ROADLESS RULE RETURNS
Roadless Areas Win New Protections
By David Frey, 12-07-06
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A recent court ruling protects hundreds of thousands of pristine acres of National Forest land across the West from the incursion of roads, mostly associated with oil and gas drilling.
The latest ruling affects leases on 304 parcels on 342,086 acres in seven states – Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and North Dakota. The biggest impacts will be felt in Utah and Colorado, which hold the bulk of those leases.
“These areas are in many cases the connective tissue ecologically in the remaining ecosystems we have,” says Tim Preso, a Bozeman, Mont.-based attorney for Earthjustice.
Environmentalists are praising the decision, which makes the Clinton-era “roadless rule” effective not only for new leases, but for all those approved since the January 2001 ban on new roads went into effect.
The Forest Service is expected to argue for a weaker ruling that would make it effective only since the Bush administration rescinded the rule in May 2005 and replaced it with a plan that let governors petition for areas they wanted to protect. Environmentalists expect the agency to appeal the rulings. Forest Service spokeswoman Jessica Plyler said the agency was awaiting a Dec. 11 hearing to decide how to proceed.
“Since it’s still under review we’re still waiting to see what happens with the judge,” she says.
One-two punch
U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Laporte’s Nov. 30 ruling in San Francisco was a one-two punch in favor of roadless protections. In September, she reinstated the roadless rule the Clinton administration put into place in its waning days. It banned new roads, mining and development in 58.5 million acres of national forests and grasslands in 38 states and Puerto Rico. Laporte found the Bush administration removed it without conducting the necessary environmental reviews.
Her second ruling closed what environmentalists saw as a loophole, protecting parcels where leases had been granted in roadless areas since 2001. Those leases still may go forward, Laporte ruled, but energy companies can’t build any new roads, meaning the resources would have to be reached underground from outside roadless areas.
“The effects of road construction over time could substantially alter valuable roadless area characteristics by fragmenting habitat, increasing soil disturbance, decreasing water quality, and providing new avenues for the invasion of non-native invasive species,” she writes.
The Forest Service has argued the rule should apply only to leases since the rule was reinstated in September.
Twenty environmental organizations sued the Forest Service demanding that the roadless rule be put back into effect. Four states – California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington – filed a similar action.
Utah most impacted
Utah has some 108 parcels on 178,657 acres of roadless areas, mostly in the Uinta National Forest southeast of Salt Lake City and the Wasatch-Cache National Forest northeast of Salt Lake City, throughout the Vernal-Uintah Basin.
“This administration wants to get out of the way any potential administrative obstacle that would burden an oil company, so they’re trying to expedite approval of oil and gas drilling on national lands,” says James Catlin, coordinator of the Wild Utah Project.
Utah’s most contentious area has been around the Strawberry Reservoir, a popular fishing spot southeast of Salt Lake City fed by a network of streams filled with native trout and other fish. Environmentalists and anglers worry runoff from new roads in the area will sully the streams, harming a prime fishing area. They worry the roads will be used not just by energy companies, but by off-road vehicle users, further increasing runoff.
But energy development could also bring dangerous chemicals that could harm the fishery, Catlin says. The combination, he says, “may tip these watersheds over the edge. It’s the cumulative impacts we’re afraid of.”
Colorado impacts
Colorado has leases issued on 72,658 acres of roadless lands and another 14,367 pending. Almost all are in the White River and Grand Mesa-Uncompahgre-Gunnison national forests on the fringe of the gas-rich Piceance Basin.
“As the price (of natural gas) goes up, it’s going to become more and more attractive to reach further into these roadless places,” says Sloan Shoemaker, director of the Wilderness Workshop.
His group has protested some of these leases, a move he believes helped protect some of these roadless areas until Laporte’s ruling. Among the areas Colorado environmentalists worry about is a region they call the Clear Fork Divide, a pass that provides a key wildlife migration corridor and hosts a vast aspen grove and a stand of old-growth spruce and fir.
One nearby roadless area has already seen a new road cut into it to reach a gas well that was never developed. That’s the kind of activity environmentalists fear will take place on roadless lands throughout the West, whether oil and gas is underneath or not.
Other affected areas include 14 parcels in Nevada, three in Montana, two in Wyoming, one in New Mexico and 83 in North Dakota.
Critical lands
Often, these leases are bought by speculators who try to prove the resources are there before selling the leases to a bigger player, Preso says, but before they can figure out how rich the reserves are, they have to drill a well and build a road.
“The public lands are left with a road punched into an otherwise-pristine area,” he says, “so there was a tremendous threat of major destruction of roadless areas.”
Nationally, 31 percent of Forest Service land is considered roadless. These are areas that are largely free of development but lack federal wilderness protections, even if some have qualities that would make them eligible for new wilderness areas. They may lack the glamour of national parks and wilderness areas, but they often surround them and can be critical to the survival of popular playgrounds.
