The Bush administration has proposed new rules that could set the stage for development of millions of acres of wilderness, including more than 4 million acres in California.

The Bush proposal essentially scraps an edict from Bill Clinton, delivered just days before he left the White House, that banned road building into nearly 60 million acres of America's wildest places.

It also sets off a classic debate between states rights advocates and environmentalists. The former say state and local governments should make decisions about how their wilderness areas are managed. The latter accuse the Bush administration of pandering to logging, mining and oil and gas developers who need the roads to reach potentially profitable areas.

It is ironic that among the detractors of the president's proposal are some of his staunchest conservative supporters - hunting and fishing groups. They backed the Clinton administration ban on road building because it preserves places of natural beauty where hunters, fishermen and hikers can do their thing in solitude. Their chief argument is that building roads maximizes the probability of the nation's wilderness being opened to corporate development.

Supporters of the plan counter that broad, sweeping policies, such as Clinton's banning of roads, simply haven't worked. In many cases, such bans work at cross-purposes to local, regional and state land management policies, and that those who live in or near the forests are the best stewards of the land.

That's not always true, but it is a good point in this debate. At the very least, Bush's proposed changes bring local and state officials into the process of deciding the best use of wilderness acreage. As it now stands, only the federal government can make policy.

Such a change also would bring the debate on wilderness use to the local and state level, and it can be assumed that, at least here in California, there would be vigorous opposition to unreasonable development proposals.

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Broad-based federal mandates presuppose that sound policy decisions can't be made at the state and local levels. In many cases, just the opposite is true.

De-federalizing the anti-road-building rule is not the doomsday scenario environmentalists fear it to be. State and local officials - and the citizens who live where the forests are - should have a say in how wilderness areas are used or not used.

July 19, 2004