Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has advised the president not to declare the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska a national monument.

Babbitt remains strongly opposed to developing the oil reserves believed to exist under the coastal plain of the refuge. President-elect George W. Bush has said repeatedly that the oil can be developed while protecting the environment. Babbitt’s successor at Interior, former Colorado Attorney General Gale Norton, has made clear her support for drilling in the refuge, as has Vice President Dick Cheney and incoming Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.

Last November, about 250 scientists urged Clinton to impose some additional safeguards to prevent drilling in the refuge. On Thursday, the Alaska Wilderness League said Bush’s selection of Norton and Abraham "leaves the refuge defenseless against a firing squad of oil drillers."

But Babbitt said ANWR already is protected because it would require congressional action to open the refuge to oil development and any such move would be strongly contested. He believes that a monument designation made on the basis of the Antiquities Act would be challenged.

That makes sense. Wildlife and natural resources are not antiquities, and the Antiquities Act was not designed to be an all-purpose protection mechanism. In 1906, few people thought of such things, because vast parts of the United States were still largely unsettled.

Babbitt realizes that the new administration has promised to undo recent monument designations, and he knows some of them — probably including Canyons of the Ancients — will be very difficult to overturn. He doesn’t want to set up a situation that would allow Bush to breeze through a reversal. Each of those monument designations must be judged on its individual merits.

Babbitt’s strategy is a sound one. Bush’s belief that petroleum could be extracted from the ANWR without harming wildlife habitat is not borne out by oil development in other sensitive areas. To argue that no damage would occur is nonsensical. It makes sense that proponents of drilling — particularly petroleum executives who stand to benefit financially from such drilling — would argue that the damages could be held to an "acceptable level." That doesn’t make it so, and the landlords of that property — the American people collectively, including those who are passionate environmentalists as well as those who believe resources were placed on this earth for human consumption — have every right to a say in what level of damage is acceptable.

Environmental protections need to hold over the long term, not just over the course of one president’s administration. The significant hurdles involved in opening the reserve to oil development are small compared to the challenges of restoring a damaged environment. That simply can’t be done. Once the protections are removed, putting them back into place is a useless exercise.