The environmentalists have lost another one. This time in the Grand Canyon, or as those who love it say, “The Canyon.”
The Park Service,which “manages” the Grand Canyon, once decided that it would be a good thing to rid the 277 miles of the Colorado River that flows through Grand Canyon National Park of noisy motorboats. Silence was one of the management goals. No longer. The latest management plan includes hundreds of motorized float trips through The Canyon each year for the foreseeable future. 
David G. Campbell, born, 1952 in Salt Lake City, Utah; with his B.S. from the University of Utah and his Juris Doctor from the same institution, thinks that is OK. Appointed a genuine United States Federal Judge by George W. Bush, Mr. Campbell just decided — with the awful wisdom that comes automatically to a lawyer uploaded to the federal bench — that the Park Service’s plan to allow 13,177 passengers to ride 429 launches each and every year in noisy motorboats is fine because the Canyon is not a wilderness area. Besides, according to the judge, motor boats don’t add that much noise to the “soundscape” since airplanes are buzzing around overhead all the time anyway. (Just more evidence, if you ask me, that the invention of the internal combustion engine was a mistake.)
But what were those environmental activists thinking? Did they really believe they would win this case in front of a conservative Republican federal judge born and raised in Utah, appointed by George W. Bush and who clerked for William Rehnquist?
Here is something everyone needs to know: When you file a case in a United States federal court, the case is randomly assigned to a federal judge. After it is assigned, there is no way to get rid of that judge. What the silent river-running plaintiffs should have done, the instant they saw to whom the case was assigned, was return to their lawyer’s office, prepare a Notice of Dismissal and go right back to that United States Courthouse in Phoenix, Arizona and dismiss the lawsuit before this judge had a chance to touch it.
Even if they had miraculously won in the lower courts, the case would end up at the Supreme Court where no chance of winning exists, at least until several new judges sit on that Court.
Waiting for better days sometimes is a good idea.
Instead, we are stuck with a bad decision, unlikely to be overturned on appeal. The Park Service’s decision has been judicially blessed and will endure for as long as the Management Plan endures.
Unless, in the meantime, Congress makes the Grand Canyon a wilderness area. Perhaps it is time to try that again. But not until 2009. Waiting for better days sometimes is a good idea.
Tags: Colorado River Management Plan, CRMP, Grand Canyon, motorboats in the Grand Canyon, river running, river running the Grand Canyon, The Park Service, Wilderness
December 25, 2007 at 8:48 am |
Being a Grand Canyon non-motorized boater, I feel obliged to comment on your post, before more time passes.
The fact that the infernal combustion engines on the motor boats are diluted by the already existing noise pollution of the airplanes… is no justification for adding more pollution to the silence: Unless perhaps, you are afraid of what people might learn or hear in the Silence.
Go find some while you can, I say!