The Roading of the Last Wild Places |
The Trump administration is plotting to undo a quarter-century of policy for the protection of national forests against new road building. Image by Laura Adai.
The Trump administration is plotting to undo a quarter-century of policy for the protection of national forests against new road building. This is a terrible turn for our public lands and needs to be stopped.
When I lived in the little town of Moab, Utah, my habit on hot summer days was to drive into the nearby La Sal Mountains, a mostly roadless island of pines and firs and freshwater streams floating over the oven of the red rock desert. The La Sals, public land overseen by the U.S. Forest Service, include vast stretches of woods accessible only by foot. The thing to do there was to dump your car on one of the few dirt roads that cross the mountains, shoulder your pack and give oneself over to the habitat of the cougars, lynx, black bears and elk, none of whom like roads (or, for that matter, people who go backpacking).
Much of the forest of the La Sals was designated to be protected from new development under the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Policy issued in the final days of the Clinton administration. The roadless rule, as it became known, ended road construction, logging and coal, gas, oil and other mineral leasing on 58 million acres of some of the wildest remaining undeveloped national forest lands — an area equal in size to all of Pennsylvania and New York State combined. The roadless rule happened not because the federal government happily opted to stop giving public land to industry for private profit. It was the result of a decade of conflict between the federal government and mainstream environmental groups and enviro direct actionists who engaged in tree sits and blockades and other forms of civil disobedience. Some 600 public hearings were held across the nation to discuss the roadless rule, with the public providing more than 1.6 million comments over two years. The proposed rule received more comments than any other environmental rule on public lands in U.S. history.
In June, the Trump administration announced that it intended to rescind the roadless rule, and this month it instituted an accelerated three-week public comment period, set to end on Sept. 19. What had taken two years to put together would now be put asunder in three weeks.
The most important thing to understand about President Donald Trump’s endeavor is that every new road blazed into a previously unroaded landscape is a disaster for wild landscapes and the creatures who live in them. In two decades reporting on the exploitation of American public lands, I’ve found that the most important first effort in destruction of habitat and the fouling of clean air and water is the building of a road.
A road cut through wilderness is a wound that won’t stop bleeding. It doesn’t matter if it’s paved or unpaved, though a paved road always brings more traffic. Then again, it doesn’t matter whether a road is heavily trafficked or lightly used. The very presence of a road........