Election politics brought a wave of "green decrees" from Washington. President Clinton has locked in the support of national environmental groups by resolving environmental controversies by executive order.

Most recently, Clinton declared 1.7 million acres of southern Utah (seven times larger than Mount Rainier National Park) a national monument, using authority granted under the 1906 Antiquities Act. With a stroke of a pen, Clinton resolved a bitter, highly polarized debate between environmentalists, who want to see 5.7 million acres declared "wilderness areas" off limits to any development, and locals, who believe the land is so special because they've been stewarding it for 150 years. There were no Utah officials present at the signing that Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) described as "the mother of all land grabs." They were not consulted on the matter; the locals and the public were the last to know. Now Utahns are working fervently to thwart the monument's existence and operation.

Snubbing Utahns is a small price for Clinton to pay for the support of the environmental groups; he finished third, behind Ross Perot, in Utah in 1992. If the monument survives legal challenge, tourism will replace coal jobs. Locals will guide buses, ATVs, and campers into the monument, rather than drive coal out.

A week earlier, the Administration brokered a halt to the logging in the northern California Headwaters Forest. Headwaters holds the largest remaining old-growth redwood stand on private property. As hundreds of protestors and a few celebrities, including pop singer Bonnie Raitt and Don Henley of the Eagles, were arrested, federal officials secretly engineered a tentative agreement with Pacific Lumber to halt the logging in exchange for other government lands and cash payments. Clinton exploited yet another environmental crisis. If the tenuous agreement stands, the federal and California governments can expect to spend $350 million to forge a ceasefire in Headwaters.

Yellowstone's New World Mine exemplifies Clinton using a green decree to make messy environmental conflicts disappear. The dispute involved Crown Butte Mines Inc., environmentalists, the Park Service, the Forest Service, locals, and even the United Nations.

In exchange for $65 million in federal lands, Crown Butte forfeits (if the deal goes through) the mineral rights on their land obtained under the Mining Law of 1872. Voila! The beast is vanquished. Clinton can return to Yellowstone, having triumphantly made the dirty mine go away.

Until the next gold mine. Or the next coal mine. Or the next timber stand.

Clinton's green decrees are quick fixes, often at the great expense of other natural treasures and local communities. For example, as the New World Mine controversy so beautifully illustrates, the Mining Law of 1872 is long overdue for reform. The myopic 1872 law provides for mineral deposits on federal lands to be turned into commodities like gold and copper, while ignoring other values: undeveloped wilderness, undisturbed watersheds, and unscarred land. Although this made sense in the Civil War era, relative values have drastically changed with increased education, scientific knowledge, and affluence.

A truly courageous president would call for fundamental reform. He would advocate systems that provide incentives to conserve, to account for downstream pollution, and to foster responsible use of the land.

Here's an idea for some political entrepreneur: Propose a system that replicates for environmental values what the 1872 Law does for minerals. It would give individuals opportunities to invest in and protect the land for its amenity and ecological features, like wilderness, biodiversity, and recreation. Public, nonprofit organizations and trusts could stake a "claim" on federal lands, like BLM districts in Utah, and attempt to produce a "mother lode" of environmental quality. Like mining claims, these would be contingent on "proving up" the environmental qualities of the land. This way the claimholders would have to be prepared to meet the public challenges of competing users.

This sort of change would dramatically alter the nature of the environmental debate in the West. In addition to reforming outdated legislation, it would move environmentalists from the Beltway to the back country. No longer would green decrees come from the White House. Federal authority would serve in its proper role of monitoring and enforcement, not opportunistic rule-setting on an ad hoc basis.

Clinton's green decrees are surprisingly effective election politics. This strategy gets good press because it perpetuates the polarization and gridlocks real reform. But this short-sightedness is the predictable consequence of political allocation. Voters may get tired of crisis management of popular areas. If so, some candidates will advocate genuine reform and be rewarded by voters for honestly analyzing the underlying causes of environmental problems.

There is another problem with Clinton's tactics. Using executive fiat to make others pay for something you want generates perverse consequences and intractable conflicts. The counterproductivity of green decrees is glaring in Utah's Kane County. The county is now backing out of an agreement to release endangered California condors into the region. After the green decree, county attorney Colin Winchester warns, "We're going to be a whole lot less cooperative with the federal government."