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--- BACKGROUND ABOUT FOREST PLANNING
AND THE UTAH FOREST NETWORK ---
1.
Forest Plan Revision -- the opportunity of a lifetime
3. The Utah
Forest Network -- who we are...
6. Roads, roadless areas and wilderness
Forest Plan Revision -- the opportunity of a lifetime
Forest Management Plans are the Forest Service's comprehensive management prescription for each forest, articulating the big picture of the agency's management philosophy, and literally zoning the entire forest for various management and use emphases. The Forest Plans are supposed to be revised every 10-15 years, but in Utah, where the first Forest Plans came out in the mid-1980's; it has now been almost 20 years. If we consider a "generation" to be a period of about 20 years, this will be our "generational opportunity" to have a major effect on the future of Southern Utah's Red Rock Forests. We owe it not just to ourselves, but to every future generation of Utahns, to seize this opportunity and make the most of it.
Although the Bush administration is trying desperately, on behalf of the timber, mining, ORV, and motorized recreation industries, to neuter the forest planning process, we still believe that forest plan revision is now one of our best opportunities to campaign hard for comprehensive forest protection. It is the only time when the agency, the public and the press take a hard look at every aspect of national forest management, and it's the only time when the Forest Service is obligated to ask the public, directly, what its overall forest management priorities should be.
The need for immediate action is dramatically evident to anyone who's been out on the land in recent years.
At an astonishing rate, we are losing our last remaining forest natural areas to many different forms of industrial development, including logging, mining, overgrazing, grazing-industry-related vegetation "treatment" projects, industrial tourism, and a host of others too numerous to mention. But in recent years one of the scariest phenomena of them all has been the "explosion" of off-road vehicle abuse on the national forests -- motorized recreation centered on public lands as huge playgrounds without regard for wildlife, quiet and solitude, or sustaining ecosystems.
And that's not just our opinion. It's the opinion of forest service chief Dale Bosworth, who said in a speech on Earth Day, 2003:
"... the number of people who
own OHVs has just exploded in recent years, [from 5 million in 1972, to
almost 36 million in 2000.]...Each year, we get hundreds of miles of what we
euphemistically refer to as 'unplanned' roads and trails. For example, the Lewis and Clark
National Forest in Montana has more than a thousand unplanned roads and trails
reaching for almost 650 miles.
That's pretty typical for a lot of national forests, and it's only going
to get worse. We're seeing more and more erosion, water degradation, and
habitat destruction. We're
seeing more and more conflicts between users. We're seeing more damage to
cultural sites and more violation of sites sacred to American Indians. And
those are just some of the impacts. We're going to have to manage that by
restricting OHV use to designated roads, trails, and areas."
But it is not happening folks. Take a look at Forest Service budgets. No additional resources are allocated to getting ORV depredation under control. To the contrary forest management programs are being robbed to pay for the Healthy Forests Initiative, intended to speed hazardous fuels reduction by shortcutting NEPA.
Mr. Bosworth's opinion is shared by James Monteith of Republicans for Environmental Protection who on August 8, 2002, issued the following "challenge" to the Blue Ribbon Coalition, a major ORV lobby group:
As a Westerner whose family roots go back for generations, I
cherish the freedom to experience wild land in its untrammeled state. That's
the biggest reason why many of us love living in the West and couldn't imagine
living anywhere else. But we have been losing that freedom over the past few
decades.
There are two reasons for this. First, for almost 25 years, the
federal government embarked on a socialistic roadbuilding program that has cost
current taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, and left future taxpayers
with an unfunded maintenance liability exceeding $8 billion.
Thousands and thousands of miles of roads, legal and illegal, cover National
Forest and BLM lands like spider webs. These roads, many of them in substandard
condition, have ruined the wild character of many public lands. I might add
that many of these roads increase wildfire danger by creating too-easy access
for fire-starters ditzy campers, lost drivers, careless smokers, and
dangerous arsonists.
Second, the successful evolution of "go-anywhere, anything goes"
all-terrain vehicles has permitted a radical expansion of motorized vehicles
deep into the backcountry, including easily damaged places where high-powered
machines are just not appropriate. On top of that, federal land management
agencies have failed to carry out President
Nixon's Executive Order requiring them to protect natural resources from
ORV damage, and to minimize ORV conflicts with other, older uses of public
lands.
The Blue Ribbon Coalition is responsible, in part, for the obnoxious spread of
motorized vehicles and the associated resource damage and conflicts. Their
financial backers include the same well-heeled special interests, lobbyists,
and cartels that conservationists have been fighting since Theodore Roosevelt's
day.
See also this recent Salt Lake Tribune Editorial on ORVs.
There are tens of thousands of miles of dirt trails and roads available to recreational vehicle users in Utah, Grand County alone has mapped more than 5,000 miles. Ninety four percent of BLM lands in Utah are open to ORV users, as are the majority of primitive Forest Service roads and trails throughout Utah. More than half of our public lands are wide open to cross country travel. At 20 Forest Service planning workshops held throughout the Dixie and Fishlake Forests local people openly confirmed that user made ATV trails spread like spider webs across Inventoried Roadless Areas. Nationwide, the Forest Service has constructed a total of 400,000 miles of roads, the vast majority of which are primitive (unmaintained) and scenic (only 80,000 miles are identified as open for use by "standard passenger vehicles.") During the 1980's and 1990's the American taxpayer subsidized this massive road construction program at the annual rate of over $200 million per year in direct expenditures and subsidies for road construction, reconstruction and maintenance.
