Having grown up in northern Wisconsin's Chequamegon National Forest, my playground was the forest, lakes and streams of what Laura Engels Wilder called the "Big Woods." To a young boy, hunting, fishing or just tromping in the woods was an adventure full of intrigue and wonder, perhaps finding a secret fishing hole or maybe a bear den.
Some years later as a young Forest Service biologist, I was out with a forest inventory crew and one of the foresters said to me, compared to cutting trees that would grow back, building a new road in the forest was the most lasting indelible mark we make on the land.
For some reason that comment stuck with me and little did I know that some 20 years later, as chief of the Forest Service I would be faced with the fiscal and environmental dilemma of a massive deteriorating road system and rancorous disputes over building roads in some of the wildest places in our national forests.
It was time for yet a different strategy, time for the Forest Service to put the shovel down and stop building new contentious and expensive roads wild places.
Today, January 22 marks ten 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. Public comments for this proposal broke all the records. People wanted more protection, not less. They wanted the Tongass in, not out. The roadless rule is not something a bureaucrat pulled out of a hat, it's something the people wanted - and they've supported it the whole way through.
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.
It is time to 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 these rugged backcountry areas are always high. Harvesting the resource in most cases is simply not economical without government subsidy.
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 shrinking budget going to fire fighting, deteriorating roads and bridges have created a maintenance backlog exceeding $10 billion.
Crumbling roads, particularly in rugged country, are bleeding sediment into streams, 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. Where will the open spaces and remote places be for our great grand children to connect with nature, fish, hike, camp or kayak in reasonable solitude?
