We didn't really believe the Idaho sportsmen who called our office to complain that their hunting and fishing privileges were being curtailed by the United Nations.
The Clinton administration has adopted some unpopular land-use policies in the West, but surely the United Nations does not have jurisdiction over some of our nation's most treasured natural and historic sites? Could a bureaucrat at the world body really tell the United States what to do with Yellowstone Park?It turns out that the sportsmen were right -- and wrong. But the issue they raised also cut to the heart of the never-ending debate over the care and preservation of still-unspoiled areas of the great American West.
The current controversy began in 1973, during the Nixon administration, when the Senate ratified a treaty with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Barely noticed at the time, the treaty gave UNESCO the right to designate some 67 American sites as historically important. Sites listed include Yellowstone National Park, the Statue of Liberty and the University of Virginia. In all, more than 51 million acres of U.S. land fall under the UNESCO designation.
This doesn't play well in the West, where ranchers and hunters are ever-suspicious of government attempts to encroach on their land-use privileges. Although UNESCO doesn't have an enforcement arm, Nixon's treaty pledges that the United States will care for these sites according to U.N. guidelines. Very few Westerners appreciate being told what to do by a group of elected officials from more than 100 countries around the globe.
Enter the Clinton administration. The first family had barely moved into the White House when Clinton angered Western lawmakers by trying to reform ancient grazing and mining laws that environmentalists believe are ludicrously outdated and harmful.
Things came to a head in 1995, when UNESCO tried to wield its influence over the proposed New World Mine near Yellowstone. The mine was to be located on private property adjacent to the park, but environmentalists saw a dangerous precedent being set and wanted desperately to protect the park's buffer zone. UNESCO sided with the environmentalists, and so did the Clinton administration when it ponied up $65 million to buy the land from the mining company and preserve it for future generations.
That was too much for some lawmakers to take. Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R-Idaho, and others quickly introduced the American Land Sovereignty Protection Act, which seeks to remove the United Nations' influence over domestic land-use decisions. Sources at the world body say the proposal is ludicrous. For one, they argue, preservation sites are only designated with the approval of affected property owners, plus local and national authorities.
Sources in Chenoweth's office tell us that state and local governments are rarely consulted before a historic site is designated, and that such decisions are usually made by unelected federal bureaucrats at the Department of Interior or higher-up.
It's too early to tell if Chenoweth's bill will even get a vote in the current Congress. But if it does, consider it yet another signal that Clinton's war on the West has proven to be almost as difficult as the one being fought in Kosovo.
United Feature Syndicate Inc.