoming, the figure is 94 percent. At issue, really, are scraps of land, places the Wilderness Society calls “too wild to drill.” Relative to the country’s overall needs, these scraps contain only trivial amounts of oil and natural gas.

Nobody expects the administration to abandon its basic doctrine that aggressive exploitation of the public domain is necessary to achieve energy independence. Yet a rebellion is slowly taking shape, not only among Mr. Bush’s usual adversaries in the conservation movement and in Congress, but also among some of his natural constituents….