Month: September 2020

Oregon is now the fourteenth state with a “friends of” Utah wilderness group formed under the umbrella of the Utah Wilderness Coalition led by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), the Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The mission of this broad coalition is to advocate for the passage of America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act (ARRWA), which would protect 8.2 million acres of wilderness quality, public land in Utah. The ARRWA already has the support of three of our Representatives and both Senators. The goals of these state-based affinity groups are to bring more visibility to local support for Utah wilderness, to cultivate new leadership, and to build connections among participants. A steering group composed of several Oregonians sharing an affinity for Utah wilderness has been hard at work with SUWA’s Washington/Oregon coordinator, Jenny Holmes, this year – mostly via Zoom in deference to the pandemic – to lay the groundwork for this grassroots group.

Our initial efforts have been focused on building relationships with the Oregon Congressional delegation and encouraging continued support for ARRWA as well as building awareness of several emerging issues threatening the public lands in southern Utah and elsewhere on the Colorado Plateau. Once the pandemic abates, we’ll look to establish regular presences at local environmental events, to further support SUWA, and to plan an autumn work trip for group members to southern Utah.

For more information on our plans, we now have an initial web site posted at https://www.oregoniansforwildutah.org and a Facebook presence under the group Oregonians For Wild Utah.

If you’re interested in joining us or even getting involved in setting our direction with the steering group, please email us at info@oregoniansforwildutah.org.

Thanks for considering!

   -Kelsey Kagan and Steve Corbató, interim co-chairs

P.S. If your group or school class (middle school through graduate school) is looking for an informational program via Zoom this fall, SUWA is providing Wild Utah presentations spanning from 20 minutes to an hour. Please contact Jenny Holmes at waor@suwa.org to schedule. 

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by Steve Corbato

Steve is the co-lead of the steering committee.

What attracted me to this cause of protecting Utah wilderness from an Oregon base?

I’m not a native of either Utah or Oregon, but for reasons of family and career (as well as slot canyons and deep powder), I’ve spent more of my life in Utah than anywhere else. My view of Utah wilderness has a scientific basis at its core. My father was a geologist who taught at summer field camps in the Sanpete Valley and points south. He introduced me at the age of ten to the wilds of the Waterpocket Fold and Comb Ridge. I have memories of Moab in the early 1970’s as a dusty small town reeling from the end of the uranium boom and with no hint of the future tourism onslaught. As a budding astrophysicist, I later helped build and operate scientific instruments that leveraged the isolation, dark skies, and favorable atmosphere of the West Desert. This experience gave me an appreciation of the regularity of beautiful fault block mountain ranges, amazingly swift pronghorn antelopes and night skies of the Great Basin as well as incongruous sand dunes, remnants of the much larger Ice Age lakes. Later as a university administrator, I had the opportunity to visit research field stations in southern Utah where I learned about the fragility of the ecosystems on the Colorado Plateau, the associated impacts of climate change, and the ingenuity and perseverance of the Fremont and Ancestral Puebloan peoples who preceded us. As a parent, I had the chance to take my son into Dark Canyon and around the Bears Ears and the San Rafael Reef among other places.

So many of the public lands in Utah that we are striving to protect through permanent wilderness designation are truly globally unique through a combination of their rugged, timeless viewscapes and the underlying geology, ecology, paleontology and archeology. I understand the political landscape of Utah and federal lands policy well enough to know that this fundamental uniqueness and ensuing intrinsic value are often underappreciated by both local and federal decision makers. The lands of the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin will persist long beyond our species’ time on this planet. I feel it that is our responsibility to work to preserve and to protect them for future generations to appreciate in their amazing natural state.