The following editorial appeared Tuesday in The New York Times:

One of the most ambitious environmental bills in years, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, is awaiting action in Congress. It could be waiting a while. A version was first introduced in 1991, and while the bill has become a perennial focus of great hopes and fierce objections, it has never come up for a vote.

The bill, sponsored in the House by Reps. Carolyn Maloney of New York and Raul Grijalva of Arizona, would designate more than 20 million acres of federal public land -- mostly in Idaho and Montana, with parts of eastern Washington, eastern Oregon and western Wyoming -- as wilderness, the law's highest protection. That means no roads, no logging, no ski resorts, no off-road vehicles. It would continue to allow certain traditional, nonmotorized uses, like hunting, fishing and rafting.

The great strength of the bill lies in the breadth of its vision. Recognizing that animals and plants thrive best within intact ecosystems, not governmental borders, it would reach across state lines to secure biological corridors where animals can roam freely.

Yet while the bill has more than 90 co-sponsors, none are from the districts affected. That is not a good sign. Congress traditionally shows great deference to local delegations in deciding whether to set aside land as permanent wilderness. And the bill's conspicuous lack of local lawmakers' support -- and in many cases resistance -- is evidence of the passions it arouses from hunters, fishermen, skiers, snowmobilers.

For that reason, many wilderness advocates say, land-preservation deals, particularly in the West, require finely wrought compromises and piecemeal progress.

But that is no reason for Maloney or Grijalva or the bill's co-sponsors to give up on this bill or on the noble idea of preserving large, connected, intact ecosystems. The proposed legislation offers a vision of where a truly enlightened environmental policy could lead, balancing the needs of both nature and local economies.

Big ideas often stumble on the ground, where this particular ski trail or that fishing lake is loved and ferociously defended. But horse trading won't save whole ecosystems. The bill's supporters are holding out for a truly wild wilderness bill in the hope that someday politics will catch up with their farsighted idealism.