A Priceless Legacy at Risk

by Kelly Matheson

Just days after she was confirmed as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Ann Veneman announced that the department was delaying implementation of the Roadless Rule, which was to take effect on March 13. The rule, finalized in the last weeks of the Clinton Administration, would safeguard more than 58 million acres of Forest Service lands in 38 states from environmentally destructive road building, industrial logging and oil and gas development.

"In accordance with the memorandum of January 20, 2001, from the Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff," Secretary Veneman wrote, "this action temporarily delays for 60 days the effective date of the rule..." The purpose of the delay, she said, is "to give Department officials the opportunity for further review and consideration of new regulations."

Given the new administration's declared intention to open up tens of millions of acres of undisturbed public lands for oil and gas drilling, mining and logging, the Agriculture Department will likely attempt to weaken or perhaps even overturn the Roadless Rule.

Conservation groups around the country are already preparing to go to court. In the words of one environmental lawyer, "We will defend the rule whenever and wherever it is challenged."

Preserving Wealth

Roadless areas comprise only two percent of America's lands, but their values are priceless. "Roadless areas are a remnant of our pioneer heritage, a dwindling portion of our increasingly developed American landscape," observes U.S. Forest Service Chief Michael Dombeck. "They serve as a biological refuge for native plant and animal species...for natural habitats and ecosystems...[and] provide unique opportunities for dispersed recreation, sources of clean drinking water and large undisturbed landscapes for privacy and seclusion."

Our national forests supply a mere one quarter of one percent of the nation's wood products and less than four tenths of one percent of the country's oil and gas. Roadless areas generate a tiny fraction of this already minuscule total of forest resources.

While national forests contribute little to our nation's resource needs, maintaining Forest Service roads costs taxpayers millions of dollars each year. In 1988, the Forest Service had an $8.4 billion backlog on maintaining and reconstructing the more than 386,000 miles of roads in the Forest Transportation System. This backlog balloons each year because the Forest Service receives less than 20% of the funding needed to maintain its existing road infrastructure.

The natural values of roadless areas, combined with overwhelming public support for roadless-area protection and the multi-billion dollar backlog on Forest Service road maintenance and reconstruction, convinced President Clinton to sign the Roadless Rule into law shortly before he left office.

A 20-Year Fight

Wyoming's Congressional delegation reacted predictably. Representative Barbara Cubin darkly warned that the rule was "part of a predetermined agenda to comprehensively eliminate access to our public lands." Senator Craig Thomas labeled it "the last gasp of a hostile Clinton agenda to drive people off their public lands." The roadless rule, he claimed, "will severely limit recreation and multiple use which are the lifeblood of economies in Wyoming and the West."

In fact, the rule does nothing to limit current uses of our forest lands. Because no existing roads within the Forest Transportation System would be closed, the rule neither limits recreational access to any area in which the public already has access nor does it limit off-road vehicle travel any place where motorized travel has historically been allowed.

Despite claims from critics within the GOP and from the timber and energy industries that the Roadless Rule is a "last-minute," "dark-of-the-night" decision, it is in fact the culmination of a more than 20-year fight to protect large tracts of America's unroaded wild places.

The Forest Service began reviewing inventoried roadless areas larger than 5,000 acres in 1972. Since then, controversies over the management of these areas have sparked volumes of congressional debate, appeals and litigation.

In January 1998, Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck declared an 18-month moratorium on road building in unroaded areas and proposed a roadless-area protection rule. The proposal generated 600 public meetings around the country and nearly two million public comments, the majority of which sought roadless-area protection without exception.

Losses & Gains in Wyoming

Wyoming's roadless areas comprise approximately 3.25 million acres of national forest lands, over 80% of which are in the Bridger-Teton, Shoshone and Bighorn National Forests. State Forest Service officials anticipate that the roadless-area protection rule will have minimal economic effects, as neither big timber harvests nor extensive oil and gas development have been the primary management focus within our state's national forests.

On the logging front, the Forest Service expects that the rule will reduce Wyoming's average annual timber harvest by nine percent and directly affect a minuscule 16 timber jobs within the state. With respect to oil and gas, the Shoshone National Forest will feel the largest impact, as about 276,000 acres of the 530,000 acres of lands available for surface use by oil and gas operators are located within roadless areas. On the other hand, while all lands outside wilderness areas on the Bighorn National Forest are available for leasing, forest officials do not anticipate any impact from the rule since industry has failed to find commercially viable oil and gas resources on this forest. The Bridger-Teton National Forest has yet to analyze the impacts of the rule, but Forest Service official Rick Anderson expects that its effects will be minimal considering the B-T's recent proposal to forbid oil and gas leasing on nearly 370,000 acres of the forest. (See story on B-T Oil and Gas.)

Small losses of timber and oil and gas revenues will be more than compensated for by the recreation dollars that the rule will bring to Wyoming and the savings gained from protecting roadless areas rather than opening them to industrial development and then spending millions of dollars to build, maintain and restore roads, combat erosion, air and water pollution and protect wildlife habitat and fisheries.

A Clear Choice

We have a clear choice between the few paltry dollars that could be extracted from our last unfragmented wild places or the intrinsic values such places provide: pure water, clean air, biodiversity, unmarred landscapes and solitude.

Will our government make the right choice, or will the new administration attempt to sacrifice our remaining wildlands to provide the nation with a minuscule supply of wood products and a few months' worth of oil and gas?

Conservation groups and concerned citizens from every state in the nation fought hard for the Roadless Rule. Now we need to fight even harder to ensure that it stands as a priceless legacy of wildness for future generations.