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Related Information
Vermillion Basin Protected from Future Oil and Gas Leasing
June 29, 2010
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| So what exactly is a Citizens' Wilderness Proposal or CWP?
In the late 1950s, Colorado citizens began hiking into uncharted public wildlands in order to map and catalog ecologically special places that need protection from an encroaching civilization. With the passage of The Wilderness Act, citizens focused their inventory work on identifying and documenting wildlands that met the definitions set forth in the Act, such as opportunities for solitude and non-motorized recreation, relatively unnoticeable signs of human work, and features of ecological or scenic value. Citizens compiled photographs, maps, and records and, in 1973, one of the first citizen wilderness proposals was completed for a Rattlesnake Canyon Primitive Area, located on Bureau of Land Management lands.
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rattlesnake arch
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(Citizens proposed it as a primitive recreation area because at that time BLM lands were not eligible for wilderness designation under The Wilderness Act.) This citizen effort bore fruit 27 years later in 2000 when Congress protected Rattlesnake Canyon as part of the Black Ridge Canyon Wilderness.
Throughout the 1980s, Colorado citizen groups conducted field studies separate from BLM. Determining the "outstanding" nature of solitude is a subjective procedure and in many cases, the citizens' proposed areas for wilderness included areas that the BLM had earlier discarded due to the agency's narrow definition of solitude and primitive recreation. Citizens initially published their 1980s-era citizen wilderness inventories in a 1994 proposal released as the Conservationists' Wilderness Proposal for BLM Lands (CWP). This first citizens' proposal recommended wilderness designation for approximately 1.3 million acres of BLM lands.
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