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Defenders Magazine
Defenders in Action: Forests on Road to Ruin?
Millions of acres of crucial wildlife habitat in national forests may fall to the bulldozer, chainsaw and drill bit if a recent proposal by the U.S. Forest Service is followed.
The proposal would effectively nullify a popular rule adopted during the Clinton administration that placed nearly 60 million acres of the nation’s forests off-limits to road building. The Clinton rule was drafted following more than three years of planning that included 600 public meetings around the country and more than 2.3 million citizen comments—one of the largest numbers of public comments for any governmental plan in history. More than 90 percent of the comments supported the “roadless rule.”
Conservationists charge that the current administration’s proposal to reverse the roadless rule ignores the will of the majority of the American people. They also cite studies showing that publicly subsidized road-building in the nation’s forests costs taxpayers tens of millions of dollars more than the federal government collects in timber sales. In addition, they point to a multi-billion-dollar backlog for upkeep on the more than 380,000 miles of existing forest roads—a number equivalent to eight times the length of the interstate highway system or enough mileage to drive to the moon and most of the way back to Earth.
An earlier Bush administration proposal would have allowed governors to ask the federal government to open roadless areas in their state. The new plan makes a 180-degree shift by requiring governors of states that want to retain roadless protections to petition the federal government to do so. Even then, there would be no guarantee that the requests for protection would be granted.
“This plan amounts to selling off our last legacy of wild national forests to the timber industry, even though they’d yield less than a quarter of a percent of U.S. timber production,” says Rodger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders. “This administration’s willingness to open wildlife areas to logging threatens all the other things these wild forests give us, like clean water, recreation, a safe haven for imperiled wildlife and the conservation legacy we’ll leave to our children.”
The deadline for comments on the plan is November 15.
