Copyright 2000 The Denver Post Corporation
The
Denver Post
September 10, 2000 Sunday 2D EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A-29
LENGTH: 391 words
HEADLINE:
Forest chief defends plan to protect roadless areas
BYLINE: By Eric Hubler, Denver Post Staff Writer,
BODY:
The U.S. Forest Service gets a bum rap as
anti-nature, the agency's chief, Mike Dombeck, told environmentalists
Saturday.
And they agreed, answering his call to designate
millions more acres of Forest Service land as wilderness areas
with thunderous applause and a standing ovation. Bill
Meadows, president of the Wilderness Society, said Dombeck is
'becoming a conservation hero.' The service's image problem started
in the 1940s and '50s, when it built logging roads to help timber
companies feed the nation's war effort and postwar building boom,
Dombeck told the Wilderness 2000 conference at the Hyatt Regency
Hotel in Denver. But early Forest Service leaders were leading
environmentalists, designating the first wilderness areas and
founding the Wilderness Society.
That's the tradition Dombeck
said he's building upon now that the service has endorsed President
Clinton's call to ban road construction on 43 million acres of
national forest land, including more than 4 million acres in
Colorado.
The main reason for a road-building moratorium is to slow
the fragmentation of forests, Dombeck said. With 7,000 acres of
the country being developed every day, forests are being divided
into chunks too small to adequately support wildlife or
human recreation, he said.
People worried that the roadless
policy, which is in a public-review stage, would mean they can't
drive their SUVs into the forests anymore can stop worrying, Dombeck
said. The policy would apply only to constructed roads of 50 inches
or wider and would not affect the current procedures for designating
new hiking, snowmobiling or off-road driving trails, he said. It
also wouldn't close any existing roads.
There's another, more
prosaic reason for the ban, Dombeck admitted: The service has fallen
far behind in maintaining the 380,000 miles of roads already on
forest lands. No private landowner would take on the liability of
letting people drive on unmaintained roads, he said.
'It's
time to slow down, take a breath and reassess and take care of the
infrastructure we have,' he said.
Stopping road-building might even help
in the nation's fight against wildfires, Dombeck said, because there
are more fires in roaded areas than in roadless ones.
LOAD-DATE: September 11, 2000
