Former Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt lectures for law conference: Public land laws need rehashing

It’s time to reconsider laws that concern the use of public lands, the former Secretary of the Interior said Thursday night.

Casey Trang
Montana Kaimin

“Public lands have served their purpose and it’s time to redraw the laws,” said Bruce Babbitt, who was the Secretary of the Interior during the Clinton administration.

Babbitt spoke to a crowd of about 300 people at the University of Montana Urey Underground Lecture Hall about the importance of managing public lands. Babbitt is the keynote speaker for the 26th annual Public Land and Law Conference, a three-day conference at UM this weekend. The free conference will discuss past and present policies for managing public lands.

Montana is in the midst of distancing itself from its traditional extraction-based economies, Babbitt said during his lecture.

He named three major industries in Montana’s economy that have changed in the past decades, though the laws governing these industries remain the same.

Babbitt said the laws concerning grazing, mining and logging need to be changed to better serve the present and future use of public lands. Common presumptions about these lands are no longer acceptable for the future, he said.

“It was once thought that every acre of land was meant for a smiling hereford,” Babbitt said.

Grazing, like many other Montana industries, has outgrown the laws that govern it, he said. The existence of cattle on public lands has caused adverse effects like over-grazed fields and the destruction of river banks, Babbitt said.

Meanwhile, other similar industries, like logging, are destroying Montana’s environment, Babbitt said.

“The forests are dying away and not being replaced,” Babbitt said.

He suggested that the logging industry could be better managed if it was administered like corn fields in Iowa.

“There are places for tree farms, like that of corn fields, but not on public lands,” Babbitt said.

If you don’t conserve these lands, he said, the biological structure begins to unravel. Birds like the bald eagle lose their habitats, while banks of rivers like the Missouri continue to erode, Babbitt said.

The mining industry is also at the center of Montana’s extraction-based economy. The mining industry has changed greatly in the past century. As a result of new technology, practices such as heat-leaching mining need to be reconsidered in law, Babbitt said.

Mining companies can now use heat-leaching mining to tear down an entire hillside just to find a small amount of a precious metal like copper, Babbitt said.

“The mining law in effect today is the Mining Law of 1870,” he said.

The Mining Law of 1870 gives automatic entitlement to minerals that individuals find on public lands, he said.

Babbitt argued that laws governing these industries need to be reconsidered to preserve not only public lands, but also the future of the Montana economy.

Babbitt’s lecture, “Public Lands, Private Gains: Yesterday and Tomorrow” kicked off the conference where former U.S. Rep. Pat Williams and other authorities on the use of public lands will speak.

The conference is designed to find the best policies for these lands, said Eric Harris, third-year law student and co-director of the conference.

“We are trying to look at the role of private entities on our land past and present,” said Harris.

All events Friday and Saturday will be held in the law school’s Castles Center starting at 8:30 a.m Friday and ending at noon on Saturday.

http://www.kaimin.org/test2.php?ardate=20030314&id=1107