This July, the U.S. Forest Service
proposed a new administrative rule dealing with the controversial
issue of roadless areas in national forests. Environmental groups
reacted as you might expect. For example, a “personal” spam I
received from John Adams at the Natural Resources Defense Council
warned that the Bush administration “is lining up massive timber
and energy sales that will send an armada of bulldozers and
chainsaws, as well as oil and gas rigs, into our last untrammeled
forests.”
Even former President Clinton got into the act,
signing an opinion headlined “Bush puts forests on road to ruin.”
But the fear isn’t borne out by the facts.
For example, on
Alaska’s 17 million acre Tongass National Forest in Alaska, where
Greenpeace protesters are now dangling in direct actions, there are
about 8.7 million acres of old growth. Seven million Tongass acres
are already congressionally designated wilderness or wilderness
within a national monument, compared to 2.5 million acres where
timber harvest is allowed.
How much can really be cut?
“Scheduled suitable” acreage, arrived at after factoring in slope,
stream buffers, growth rates and other factors– totals only
676,000 acres, less than 4 percent of the whole forest. The rest
will never be touched by saws, Roadless Rule or no Roadless
Rule.
Yes, it is possible that new roads may be built, and
trails too. Mines might be dug, oil and gas holes drilled. But
there isn’t one of us who doesn’t need minerals, fuel
and power . And if development occurs someday in these roadless
areas, that’s still not the end of the world. Some lands can
be explored and drilled for gas, yet years later get reclaimed and
become official wilderness.
Furthermore, federal and state
environmental laws mean that activities that put the environment at
risk anywhere –not only in roadless areas –will get challenged in
court.
So what’s the real deal? The Bush administration is
dropping the roadless issue in the laps of state governors. After
all, as the July 16 Federal Register notice declares in classic
bureau-speak: “States affected by the roadless rule have been
keenly interested in inventoried roadless area management,
especially the Western states where most of the agency’s
inventoried roadless areas are located.”
How keen that
interest is now, and how it will finally shake out at a state level
is a function of two factors: geography and demographics.
Geographically speaking, most roadless areas are a peripheral,
trivial matter, of importance only to environmental groups. But at
the local level, roadless policy decisions can be critical to
communities.
For Western states, the way the issue will
get resolved depends a lot on the demographics of the rural-urban
divide. States with urban centers larger than a half-million people
will probably approach the Bush proposal differently than states
that lack big cities. Environmentalism is an urban-based movement
in terms of both money and membership, and that bears on what we
know of politicians, who specialize in following the path of least
resistance while counting noses along that path.
Therefore, in Western states with large, liberal cities that
politically dominate their mostly conservative hinterlands and
small towns — California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, New
Mexico, perhaps Colorado — each governor may be prone to ask for
lots of roadless protection, to be quickly followed by a formal
call for congressional action designating wilderness. If so, well,
that’s democracy.
States that lack large cities — Idaho,
Montana, Alaska, Wyoming– will probably go the other way. Not
coincidentally, those states have the lion’s share of roadless
areas that aren’t already official wilderness. That’s
democracy, too. As for Utah, while Salt Lake City is certainly
large, the state has been bitterly divided over wilderness and the
very definition of “road.”
But there is a catch that cuts
both ways. In a free country, the fairness of government policy
decisions can be judged by whether a policy has the support of
those directly affected. The best way to judge that consent, of
course, is whether those who make policy are held accountable for
their decisions.
Each governor is going to have to make a
good-faith effort to ensure balanced public participation,
involving the same local communities, tribes, and states that were
impacted by, and sued to stop, Clinton’s Roadless Area Conservation
Rule.
If they don’t, well, that’s why we have elections —
to find out what citizens think is fair.
Dave Skinner is
a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). He writes in Whitefish,
Montana.
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