But all of this is STILL not enough to satisfy the voracious appetite of the off-road vehicle lobby. While categorically opposing any effort to limit ORV access to the existing, staggeringly huge network of forest roads and trails, the ORV lobby is now pushing for the construction of gargantuan NEW trail systems, many of which will criss-cross existing roadless areas. And it complains the new Wasatch-Cache Forest Management Plan unfairly limits ATV access.
Take the proposed new 567-mile Shoshone Trail system in the Wasatch-Cache National forest of northern Utah. While most of the proposed network would be on existing roads and trails, at least 24 miles of new road would cross existing roadless areas, and 45% of the trail system would be across private lands, forcing private landowners to deal with ORV access. The trail would connect dead-end segments to create loop routes that do not currently exist, and can be expected to attract an army of ORV-users to Utah from all over the nation.
In South-central Utah the Sand Ridge Riders and other ATV clubs insist that the Forest Service construct connector trails to turn dead-end trails (mostly user made, branching from the Paiute Trail) into loops for ATV pleasure without regard for impacts on quiet, solitude, or wildlife security.
The ORV threat to America's public lands is massive, pervasive -- and rapidly growing in severity and scale. Throughout our national forest system, ORVs are destroying sensitive ecosystems, ripping up fragile soils, tearing up stream beds, pulverizing plant life and wetlands, scarring hillsides, spreading noxious weeds, polluting lakes, terrorizing wildlife -- and killing ORV users in ever-increasing numbers, with annual ORV-related deaths up 159% from 211 in 1993 to 547 in 2000, and injuries requiring emergency room treatment up to 111,700 in 2001. Nearly 40% of ORV fatalities are children under 16.
Just one example of the extreme effect of ORV-mania on wildlife is the new sport of "antler shed hunting", in which ORV-riders chase wildlife through brush during the antler shedding season, hoping to knock their antlers off.
Each year the industry concocts a new motorized terror -- from 5-ton Humvees to the recent invention of the "snow hawk" -- a "supercharged cross between a snowmobile and a motorcycle."
The off-road vehicle lobby is extremely well organized and massively funded by the ORV manufacturing industry. (See "New rules for forests appealed", by Skip Knowles, The Salt Lake Tribune, July 8, 2003) If we want the Forest Service to curtail this ORV invasion, we must show that there is still more massive public support for road closures and restrictions on ORV access.
Overwhelming public support for ORV abuse containment clearly does exist. A national poll done in 1999 poll by the Mellman Group showed that 67 percent of respondents want ORVs prohibited in the undeveloped "roadless" areas of our National Forests, and in Utah, a recent poll by Dan Jones and Associates showed that 68% of respondents believe ORVs are damaging to the public lands, and 88% believe that there should be areas off-limits to ORVs. But opinion polls alone will not change National Forest management policy. Only YOUR vigorous participation in the Forest Planning process can do that.
The
Utah Forest Network: who we are...
Starting last year some of Utah's leading, long-time wilderness activists have been working quietly and diligently to prepare for the opportunity of a lifetime -- the revision of forest plans for the three southern Utah national forests.
To facilitate this work we've created the Utah Forest Network -- a coalition of the following eight local and national environmental advocacy groups
- Utah Chapter, Sierra Club
- Wasatch Mountain Club
- Save Our Canyons
- Red Rock Forests
- Wild Utah Project
- Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance
- American Lands
- The Wilderness Society
Current participants include many seasoned, life-long veterans of the Utah BLM wilderness campaigns, such as legendary Utah activist and national Sierra Club board member Jim Catlin, Wasatch Mountain Club conservation chair Brad Yates, Red Rock Forests executive director Wayne Hoskisson, Save Our Canyons co-founder Gale Dick, SUWA executive director Larry Young, wildlands defense legal experts Suzanne Jones from the Wilderness Society and Liz Thomas and Ray Bloxham from SUWA, among others.
Ours is a collaborative venture similar to that of the Utah Wilderness Coalition's campaign for BLM wilderness. We believe that the time has come for a major new campaign to protect wilderness, wildlife, ecosystem integrity and biodiversity on Utah's National Forest lands as well.
For nearly a year now the UFN leadership has been meeting regularly to develop its forest protection campaign. Here's what we're doing:
- Roadless area inventory
UFN has launched a statewide survey of Forest Service Roadless areas, which should be substantially completed by this fall.
2.) Wildlands defense.
In bi-monthly conference calls, UFN participants share information about proposed development actions on Forest Service lands throughout Utah, and coordinate their staff and legal resources to address these threats as quickly and effectively as possible.