“Ecologically they’re just tremendously significant,” Preso says, “because a lot of these systems can’t persist without large and undeveloped landscapes.”
In Utah, about half the state’s national forest land is roadless, Catlin says, making these lands particularly important.
“Really what we’re looking at is the long-term health and productivity of public lands,” he says, “and the communities and users that depend on it. We’re finding that there is a continued deterioration of ecosystem health. Now, why do we care about that? Well, almost every human endeavor is grounded on some product or service that comes from ecosystems. What this means is that we find that healthy ecosystems are more resilient and more productive and these more often than not are roadless.”
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Comments
1) Charge adjacent landowners for suppression costs in co-mingled landscape ownership fires. In other words, if the fire comes on your property, from Federal lands, you are going to be responsible for part of the suppression costs.
2) The fuels reduction effort should be ramped up, and letting "natural" fires burn is a part of that advice. In addition to setting more fires, the Feds need not put as much effort into containing or suppressing the ones that start on their lands.
3) Federal fire personnel should be watched more closely to ensure that they do not spend any more money than necessary. A larger effort to audit and monitor all fuels reduction and fire fighting efforts should be undertaken.
With all that being said, the public response should be outrage. However, the litigators from Earth Justice, ad nauseum, should be thrilled. They are sliding into the Ed Bangs universe of income not matter what happens. He was paid to introduce wolves, and now gets paid to extipate naughty ones. The Greenies will be able to sue if not enough is burned, and if too much is burned. The legal perpetual motion machine. And God forbid someone build a fire line on the roadless land next to their land. They will have to build it on the private land, and hope cadastral eccentricities don't mess them up. Of course, build it with their money to keep the Fed's fire off their land.
Keep the lawn green, the roof metal, the trees trimmed and far from buildings, keep your Nomex speedo handy, the livestock trailer bearings greased, and think nice thoughts about how the Feds have America's best interests in mind. They are going to make sure all the fuel gets burned, that you pay to keep it from burning your house or even if it does burn your house, and Federal employees are now on notice that they are way better off not doing anything than spending money that auditors might not approve.
Now our leaders think like the third world tin horn dictators the Greenies so admire. Here's to a warm and fuzzless future.
yet in the same breath, Mr. Bearbait would have all of us, or in other words, the federal government, pay in cash dollars to build fireline on public lands to protect those reckless or feckless enough to build in wildfire zones. Mr. Bearbait, further, does not acknowledege the ecological, social, and intergenerational costs of roading the last remnant public lands. Mr. Bearbait exhibits an entitlement culture that is essentially selfish--a me-first attitude.
Many would suggest to Mr. Bearbait that he should put up the dollars to protect his own home--not ask the rest of us to do it. Do we teach our children to have others do their homework for them, or to take someone else's lunch because they forgot their own. The selfish entitlement culture Mr. Bearbait exemplifies must stop.
I have no entitlement cultural leanings. I do have experience as to who gets blamed for fire if not of lightening origin. I was once part and party to contract mandated slash burnings, one of which crossed onto private property, and we paid to replant the area (recently planted but had huge slash piles unburned--those caught fire) and we paid suppression costs. Our private concern had the liability, and we were burning on public land, at a time, manner and effort determined by a contract administrator for the public lands management agency. He flew in the helicopter that set the fire, at his direction. It was across the line 3 minutes into the lighting. And he had no responsibilty, financially. That became ours.
If, as the USFS internal auditors suggest, private parties have to pay to suppress runaway intentional Federal burning, how in the hell am I expousing "entitlement?" Were the Katrina victims "entitled?" They live on the hurricane coast. Why should government help them? Because an inordinate number of the victims were black? Or poor? Where does it say race or economic status "entitles" you to government aid? If you are wealthy, should government expect you to not have the same protection as less wealthy folks? The most useful, evidently, responders to Katrina were the Federal Fire Incident Overhead Teams. Were the Katrina victims charged for that service? I do know for a fact that the Oregon Natl Guard that went to New Orleans has yet to be paid by the Feds. Evidently New Orleans was entitled to their presence to provide the order their corrupt cops could not.
If the government is going to set fires, and not going to fight naturally occuring fire, there will have to be a national debate on who pays the bills when that fire destroys private property. That will be decided in court. If a plaintiff is considered "entitled" in your jargon, then how do you account for all the plaintiff activity your viewpoint espouses in defending will 'o the wisp "ecological values?" Might I consider "legal right" an entitlement?
