A group of environmentalists have launched a campaign aimed at protecting public lands in Utah. Their target audience is visitors to the Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument.
Escalante residents Tori Woodard and Patrick Diehl, who formed Escalante Wilderness Project in June, were to have a public information booth set up at the Escalante Interagency Visitors Center this weekend. The couple received a permit from the Bureau of Land Management to distribute literature to tourists. The permit is good until the end of June.
"We will be contacting tourists who stop at the center during the Memorial Day weekend," said Woodard. "Visitors need to know how fragile this landscape is, that it has been significantly damaged by grazing, logging and mining, and how precarious our economic future is so long as these unsustainable activities continue."
Although there's been tension between local ranchers and environmentalists in Escalante, there's been no indication of hostile actions as a result of this outreach campaign.
Still some locals don't like what environmentalists are doing.
Steve Gessig, an Escalante resident and member of People for the USA, worries tourists won't be getting the full picture.
"If visitors in our area want to know the truth about cattle management they should talk to a local rancher, not a paid green slacker or a biased federal employee from New York City behind the desk," Gessig said.
The environmental campaign grew out of a conference held in Escalante earlier this month. It drew activists from Utah, California, Arizona, Michigan and Indiana. Organizations represented at the conference included the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, Salt Lake-based Utah Environmental Congress and Wild Utah Project, and the Glen Canyon Action Network of Moab.
Environmentalists call it the "first of its kind." It was held to come up with a strategy on how to gain public support and awareness about wilderness in southern Utah.
"There is a new and growing conservation movement in southern Utah, and we're excited to be part of it," said Diehl.
"We've long needed to hold in Escalante a discussion of the future of this region. The monument gives us the opportunity to make Escalante the center of study of compatible use of public lands and of healthy ecosystems," Jim Catlin, coordinator of the Wild Utah Project, said in a press release.
The conference will be an annual event. It also will include public service restoration projects.
But it's not just about protecting wilderness, there's also an effort to boost the economy of Garfield County, Woodard said.
"We're aware that the environmental position could have an impact on the local economy," Woodard said. Yet she says there's an opportunity for locals to capitalize on the tourism that the monument will bring to the area. "We feel this is a world-class monument," she said.
That is as long as federal land managers protect it, others say.
"We're watchdogging BLM and the monument," said Daniel Patterson, desert ecologist with the Center for Biological Diversity and board member of Escalante Wilderness Project. "So far Clinton's monument designation has resulted in less protection than is needed to protect and restore imperiled species and habitat. Cattle damage is an especially large and widespread environmental problem across southern Utah."
To Gessig, it's all propaganda.
"We have heard the same arguments for years from various groups and it's all lies," Gessig said. "The people of Escalante have managed the public lands properly."
E-mail: donna@desnews.com