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Show 19 The successful effort to preserve Echo Park and Dinosaur National Monument revealed the dawning ofa new era in the nation's environmental history .... The outcome revealed an important shift in public attitudes toward the national park system, demarcating the postwar =~::.!~ion with its intcrcs1 in protecting national parks and wilderness Judging from the editorial positions of Utah's major newspapers and from the opposition from Utah's representatives in the U.S. Congress, the state's attitude toward conservation did not reflect the nation's. While the national movement might have been strengthened by the defeat of the Echo Park Dam, the growing sentiment in Utah was that the federal government had once again locked up public lands and dealt an economic blow to the state. Thi s debate with the federal government over land use and conservation was a harbinger of environmental sentiment in Utah and the West. The assertion in Utah was that conservation meant multiple use - in the spirit of Pinchot's definition. Through political pressure from Western states, the idea of multiple use as conservation was codified in 1960 in the Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act, which gave authority to federal land managers to regulate land use to balance competing demands - including both development and preservation. But that legislation did not end the land-use debate. The tension reached a high point in the West during the 1970s and '80s in the connict now referred to as the Sagebrush Rebellion. The pivotal move in the Sagebrush Rebellion came in 1979, when the Nevada Legislature passed a law granting the state ownership of federal BLM lands. 48 Utah and 47 1bid .. 287-88. 41 Cawley, Federal Land. We~·tem Anger, I. |
