More fun with the Paria River protests

The Paria Canyon ATV protest (explanation) has been getting a fair bit of coverage in the Salt Lake Tribune and elsewhere over the past few weeks. Some samples:

Grandstanding won't help preserve public land
By Laura Welp
 05/29/2009

...This mass drive had a purpose: the promotion of a political viewpoint that rejects federal government control of the monument on principle (and is willing to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to do it). Before the drive, Kane County Commissioner Mark Habbeshaw and Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab, incited the crowd with anti-government rhetoric, and the rally ended with, "Let's ride!"

The problem, however, is that Utah isn't the pioneer world that Utah's "cowboy caucus" politicians evoke in their speeches. Off-road vehicle abuse is already rampant on public lands in southern Utah, even on monument land. Really, this is only a monument on paper. For years now, the county has been allowed to run the BLM, to the detriment of the lands the BLM is charged to oversee. That situation needs to change...  Read more.

  
Some laws are just made to be broken
By Paul Rolly (columnist)
The Salt Lake Tribune
05/22/2009

...That riverbed inside the national monument has never been designated a road, and under long-established federal law, before it can be used as such it must be adjudicated in federal court and shown that it was a road under use for 10 years before Congress in 1976 amended a Civil War-era law that allowed roads to be built across federal lands to encourage development of the West.

Just because Mike Noel and his fellow cowboys say it is a road, that doesn't make it so. And, as I said before, every time they have gone to court to open a road in protected federal areas, they have lost, using your money in the process.

The protest riders who broke that law when they drove their ATVs up the riverbed May 9 did so under the watchful eye of federal law enforcement officials, who did not cite them. Noel has since said the protest riders had a right to do what they did and the feds were acting inappropriately to even be there watching them, taking down their license plates, no less, and threatening possible citations.

That would be the same Noel who wants bogus oil-and-gas-lease-bidder Tim DeChristopher prosecuted to the full extent of the law...

...So some laws count, and some don't, depending on whether they agree or not with your politics.

Read more.

Walsh: Charge the protester, but let the politicians ride?
By Rebecca Walsh
Tribune columnist
05/14/2009

...Which is where [U.S. Attorney Brett] Tolman comes in. After years of Bush administration blind-eyeing destructive off-road "recreation" in Kane County's wilderness areas, BLM enforcers finally were out in force. They wrote down license plate numbers, photographed the offenders and forwarded the evidence to Tolman.

After waxing on about the law when it comes to mining-lease monkey-wrencher Tim DeChristopher -- "I'm trying to do this job and make decisions that are based solely on facts and the law" – now Tolman is caught by his own zero-tolerance standard.

One person's civil disobedience is another's crime. For Tolman, it's all crime. If he does nothing now, his brand of justice will look selective: giving special treatment to conservatives protesting federal land use policy while throwing the book at a liberal environmentalist doing exactly the same thing.

...More than trespassing, DeChristopher attorney and former BLM director Pat Shea says Tolman should consider the damage done to the riparian area around the river. Riparian areas make up 1 percent of Utah's landmass, but 80 percent of the state's habitat for native plants and animals. Read more.

Oust Noel, Habbeshaw
Public Forum Letter
05/15/200

No ATV precedence
Public Forum Letter
05/29/2009

...But over the past decade, that tranquility has been increasingly interrupted by the drone of two-stroke engines and the odor of ATV exhaust. And why, pray tell, should the pleasures and freedoms of ATV riders take precedence over mine and my family's?

Given the enormous size of the ATV industry, and the clamor made by those ATV aficionados who feel they have the right to go wherever they want unhindered (think of the recent Paria River protest), it's clear that the rights of those of us who appreciate nature devoid of noise and dirty air are destined to lose out... Read more.

Kanab not Confederacy
Public Forum Letter
05/14/2009

...The Kanab area is beautiful, and I am sickened that those people feel good about degrading a river like the Paria. Goes to show they don't really appreciate the land or they would have found another form of protest.

I know not everyone in Kanab feels the way Kane County Commissioner Mark Habbeshaw and Rep. Mike Noel do. I hope they show up at the next election... Read more.