Roadless Is Clueless
In the waning days of the Clinton administration, just before Clinton’s staff trashed the White House computers and destroyed all the digital records, Slick Willy promulgated the “Roadless Rule” that condemned 58.5 million acres to unmanagement, zero stewardship, and catastrophic megafire.
The incoming Bush Administration let it stand, honoring the office of the Presidency, but numerous lawsuits arose anyhow. The basis of those lawsuits was explained by Wyoming attorney Harriet Hageman [here]:
[Clinton's Roadless Rule] was adopted following what was arguably the most truncated, superficial and scientifically-devoid NEPA rulemaking in history. The alleged “public process” associated with the Roadless Rule was politically driven rather than scientifically supported, with less than thirteen (13) months having elapsed between the announcement of the proposed Rule and publication of the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS).
It was an illegal, Washington, D.C. driven, one-size-fits-all approach to management of 1/3 of our National Forests. It was designed to ignore the physical aspects, management considerations, economic issues, and social/cultural dimensions that make each National Forest unique. It treated Wyoming’s National Forests exactly the same as the National forests in North Carolina and Puerto Rico, and violated the individualized Forest Management Plans that have been painstakingly developed pursuant to the National Forest Management Act (NFMA). The Roadless Rule bypassed scientific analysis; hijacked local participation in forest management; and anointed Washington, D.C. as the supreme authority on forest management decisions …
The numerous lawsuits coalesced into one (brought by the State of Wyoming), and US District Court Judge Clarence A. Brimmer issued a permanent injunction against Bill Clinton’s 58.5 million acre Roadless Rule in 2003. The issue festered and a minor judge, Magistrate Elizabeth Laporte of San Francisco, reinstated Clinton’s Roadless Rule in 2006. Judge Brimmer was forced to enjoin the Rule for the second time in 2008 [here].
Still, it wouldn’t die [here, here]. Lock it up and burn it down is exceedingly stupid and destructive, but the Holocaust Now Party is dead set on roasting America’s forests in the name of World Socialism. And after electing Socialist activist and community rabblerouser B. Hussein Obama as President last year, the anti-environment (and ascientific, ahistorical, arguably racist) Roadless Rule has crawled out from the grave again like a zombie that will not stay buried.
North Carolina forester Steve Henson wrote a perceptive opinion piece last week that distills the issue, and we post his words in full below. Unfortunately, it will take more than cogent argument to finally rid ourselves of zombie Clinton’s zombie Rule.
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Forest ‘Roadless’ Rule can’t stand up to objective scrutiny
by Steve Henson, Asheville Citizen-Times, May 14, 2009 [here]
It appears, from newspaper editorials from across the country, the environmental extremists are again pushing to get the Clinton “Roadless” Rule of 2001 codified within the federal bureaucracy. This disputed rule would set aside 58.5 million acres of national forests as de facto wilderness designation across the country.
Given the fact that the “Roadless” Rule has been kicked around in the courts for eight years and millions of environmentalists’ dollars have been spent in promotion of it without resolution should be a clue that something is very wrong with it — and there is.
Murky origins
It has been well documented that this onerous presidential proclamation is the product of a behind-closed-doors collaboration of Clinton administration officials and environmental groups looking to salvage the legacy of a troubled presidency. It is also well known that the environmental groups financed a well orchestrated cut-and-paste letter writing campaign to artificially sway the “public support” toward approval as the administration hurriedly pushed the rule through all the hoops before President Clinton left office.
In 2008, acting on a lawsuit brought by the state of Wyoming, a federal judge ruled that the Clinton initiative violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the Wilderness Act because of the way it was developed outside of public scrutiny and usurped the powers of Congress. This most recent legal development somehow escapes most newspaper editorials.
Promoters of the Clinton rule lead you to believe that the national forest lands in question have never been logged and have no roads. Actually, all the national forest land impacted by this rule in North Carolina has been logged, in some cases several times. And, guess what, there are roads in them used for timber management purposes — so much for the term “roadless.” There is very little timberland in Western North Carolina that has never been logged — less than 1 percent by credible estimates — and most of that is in the upper most reaches of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park where it will remain that way according to the park’s directives.
Wildlife agencies’ view
Perhaps the most misleading promotion of the rule is that it will be a tremendous benefit to wildlife and plant diversity. If this were true, you would expect state wildlife agencies to support it. Astonishingly, every state wildlife agency (N.C., S.C., Va., Ga., Tenn.) in our region publicly questioned the wisdom of setting aside more federal lands to a de facto wilderness status as proposed by this rule. The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, in a released statement, said “In many instances, the proper habitat manipulation to benefit a particular wildlife species may require some road or firebreak construction to implement management prescriptions such as prescribed fire, timber harvest or timber stand improvements.”