I will say this and say it until enviros get damned tired of it. Wilderness, by Congressional designation, is genocide. It denies that before European contact, the native peoples lived across the landscape, none of which was off limits to their use and management. They cultured plants, hunted and managed for game, gathered seeds and nuts, pruned plants to make them produce more fruit, nuts or seeds, or to keep the dead limbs out of fire's way. For perhaps 15,000 years, they made a living off the land, and survived, even prospered, as a species. Wilderness is the denial of their prior and present existence, in law and in administrative rule, and in any definition of the term "genocide", I am correct. And for that reason, I oppose wilderness, and random acts of insanity like setting fires you don't have the resources or will to control. Los Alamos was only a few years ago. The Jungle fire, not a set fire but a "wildland use fire", in Montana this summer came running out of the wilderness to add its mayhem to the Derby fire area. I watched that one get larger every day, fueled by trees dead from disease as the result of overstocking and a drought. Until the metes and bounds of Anglos came to the land, the native users would burn those areas frequently (who needs downed trees to travel through, and open space grew grass for the elk and buffalo). Now we can't get there from here, unless we physically remove fuel. Fires operate on fuel. The more fuel, the hotter the fire, and the farther it travels. Logging is off the table, and fire is not. We will get the fire, like it or not, and not benign underburns, but full out conflagration.
I live in town. I pay for fire insurance. My taxes pay for fire fighting. But we also do not permit anyone, government included, from having a huge pile of fuel on the property next door. Local law mandates the removal of that fuel. Evidently, I am being baited by someone who feels public lands be forgiven from being good neighbors. How, when, and in what way we, the public, can use public lands is regulated. It is only fair that public land be subject to regulation in the Wildland Interface. You suggest property owners have a responsibility and the Feds none. I fervently disagree.
Add to that the morning newspaper story that Congress is not going to continue with the Payment in Lieu of Taxes program to counties with large Federal land holdings. Not only will there be no money to fund any sort of Wildland Interface fire fighting effort, there won't be any local cops to man the barricades of closed roads during the fires that are sure to come. And no ambulance service, and diminished schools for public land employees' children, and no road repairs to access the public lands. No SAR rescues for people lost in their wilderness. It was a private helicopter, rented by the family, that found the people near the Rogue River last week, in a county now without adequate tax base, short on resources, and long on public lands. I can see tens of thousands of miles of county roads being abandoned and taken by the adjacent land owners, and thousands of access problems arising for public land users. Of course, public land users have their own "entitlement" issues to deal with now that Congress has opted out of the PILT deal. The people who 25 years ago said when the timber no longer gets cut, there will be no money to run the rural counties with large Federal land ownerships, many of which have 70% or more in Federal hands, turned out to be correct, prescient, and seers. It has happened. No Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, no urban dilettantes will show up with bags of cash to provide vital services. That is life. And the reality of life in the West.
If the no snow at the Yellowstone Club or Big Sky continues, we will have a bang up fire season next year. Whoo-eee. All ye who are fans of fire as the saviour of eco-health will have an endless celebration. And if no fire fighting efforts are forthcoming from the Feds, it will be an even better deal. Of course, I will celebrate the smoke going on its world wide west to east tour. A pall over the East would be just fine with me. They need to have a piece of the incinerated West on their collars, in their filters, sinus cavities. And a no tourist summer will be even better. More fish and game for the locals in the unburned areas. And black forests reflecting the urban color scheme, whether it be clothing preference or limo color or architecture. Black, grey, rain bleached white. We are, after all, entitled to black forests, the organic material burned out of the soil. A lot more reflective surface will radiate heat into the stratosphere in the winter or at night in the summer, and pyrocumulus clouds in the summer will spread the incinerated nutrients across the Great Plains. We are entitled to that.
Judge Laporte isn't even a full-monty judge although after this latest round you can bet Feinstein and Box of Rocks will have her on the short list for Ninth Circuit. LaPorte has been reliable for both the anti-tobacco litigants, also aborted the Navy sonar program, and now this. So she's going to be reliable when it comes to fork-America rulings.
As for the other debate going on here, Bearbait is completely correct about the anthrogenic roots of the environment we live in. ANthropologists are documenting thousands of years of cultivation and deliberate vegetative regime manipulation across vast landscapes by Indians. In short, that pristine environment was an artifact of deliberate and systemic HUMAN management using available tools. Period. Lot more tools should be available now, but aren't thanks to the eco-luddite lawyahs.
I did not know until I read your post that they were stopping PILT, that will be a problem for western states where already half or more of the land is woned by the feds. Everyday some good enviro group is taking up conservation easements and selling them to the government so they control even more of the land. It of course is going to all be off limits to all but the chosen ones, the greenies.
Report on Large Fire Suprression Costs by Robt W. Young, Asst. Inspector Gen'l, USDA, office of the Inspector Gen'l, Western Region, Report #08601-44 SF Nov 2006
Burn, baby, burn.