Roads to recreation could soon be closed
Adherence to the national Travel Management Rule could close forest roads and limit motorized access to public lands
By Mike Stahlberg, Register-Guard, Mar 31, 2009 [here]
OAKRIDGE — Willamette National forest officials will soon be telling motorized forest users exactly where they can go.
Disgruntled trail riders, hunters, anglers, campers, mushroom pickers and other recreation enthusiasts upset by reduced motor vehicle access might be tempted to respond in kind.
Controversy over closing forest roads and other restrictions on motorized access to public lands is erupting as local forest managers work to implement the national Travel Management Rule of 2005. The rule requires all national forests to publish, by year’s end, maps showing precisely where motor vehicles are allowed.
Cross-country travel and driving on any route not on the map will be illegal.
Currently, motor vehicles may be driven anywhere they are not specifically prohibited.
On March 13, the Willamette National Forest issued a “request for public comments” on its travel management plan as part of its “initial scoping” process under the National Environmental Protection Act. The deadline for comments is April 15. …
In Oakridge, a former lumber town literally surrounded by Willamette National Forest lands, grumbling about reduced access is extensive.
“I’m just fed up with government intervention in our lives,” said Floyd Staley, a long-time volunteer active in high lakes fish stocking and forest clean-up work.
“The regulation of our freedoms to use the forest and outdoors is the ultimate insult as far as I’m concerned,” Staley said. “That’s why a lot of people live in Oakridge — to have immediate access to what belongs to the American citizens.” …
John Cape, an Oakridge resident since 1971, says the Forest Service is spending thousands of dollars to excavate “waterbars” (trenches) across unmaintained roads to discourage their use.
“They’re spending money to ruin roads now so they don’t have to spend money on maintenance in the future,” Cape said. “If they’d just leave the road alone, eventually Mother Nature is going to take it back and then we won’t be able to use it. But why can’t we use it up to that point? We paid to have them built.” …
“I wish I could have had a little more to say about it,” said Doug Devorak, a member of the Emerald Trail Riders. “They brought this all on and they didn’t ask the public what we really thought about it.” … [more]
It is vital that folks learn the extent to which language deception has been used to steal property rights, i.e., freedom — including, but not limited to, their ability to access and enjoy these places.
Words like “manage,” “protect” and “restore” look very different if the word “control” is substituted. Control is the more accurate word, for it involves who gets to do what, and where. Disabled veterans returning home from Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., and every taxpayer in America, should have the right to access these places. Certainly, many of them will not use that right — but a goodly number WILL. For any federal agency or its partners (think: “Nature Conservancy,” Sierra Club, Audubon Society, and dozens more of their ilk) to forbid or take such arbitrary actions to force people from places, is criminal.
The debacle that the “Endangered Species Act” and its “interpreters” in the judicial, legislative and executive branches of “government” have cast upon America — and the resultant dependency we now know on food and products grown and mined elsewhere where the ESA’s tentacles do not reach — leaves a broken and battered, perhaps fatally wounded, America, in its wake. When power brokers can use language deception to steal property rights, i.e., freedom, from Americans, they can have their way with the spoils of this war fought with words: America’s resources, including her “human resources,” and they can turn this country back into the 21st century equivalent of a crown colony, subservient to those holding the collateral that has been offered. Those that have reaped the ill-gotten harvest of America’s resources in the form of locking them up and signing them away to bankers in distant lands — will have to pay the piper someday. In the meantime, our Republic — in those prophetic words once uttered: “…if you can keep it…” — will lie prostate on the ground at the feet of Liberty.