3.) "Citizen Alternative" forest plans
Legal action may be the "best defense", but in the long run, having a good "offensive" strategy is the very best defense. Thus, we are developing "Citizen Forest Management Plans" for the Fishlake, Dixie and Manti La Sal forests, also with funding from the Wyss Foundation. Red Rock Forests staff and volunteers associated with our member groups are collaborating to prepare these to be included as the "citizen alternative" in the EIS process for each forest. Our plans advocate for maximum protection for wildlands and ecosystem integrity, and for a "Recreation Opportunities Spectrum" featuring primitive and semiprimitive non-motorized recreation while allowing for motorized recreation only on trails posted for such use.
4.) Getting out the vote.
Writing "citizen
alternative" forest plan documents is only half of the job. Unless there is substantial public
support for these plans, they will mean very little. We are committed to maximum public involvement in the
preparation and promotion of citizen alternative forest plans. This email is the first salvo of our
public involvement campaign.
At the moment our group of committed activists is limited. Though many of us represent environmental groups with large membership numbers, if each of us writes letters and comments in support of a citizen-alternative to the forest plan, that will be only 20 or so letters.
That's not going to cut it, folks.
There are many well-intentioned and environmentally conscious Forest Service staff in Utah. But bent almost double under the enormous political and economic power of the timber, mining, and ORV industries and their powerful friends in the Congress -- not to mention, a White House that is fiercely protective not of our public lands, but of the timber, mining and motorized recreation industries, the Forest Service managers can hardly be expected to stand up to these powerful interests without maximum public support.
So far attendance at Forest Service planning workshops has been pathetically small. But when the chips are down, the timber and ORV lobbies can and will turn out hundreds of their supporters to attend hearings, write letters, and peddle their considerable influence with our antiwilderness congressional delegation.
Numbers matter. Citizen involvement matters hugely. Attendance at Forest Service hearings and workshops, and letters from individual Utah citizens really do matter. For the future of forest wildlands, and for future generations of Utahans and Americans, please stand up and be counted this fall.
Roads, roadless areas and wilderness; how did
protection of our forests get to this sorry state?
In addition to immediately creating a wilderness
preservation system of 9.1 million acres, the 1964 Wilderness Act required the
U.S. Forest Service to identify all roadless areas of over 5,000 acres, and to
make recommendations as to which of these should be protected forever within
the National Wilderness Preservation System. These recommendations were then to be considered by
the U.S. Congress, which alone has the power to add lands to the wilderness
preservation system.
While the Forest Service carried out this large task, it adopted a policy of "interim management protection", meaning a defacto moratorium on most forms of development within the identified roadless areas under study as possible candidates for wilderness.
This policy created an enormous problem for the timber, mining and other extractive industries, because it was obvious that huge amounts of land would potentially meet the naturalness and minimum size requirements for designation as wilderness. Large corporations need to plan their activities at least several years in advance, and for the mining magnates and timber barons, any uncertainty about access to the public lands would be a huge inconvenience.
By the early 1980's the Forest Service had conducted two statewide "roadless area review and evaluation" inventories--so-called "RARE I" and "RARE II" -- both of which had been challenged in court and ruled inadequate. A third inventory ("RARE III") was well under way, but never finished because the Wilderness Act of 1984 prohibited any further wilderness/roadless inventories until plan revision time. That's now folks, and we need to get on it because preliminary RARE III documents released to the public make it apparent that in Utah the amount of land identified as roadless would have been somewhere between 4 and 5 million acres.
The extractive industries appealed to their many friends in the U.S. Congress for help with this ominous threat to their stranglehold on our public lands. In Utah, and many other states throughout the West, the politicians came up with a simple and effective solution: "token" wilderness bills that would designate a few, relatively small, scattered wilderness areas -- and simultaneously "release" all undesignated roadless areas from interim management protection.
In Utah the results were predictable. The Utah Wilderness Act of
1984 designated as wilderness
about 800,000 acres -- much of it within the already-protected High Uintas
Primitive Area -- and "released", or re-opened to mining, logging,
road construction and most other forms of development, some 3 to 4 million acres. Not surprisingly, the bill won
enthusiastic support from legendary anti-wilderness politicians such as Jim
Hansen, Jake Garn, Orrin Hatch and San Juan County Commissioner Cal Black (who
after a lifetime of ferocious opposition to wilderness, rushed to the nation's
capital to testify before congress in support of the bill).
The Utah delegation hoped that this "release" provision would be permanent, meaning that the Forest Service would be prohibited from ever again recommending any of the "released" lands for wilderness. Fortunately, some influential members of Congress insisted on a "soft" release language which provided that the Forest Service could again identify new roadless areas for wilderness protection in the next generation of forest plans.
Now, after a wait of nearly twenty years, the Forest Service is at last rewriting its Forest Plans for the 3 national forests in Southern Utah -- and once again evaluating whether any of the remaining roadless lands should be recommended for wilderness protection. It is true that some lands that were roadless in 1984 have been severely roaded and logged in the interim. But it is also true that many large, as-yet unprotected FS roadless areas are superb candidates for wilderness designation.
Our "generational opportunity" to stand up and be
counted in support of forest wilderness, is at hand. If you
care about old growth forest, wildlife, solitude, untrammeled beauty and
ecosystem integrity, now is the time to act.