missions Congress has given the agencies.
"The people in these agencies are, I
believe, doing the best they can, under the circumstances
and the hand that Congress has dealt them. [But] Congress
has dealt them a very lousy hand."
On the one hand, she points out, the agencies
are told to accommodate, and in some cases, subsidize
certain commercial interests on public lands.
"Yet," she says, "we still have an
Endangered Species Act on the books, we still have
wetlands rules, we still have the Clean Water Act, the
Clean Air Act, and everything else."
A more fundamental problem is the actual
bureaucratic structures of the agencies, which, she says,
"were really put in place in a different era, for
different motivations.
"Ultimately, the federal agencies are
making a lot of decisions that I view as inherently
local" -- decisions she says the agencies
"aren't terribly well suited to do."
Environmentalists should not misinterpret the
1996 elections, she says. Although the electorate
rejected what she calls the "slash and burn"
approach of the 104th Republican congress, real problems
remain, she says, with "the nation's outdated
'command and control' environmental regulatory
apparatus."
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"The
bottom line going into 1997," writes Knopman,
"is that the frustration with the first generation
environmental approach remains a sore point, especially
for those most directly affected by regulation. If we
ignore these persistent frustrations, 1996 could well
turn into a hollow victory for the environmental
movement."
In the American West especially, she says,
centralized federal control of local public lands not
only lacks public support, but it doesn't even work.
"The heart of the dispute between
Washington and the West is not federal subsidies, but
control of the land. Washington's traditional 'multiple
use' paradigm, which tries to strike a balance between
commercial and non-commercial interests, simply does not
work in most places.
"It's not that the concept of public
lands has failed," says Knopman, "but that
centralized control over those lands used for commercial
purposes lacks public support and does little to preserve
the environment."
She quotes the Democratic major of Missoula,
Montana, Daniel Kemmis, who says, "I do not believe
the federal
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