America’s Great Outdoors Listening Session, Annapolis, MD
Friday, June 25 2010
Post by Chris Yoder

The focus was on the Chesapeake Bay.  In the breakout sessions they had a list of four issues they wanted to discuss, all of them on the theme of how do we get more people outdoors and onto the Bay. My breakout group was moderated by a woman from the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

I went off script and commented that just as the Bay is a national resource and that the entire nation, not just VA and MD, has an interest in the health of the Bay, so is America’s Red Rock Country (located in Utah) a national resource in which the entire nation has an interest (not just Utah).  I spoke in favor of “multiple use” observing that Wilderness IS a multiple use and that, unlike many management prescriptions, wilderness management protects the resource for the future.   While not all of the Red Rock Country is appropriate for Wilderness, BLM’s sweetheart deal with the prior Administration in which it agreed to refuse to recommend ANY wilderness is simply counter to the public interest, common sense, and the concept of
multiple use management.