From wire and correspondent reports

WASHINGTON - The sale of 300,000-plus acres of national forest land, though less than half of 1 percent of the 193 million-acre national forest system, could result in a significant loss of public access, environmentalists said Friday.

Private property advocates, meanwhile, said public lands can be put to greater productive use by private owners.

The Bush administration on Friday detailed its proposal to sell more than 300,000 acres of national forest land and other Bureau of Land Management property. The Forest Service's Wyoming plan involves more than 17,000 acres in the Black Hills, Medicine Bow and Bridger-Teton national forests and the Thunder Basin National Grassland.

Under the BLM program, some 125,000 acres would be sold across the West to generate about $260 million over five years. Seventy percent of the funds would be sent to the federal treasury, 26 percent for BLM administrative costs and 4 percent to the states.

To really understand what these proposals mean, hikers, hunters, fisherman and conservationists will need to go look at these "for sale" properties, said Janine Blaelock, director of the Western Lands Project, a Seattle group which tracks the sale or exchange of public lands. The Forest Service posted its list Friday on the Internet. The BLM has not developed a list.

In Blaelock's experience, "You can't trust the agencies, because these properties often turn out to be ecologically significant, like wetlands or riparian areas. It is a desperate measure to use public lands as a cash register," she said.

Indeed, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition has already determined that some Bridger-Teton National Forest land listed for sale looks to be ecologically significant.

"Some of these properties are along the Hoback River," said Lloyd Dorsey, a Jackson representative for the coalition. "This is exactly the kind of land the Forest Service should hang on to, not sell."

He termed the property as ecologically critical habitat for wintering moose and cutthroat trout, acknowledging it would also be attractive to real estate developers.

That's perfectly all right in the view of Terry Anderson, executive director of the Property and Environmental Research Center, a nonprofit environmental think tank in Montana seeking market solutions to environmental problems.

Federal land management is bad on two counts, Anderson said n fiscally, in that the federal government loses billions of dollars in economic opportunities that could be pursued by private enterprise; and in environmental degradation, such as the nation's tinderbox forests.

"Selling public lands can help reduce the drain on the treasury and give us benchmarks to compare private with public management," Anderson said.

'Not the crown jewels'

Both the BLM and the Forest Service describe prospective lands for sale as isolated, scattered properties that make it hard to manage those lands efficiently.

Mike Ferguson, budget officer for the BLM, described them as having little scenic, recreational or mineral value. Randy Karstaedt, director of physical resources for the Rocky Mountain Region of the Forest Service, said the program was designed to sell off isolated tracts on the perimeter of national forest boundaries, or tidy up the hodgepodge of private/public ownership around mining claims in the mountains.

"These are not the crown jewels we are talking about," said Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who directs forest policy. "This is a reasonable proposal to take a small fraction of a percentage of national land which is the least necessary and use it for those in need and achieve an important overarching public purpose."

The money would be used for roads, schools and other needs in rural counties hurt by sharp declines in timber sales,in the wake of federal forest policy that restricts logging to protect endangered species such as the spotted owl.

Although BLM spokeswoman Celia Boddington characterized the proposal as mostly "an accounting issue," Blaelock strongly disagreed.

The sale of BLM property falls under the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act. Blaelock said she fears that the FLPMA program will be expanded beyond its current activity level of land exchanges and small land sales.

"There's the potential for hundreds of thousands of acres to be sold," she said, "simply because the BLM has more land and it is easier to sell off a bunch of rocks and creosote brush than mountain forests."

U.S. Rep. Barbara Cubin, R-Wyo., said it's important to differentiate between the Forest Service and BLM land sale proposals.

The BLM plan would "use updated, local land management plans in determining what parcels are eligible for disposal," she said. "They've had that authority since the 1970s, and have been able to keep part of the revenue from these sales since 2000. This doesn't change that authority; it simply updates it to ensure current management plans are taken into account."

The Forest Service plan, meanwhile, would provide a new funding source for the federal rural schools program.

"This program is not new. All that's new is that it looks like the president is trying to find a new way to pay for it," Cubin said. "I'm not convinced federal land sales are the right way to get that done. I'll keep my eye on this through the process, and protecting Wyoming's public lands will be front and center in my mind."

Regarding the BLM's proposed land sales, U.S. Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., said: "Any changes to how money is distributed from these sales needs to be carefully considered. I'm not sure that dropping the money in the federal treasury is the best approach to take."

He'd prefer that "a good portion of the money from these sales stay within the agency to help them be better stewards of the land."

The proposals follow a failed move last year to allow the sale of public lands for mining. Western senators had criticized the idea, as well as a plan by Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., to sell off 15 national parks.