CIEDRA is touted as a wilderness bill, but it is so mutagenic to the idea of wilderness as expressed by the 1964 Wilderness Bill that it requires a separate identity. So I’ll state the obvious: There’s a new entity in the landscape of land-use in the American West, and that is a CIEDRA.

A CIEDRA has a number of distinguishing characteristics. The foremost is a Boutique Wilderness, which can be defined as a wild area where the prime attractions are accessible by day-hikes. Motorized corridors are essential to this form of Wilderness, because a CIEDRA is concerned more with motorized access to what surrounds it than what lies within it.

Another CIEDRA characteristic is fuzzy math. Acreages will shift as the bill is introduced to the public. Economic benefits will be projected, and they will shift, too. Numbers will be manipulated to ensure public support. The amount of money granted to local governments and individuals will vary according to public scrutiny of the grants—the more scrutiny, the less money.

A CIEDRA will advertise itself as a singularity, a one-time, don’t-miss-it event. It will deny that any of its provisions will have the power of setting a precedent. It will ignore the fact that precedents cannot be seen ahead of time and are always discovered after the fact, usually by attorneys going over the fine print of a law in order to discover economic advantage for their clients.

A CIEDRA will involve turning public land into private land. In many cases, this will involve trading land, but as in the case of Simpson’s bill, it will often involve the outright transfer of public lands to counties and municipalities and individuals who will then be able to sell them for profit.

A CIEDRA will use lots of government money to ensure that ranchers give up grazing leases of dubious economic value.

A CIEDRA will involve trophy home subdivisions, as in the case of the 162 acres of tableland above Stanley, Idaho—itself indistinguishable from some of the meadows in the White Clouds. Indirectly, CIEDRA is designed to increase development in a large sacrificial donut around the Boulder-White Clouds Wilderness. The transformation of the Ketchum-Sun Valley area into a tract of unlit mausoleum-style trophy homes shows what happens toward the end of this process.

This last characteristic is worthy of close examination. A CIEDRA codifies the money-making development formula that has evolved in the American West, first in Aspen and Sun Valley, and eventually spreading to all of the other islands of the Lycra Archipelago. In those instances, a ski hill is designated. Then celebrities are invited to ski and build houses and hotels there. Then a trophy-home and real-estate industry utterly transforms the surrounding culture and landscape into a Disney-style suburb, one with a gate and gatekeeper and security force. They are called planned communities, but they’re more plan than community.

In the case of the Simpson bill, there is no ski hill to support these suburban plans. In place of a new ski mountain is a hoped-for critical mass of Idaho wilderness: The Sawtooths, the Frank Church, and now the Boulder-White Clouds, all within a short drive of one another. This is the triad that will be advertised by the real-estate partnerships—some of them with former Cabinet members on their mastheads—that are even now nosing around recreation properties in Stanley.

This money-making formula has kept the economy of the American West going strong since Reagan’s tax laws made second homes into appreciating assets. But the West is running out of first-tier locations for the process to happen. A CIEDRA is an attempt to develop the second-tier locations.

So Stanley, Idaho, which has always been a second-tier location due to its eight-month winters, smoke-ridden summers and the general irascibility of its residents, is undergoing legislative cosmetic surgery to make it first-tier. I hope that there will be counseling available after that first post-anesthesia look in the mirror.