The Renewed Attack on America’s Roadless Areas

The struggle over how to manage America’s 60 million acres of unprotected roadless areas shows no sign of ending soon. Six million of those roadless acres are found in Montana, 9 million in Idaho, and 3 million in Wyoming.

Although the Clinton Administration tried to extend protection to most of these unprotected wildlands, the Bush Administration, under pressure from the governors of some of the western states, has reopened the issue. It has proposed to leave it up to state governments to recommend to the federal land managers how the roadless areas within their states should be managed. The federal land managers would then make decisions state-by-state.

One certainly cannot object to having elected representatives of local residents offer advice to federal land managers. But state political leaders have never been shy about offering such advice. In fact, for most of the history of western public lands, local political leaders, speaking for those local businesses with a direct financial interest in those lands, largely dictated how they were used. The modern environmental movement sought to give voice to the vast majority of other citizens who saw those public lands as something other than commercial warehouses to be exploited for profit by a small minority of business interests.

There are two serious problems with what Bush has proposed. First, these lands do not just represent commercial resources for a few local businesses. They represent a national treasure of valuable non-commercial environmental services including some of the last remnants of our early history, habitat for endangered species, the headwaters from which most of the western rivers originate, scenic grandeur, and unique landscapes. All of the American people have an interest in how they are managed.

Second, the financial responsibility to pay the bills associated with management of these federal lands would not be shifted to state governments or the commercial businesses that want access to these public resources. The American taxpayer would continue to pay the piper while a few businesses make off with the commercial resources leaving environmental destruction in their wake. What Bush has proposed, under prodding from the governors of Montana, Idaho, and Alaska, is what the Western states have always sought, commercial exploitation of public resources subsidized by the rest of the American people.

Most of the roadless areas of the nation have remained roadless for a reason. They were not simply overlooked by commercial interests in the past. They tended to be isolated areas with rugged terrain that made the building of roads very costly. Often they were also areas of very low commercial productivity: the high, cold, low productivity mountain forests including lots of rocks and ice, ancient, contorted canyon- and badlands, high grasslands, and desert country. These remnant wildlands remained unroaded because the commercial values would not cover the cost of the access roads, hence the need for taxpayer subsidies.

This is not an economy versus the environment issue. Such publicly subsidized roading of these wildlands will not bring an economic bonanza. Consider Montana’s roadless areas, largely high forestlands. Actual and planned Forest Service harvest in these roadless areas over the last decade came to about three or four million board feet of timber per year. At most about 40 jobs are associated with that level of harvest. The Montana economy currently supports about 580,000 jobs and has been adding 5,000 jobs per year. Thus roaded entry into these high mountain forests would generate the number of jobs that the Montana economy creates every three days.

Worse yet, across the West, job growth in areas adjacent to roadless areas has been greater than job growth adjacent to lands developed for commercial purposes. Roadless areas, because they protect environmental quality that is valuable to people, support higher levels of economic vitality than does commercial development of those lands. In that sense, roaded development may reduce job growth rather than boost it a trivial amount.

The key question is whether Montanans and Americans want to spend millions of taxpayers’ dollars and permanently sacrifice the environmental values these remnant wildlands sustain in order to add, at most, three days of normal job growth. That is, are we willing to give up six million acres of our natural heritage and drive the federal deficit still higher so that job growth in Montana next year will be 5,040 jobs rather than just 5,000 jobs? Although some commercial interests may be that greedy, the overwhelming public support for continued protection of these roadless wildlands clearly indicates that most Montanans and Americans are not willing to sacrifice these unique lands in the pursuit of an economic loss.

You can let the US Forest Service know your judgment on this issue by submitting a comment by November 15^th at statepetitionroadless@fs.fed.us .