U.S. Roadless Protection Announcement a "Charade"

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

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Forest Networking a Project of forests.org

http://forests.org/ -- Forest Conservation Archives

http://forests.org/web/ -- Discuss Forest Conservation

10/23/99

OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY

While I continue to support the gist of President Clinton's recent

forest protection announcement--that the vast majority of remaining

roadless areas should remain so--the following article highlights

several of the problematic features with the announcement and process

to date. Primarily, it is unclear what management and extractive

industries exactly are permitted. Logging may be allowed via

helicopter. Livestock grazing, mining and dirt bikes may not be

banned. The best forest lands that remain roadless may be left out

in their entirety from the plan. Such protection of "roadless" areas

falls far short of the biological reserve status that is required on

far more of the American landscape, if forests and their constituent

biodiversity and cumulative ecosystem functionality are going to be

sustainably preserved at large spatial scales. This is important for

environmental sustainability at the regional level. And by all

means, lets not give up on the smaller roadless areas that contain

healthy and vibrant natural forest and other vegetational communities

either.

Recall that these and other concerns can be expressed in the current

process of defining the details of the roadless protection measure.

If we take President Clinton on his word, this is a process that

should be able to be impacted upon by sound science and public

opinion. If not amended to live up to its rhetoric, than Alexander

Cockburn is correct (below), this is all just a political gift to

Vice-President Gore's flagging election campaign. Comments can be

submitted to: USDA Forest Service-CAET, Attn: Roadless Areas NOI, PO

Box 221090, Salt Lake City, UT 84122 or

mailto:roadlessareasnoi/wo_caet@fs.fed.gov

g.b.

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Title: Clinton Hugs Not Trees but Gore Campaign

Environment: The movement has become 'a wholly owned

subsidiary' of the DNC.

Source: By ALEXANDER COCKBURN, The Nation

Date: October 21, 1999

It has been billed as the greatest act of land preservation since

Teddy Roosevelt created the national forests. On Oct. 13, President

Clinton made his way, by way of helicopter and sports utility

vehicle, to the George Washington forest in the Shenandoah Mountains,

where he disclosed his plan to protect 40 million acres of roadless

land in national forests across the country. Amid the ecstatic cheers

of environmentalists bused to the site by the National Audubon

Society, Clinton declared that "in the end, we're going to protect

all this," gesturing as he spoke to the surrounding trees.

Those cheering environmentalists should have been warned by Clinton's

means of transportation to the great event. The first flaw in his

plan is that it appears to prohibit road-building but not logging.

These days, helicopter logging is becoming increasingly common as a

way of extracting the trees from the cut-over terrain to the nearest

available road.

Logging won't be banned, it seems. Nor will livestock grazing, mining

or dirt bikes. The plan falls short of protecting all roadless areas.

Steve Kelly, a feisty green organizer in Montana, had it right when

he said, "The president tried to redefine sex, now he's trying to

redefine wilderness."

There are around 60 million acres of unexploited forest under federal

supervision, and Clinton's plan applies to only 40 million of them.

More than half the area covered by the Clinton plan is composed of

rocks and ice, with no trees. By contrast, the 20 million acres that

have been excluded are mostly forested terrain. So it's scarcely

surprising that Patti Rodgers, spokesperson for the Willamette

National Forest, said the plan would have very little effect on

logging in that forest, an assessment that was foreshadowed by

Clinton when he said, "It's very important to point out that we are

not trying to turn our national forests into museums." The Forest

Service calculates that under the plan, timber harvests will decline

by only 28 million board feet. The annual take from national forests

is 4 billion board feet.

Another huge defect in the plan is the apparent omission from its

purview of the nation's largest and most ecologically intact national

forest, the Tongass in Alaska, thus deferring to the political power

of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). This brings us to the plan's real

intent, which has little to do with preservation and everything to do

with the politics of the next 13 months.

What is afoot? The long process of review--probably 18 months--means

that the executor of the plan will be the next president. What better

way to congeal support for Al Gore, with leaders of the major green

groups presaging a forest holocaust if George W. Bush wins the White

House?

The announcement of the plan comes when Gore sorely needs to buttress

his credibility with environmentalists. Friends of the Earth has

endorsed Gore's rival for the Democratic nomination, Bill Bradley.

Clinton took care to emphasize that the plan's architect was Gore,

along with George Frampton, head of the government's Council on

Environmental Quality. Frampton was once head of the Wilderness

Society, with Richard Hoppe as his right-hand man.

These days Hoppe is one of the leaders of the Heritage Forest

Campaign, which has most actively promoted the roadless area

initiative. The Heritage Forest Campaign has no membership, only a

substantial staff paid for by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which

committed $1.4 million to the roadless area campaign.

Thus we have Pew, the richest and most influential foundation in the

environmental sector, creating Heritage Forest to advance a

politically motivated initiative in an election year. Staffers of the

Heritage Forest Campaign have been telling environmental organizers

not to criticize the plan. "It is VITAL," ran an Oct. 11 Heritage

Forest e-mail, "that we respond immediately to early news reports of

this effort with praise and consensus.

. . If not, we jeopardize the whole deal." The plan testifies to what

the mainstream environmental movement has become: a wholly owned

subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee. As Oregon Democratic

Rep. Peter A. DeFazio said, "Forest policy is too serious to be the

theme of the day in some attempt to boost Gore's flagging

presidential campaign, which is what I think it's all about."

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