Former USFS chief on 10 year anniversary of road building moratorium

By Matthew Koehler, Unfiltered 1-23-08

Today marks the ten year anniversary of the Forest Service's moratorium on building new roads into pristine, roadless wildlands on most of our national forests. This moratorium later became the Roadless Rule, which George W Bush blocked within 24 hours of taking office.

If memory serves correct, Dombeck made the moratorium announcement on January 22, 1998 in Missoula at a packed speech at the Urey Underground Lecture Hall on the University of Montana campus.

Fight over the Roadless Area rule in national forests is purposeless
By Mike Dombeck

(Mike Dombeck is professor of global conservation at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. He formerly served as the chief of the U.S. Forest Service and director of the Bureau of Land Management.)

Wednesday marked 10 years since the Forest Service proposed a moratorium on building new roads on 58.5 million acres of remote wild lands in our national forests. After three years of analysis and well over 1.5 million public comments, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule was finalized, making the moratorium permanent.

Within 24 hours of assuming office, President Bush blocked implementation of this rule, and over the past seven years, his administration has tried to reverse and weaken it. Litigation both for and against protection has resulted in judicial decisions that have been appealed and reversed -- with still more litigation pending.

In spite of seven years of Bush administration effort, roadless areas remain protected in the national forests of the lower 48 states, but more litigation to remove protection is in progress with the outcome uncertain. The Bush administration lifted protection of roadless areas within Alaska's vast and spectacular Tongass National Forest. In the past seven years, construction of new roads in roadless areas has amounted to three miles for a phosphate mine in Idaho's Caribou-Targhee National Forest and four miles in the Tongass for salvage logging.

After spending millions of dollars on administrative actions and judicial proceedings, it is time to stop fighting and look to the future. Here's why:

Commodity values in the vast majority of roadless areas are low. The remaining wild and remote places in the national forests did not remain roadless by accident. Costs to access the timber and minerals in these rugged backcountry areas are always high. Harvesting the resource in most cases is simply not economical without government subsidy.

During the past seven years, according to House Appropriations Committee, the operating budget of the Forest Service has been slashed by 34.8 percent. It's time to stop wasting money on endless debate, with no tangible outcome, that shortchanges higher priorities such as wildfire, forest restoration and visitor services.

The 192 million acres of national forests "officially" contain nearly 400,000 miles of roads; countless thousands more that are not on the map.

With nearly half the Forest Service's shrinking budget going to firefighting, deteriorating roads and bridges have created a maintenance backlog exceeding $10 billion. These roads, particularly in rugged country, are bleeding sediment into streams, thus destroying habitat for many species, including salmon and trout, and reducing water quality for downstream communities.

With sprawl and development occurring at a near record clip, we are losing open space at a rate approaching 10,000 acres per day. Remote sensing studies by the Forest Service Southern Research Station report that in the conterminous U.S., only 3 percent of the nation's land is farther than 17,000 feet from the nearest road.

The first "roadless" or primitive area inventory on national forests was conducted in the mid-1920s. The Forest Service inventoried 74 tracts larger than 200,300 acres. In the '70s, areas larger than 5,000 acres were inventoried. By the late '90s, we were debating 500-acre tracts. What size tracts of land we will be fighting over 25 years from now? Where will the open spaces and remote places be for our great-grandchildren to connect with nature, fish, hike, camp or kayak in reasonable solitude?

Roadless areas represent most of the last best trout fishing and trophy big game hunting in the country and are the remaining stronghold for many rare species. As unknown climate change challenges loom, these remote and wild places will provide migration corridors for both fish and wildlife and will supply water for many communities.

A century ago, Theodore Roosevelt was leading the charge to protect public forestlands for future generations. Today the need for such a vision is even greater.

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