Federal West

WHAT the West lacks in water it makes up for in agencies. Below is a skeleton guide to some key players. The key to the asterisks next to the Department of Interior bureaus and the Environmental Protection Agency is at the bottom of the page.

Climate


Dam Builders / Keepers


Fish and Wildlife


Public Land


Research


Tribal


Watchdogs


*The various bureaus, agencies, offices, divisions etc that fall under the Department of Interior have an asterisk by them. A very pointed asterisk it is too.

Control Interior and you control the West.

Libertarians find this incredible, but the West began spawning Departments and Bureaus only one short year after the US victory in the Mexican-American war. In 1849, the prospect of the gigantic carve-up out West required a corresponding carve-up in Washington. So the bureaucratic amputations and inventions that make up the modern Department of Interior began.

The Department of War bundled off its “Indian Office” to Interior. The country’s venerable mapping service, the US Geological Survey, was also attached. For lack of water in the West, the Bureau of Reclamation was created in 1902 to start building dams. It too was put under Interior. In 1916, Interior was given the National Park Service, then from former homes in Commerce and Agriculture went in the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Finally, in 1946, the General Land Office, once part of Treasury,  was rolled together with the Grazing Service and the new organ was named the Bureau of Land Management. It too went to Interior. By the middle of the 20th Century, the US Department of Interior controlled roughly a third of the country.

Most of this land is in the American West and Alaska. It is either remote, desert, tundra or somehow hard enough to manage that at statehood the host states deemed it best left to the Feds. Their land became our land, and our land became next to free range for ranchers and one of the last safe refuges for bald eagles, buffalo, beavers, desert tortoises and the like. Back in our towns and cities, most of us don’t know it exists. So few argued as some canny Congressmen and Senators started proposing selling Nevadan public land to developers in the late 1970s. (The non-profit Western Lands Project was a notable exception.)

Yet as the sale of federal land in Southern Nevada in the 1980s and 90s helped to drive unprecedented development in Las Vegas, Interior’s scientists did notice a problem. There was not enough water to support the growth. And when the Southern Nevada Water Authority was created expressly around the idea of driving a 300-mile-long pipeline to the feet of Nevada’s only national park to funnel Great Basin water south, protests rose from the National Park Service, the US Fish & Wildlife Service, the US Geological Survey and the US Bureau of Land Management.

Then in 2006, as if by magic, this opposition turned into unanimous cooperation.

How it happened, or why, may never be known. The decision was made behind closed doors and a special appointee was sent West from Washington by no less than the Interior Secretary’s office expressly to streamline cooperation with Las Vegas.

Interior’s about face may have been honest and based in science. Or it may have been 100 times worse than the ribaldry that made headlines over at the Minerals Management Service. We have no way of knowing.

We have a new Interior Secretary secretary from the one who appears to have ordered his many bureaus and services to down-dog-and-kennel in 2006.  May he rise above the secrecy and scandals and remember that his department’s one third of America is public land. Before choice bits are slipped into the hands of developers, then the remainder is drained of its water, vegetation and wildlife to feed that development, we should be part of the conversation.

In the meantime, please understand why, on this blog page at least, any Interior agency must have an asterisk by it.

**The US EPA gets double the asterisks for standing back and allowing Interior to make mistakes and doing nothing until a disaster has unfolded. It can and does come in after environmental problems associated with, say, groundwater pumping occur. However, the way Environmental Impact studies are done now, the agency is absent at the front-end of the permitting process, even when disasters are wholly predictable. So even though dust storms might be an inevitable outcome of a groundwater pumping plan, the state and federal authorities involved with project compliance during the permitting process have little or no authority to stop projects on the grounds of air pollution. Less action, more asterisks.

  • Share/Bookmark