Likewise, the Virginia Board of Game and Inland Fisheries passed a resolution stating, in part, “These misguided policies are harmful to wildlife and the management of wildlife in general. Policies that ban the harvest of timber are particularly devastating to grouse and woodcock which are dependent upon the new growth resulting from timber cutting.”
If you are concerned about the general loss of plant diversity in areas that have been logged you can take comfort in a recently published study involving several university and U.S. Forest Service researchers who addressed this very issue. The study, published in the March issue of “Castanea - The Journal of the Southern Appalachian Botanical Society, ” looked at old growth (125 years-plus) and second growth (60 to 80 years old) rich forest cove stands across the Southern Appalachians. The study’s summary begins with the following: “Second growth (70-plus or 10 years) did not differ in species diversity or species-area relationship (SAR) from old growth (125 years) rich coves, although some species had reduced second growth abundance. Notably, all tested species were present to some degree in both age classes.” This peer-reviewed study refutes many of the environmentalists’ arguments against logging and the promotion of old growth in our region.
Misguided control
The biggest wrong of all is it is a one-size-fits-all directive from Washington and has no place in natural resource management for multiple-use lands like national forests.
While the Clinton rule promoters use warm and fuzzy spin to paint the “Roadless” Rule as a no-brainer and ought to be codified by the Obama administration, it cannot be justified by the sciences. It can only be justified politically to satisfy the environmental extremists. And, we all know how difficult that is — they’re never satisfied.
Steve Henson, N.C. Registered Forester #496, is the executive director of the Southern Appalachian Multiple-Use Council.
by Mary M.
Though few may realize it, maps can be used as weapons. War is takeover of territory by force or threat of force. When cadres of power brokers make maps in backrooms, it is an exercise in warfare, not biology.
by Bob Z.
And where “conservation biologists” are involved, it is a matter of political science, not biology.
These areas have had roads for thousands of years, and have had catastrophic-scale fires for only dozens — with strong, scientific correlations between roadlessness creation (via abandonment or regulation) and subsequent fuel build-ups and mega-fires.
The problem is that archaeologists, anthropologists, landscape historians, and historical ecologists that recognize and document this relationship (roadlessness and wildfire) are being routinely ignored and marginalized in favor of the conservation biologists, New Forestry ecologists, Natural Fire ecologists, and other members of the GW sect who are on a mission.
This is clear collusion between people with a social agenda and sympathetic agency “scientists,” and might (hopefully) have legal consequences. As Mike points out, maps are standard tools of war, and our rural communities are being systematically starved-out and destroyed with their adversarial uses.
Bob, you bring up a key point that eludes most people: our continent has been fully roaded for thousands of years.
I’ll say it again for emphasis: a complete network of roads that reach nearly every acre in North America has been in place for millennia (or was in place until erased in the last 100 to 300 years).
The First Residents did not bushwack hither and yon — they traveled on established foot roads. I’m not talking about hiking trails. The ancient roads were wide and well-worn from frequent use, and the roadside vegetation was tended. Pocket prairies (meadows, fields) dotted the road network like pearls on strings.
Lewis, Clark, and the Corps of Discovery crossed the continent on roads (they were led by native guides). On the few occasions when they strayed from established roads (such as in the Lochsas), they nearly perished. By the way, in their journals Lewis and Clark referred to their route as “roads” and acknowledged that without those “roads” they never would have made it to the Pacific or back.
What Congress laughingly refers to as “wilderness” and “untrammeled by man” are areas laced with ancient roads. For instance, the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness Area cavalierly incinerated by Let It Burn holocausts such as the B&B Fire (2003) and the Black Crater Fire (2007) contains major Indian highways running north and south and east and west.
It takes sheer conceit and extreme cultural bigotry to deny the FACT that human-built roads have crisscrossed this country since time immemorial.
by YPmule
To promulgate the lie that the forest is “untrammeled by man” our FS has been busy for years destroying the evidence of our presence. These so called “roadless” areas are artificially created by erasing the roads on a map, then coming in with gates and equipment to erase them on the landscape.
Here in the SW we find vast thickets of 6-8 inch 60 year old trees, diseased and dying - an enticement for forest destroying catastrophic fire.
Meanwhile the extremists show up at FS Travel Management (road closure) meetings and hobnob over maps in the back room with the metastasizing percentage of FS “conservation” “biologists”. There they peruse the forest road maps and plan strategies for which closures will most likely ensure advancement of roadless puzzle piece areas conducive to eventual much more widespread wilderness (holocaust) designation.