BOARD02415

• Board Meeting Date: 3/20/2000
• Description: Directors' Reports
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

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pride rather than simply haying a bunch of inventory out in the garage that is discovered and
given to someone else.

And that's the reason when President Clinton did the Grand Staircase Escalante in 1996 I said to
him, you should create a first monument by Presidential Proclamation that has ever been created
for and within the Bureau of Land Management. And people said "Well, why do that?" Well, I've
given you one reason. And that is I think you give an institution some pride and some direction,
not by stripping it by its best assets. But you also induce a new sense of the relationships on the
landscape. The importance of Grand Staircase Escalante was that we were dealing with the
landscape matrix in which Bryce and Zion and Parashant and Canyon lands and the Grand
Canyon lay and turning the matrix into a coal mine didn't seem to make much sense. But the
matrix doesn't need to be a national park. The visitation sites are already there. What you need to
do is manage the ecosystem and make sure there are no incompatible uses. And that is the
relationship that I think is now beginning to corne upon the landscape. We are going to work this
out at Colorado National Monument in Grand Junction because we're debating the jurisdictional
future ofthe landscape adjacent to a national monument run by the park service. We are debating
that in southwestern Colorado - because we are debating about the matrix in which there are
discrete national park units. And, of course, we will be debating it in the San Luis Valley. And
my hope is that out of this will emerge not two but three land management agencies in charge of
administering live, vibrant, carefully protected conservation units - Fish and Wildlife Service,
Park Service, Bureau of Land Management.

Way in the back.

Two questions. Don't you think Dinosaur National Monument might benefit from large visionary
plan like you describe?

BB: Good .and the second question is how do you approach this?

BB: Those are all the right questions. The first one is, "What about Dinosaur National
Monument?" And I'm thinking - "Have we missed one in Colorado? Show me the way."
Seriously - that's precisely the kind of dialogue that I think we should encourage. These
initiatives have to have some roots in local communities. You can't just sort of impose them from
on high. And that's why we've had this year-long dialogue down in Cortez, and why we have
been to Grand Junction again and again. Because there are a lot of important site-specific issues.
The National Park model is exclusive. It basically mOYes everything out. It may be in some of
these cases, particularly where you have these big ecosystem landscapes, it is appropriate to have
compatible use which you would not have in a national park. Hunting, I think is one example.
That's an important activity in rural communities. Properly carried out it is not destructive of
conservation diversity. It is not appropriate in a national park, but it might be in a BLM
monument covering an entire ecosystem.

We need to look thoughtfully at the small farnily agricultural systems in the San Luis Valley.
Those are long-standing traditional practices, they are scaled appropriately to the landscape. The
type of activity that may be appropriate. We ought to work these issues hard and site specific. It
is hard to generalize. A national park - there's a container, a statutory container. A national park
in the famous phrase of Luna Leopold can be thought of as "a vignette of pre-settlement
America." Now, that phrase has been with us a long time. It's got a lot of power. And it's a really
nice paradigm for national parks. There isn't going to be any economic activity. No wood cutting,
no hunting, no grazing, nothing. That may not be an appropriate standard for these large