September 3, 1964, is a holy day in the history of the American environmental movement. In the White House Rose Garden on that late summer morning, Lyndon Johnson signed two unprecedented and broadly bipartisan bills into law. The first was the Wilderness Act, now beloved and well known, which established a system of protected lands across the nation for the use and enjoyment of the American public. The second bill, lesser known though equally important, was the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act. It established a pool of money, drawn from offshore oil and gas royalties, meant to expand and sustain a crucial American institution: the public lands, the many millions of acres that local, state, and federal agencies manage on behalf of the American people.
The Land and Water Conservation Fund, or LWCF, quickly became a wildly successful pillar of this country’s conservationist infrastructure. That baseball diamond or public playground you played on as a child; that hiking trail in the hills, Civil War memorial or expanded national park nearby—chances are the fund helped create them.
“I believe the significance of this occasion goes far beyond these bills alone,” said LBJ, when he signed the fund into law. “In this century, Americans have wisely and have courageously kept a faithful trust to the conservation of our natural resources and beauty.” And that faithful trust continued for more than fifty years, until it finally broke down this fall.
In September, in an act of stunning legislative arrogance, LWCF was taken hostage by rabid anti-conservationist Congressman Rob Bishop, a Republican from Utah and Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, who blocked the fund’s routine renewal. Without any kind of debate or deliberation, he single-handedly cut the cord that funneled Big Oil royalties to worthy conservation projects across the country. Before gutting the fund, Bishop released a statement that railed against the “[s]pecial interests that seek to hijack the LWCF to continue to expand the federal estate….”
“Under my chairmanship,” he warned, “the status quo will be challenged.”
Like any good hostage taker, Bishop has since offered conditions under which LWCF might live: he will renew the fund if it is remade in his Tea Party image. And so he recently unveiled a draft bill, called the Protecting America’s Recreation and Conservation Act (PARC Act), which would amend—and partly mutilate—the original LWCF legislation. The first full committee hearing on the bill is today, November 18th.
Bishop has billed the PARC Act as a “common-sense” effort to channel more of LWCF’s money toward state and local projects, which is not a particularly controversial goal. But beneath his aw-shucks talk of “reform” and “true intent” is a radical agenda that would pervert the LWCF by channeling at least 20 percent of its funds back to the oil industry for offshore energy exploration, oil industry innovation, and oil-worker education. As serious, it would slash the portion of LWCF funding that could be used to purchase new federal lands and all but block its ability to acquire land in the American West (an area that includes Bishop’s home state and is under particular pressure from oil interests and developers).