Copyright 2000 Star Tribune
Star Tribune
(Minneapolis, MN)
May 18, 2000, Thursday, Metro Edition
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 24A
LENGTH: 538 words
HEADLINE:
Roadless forests;
A good policy with some serious faults
BODY:
The U.S. Forest Service deserves more praise
than criticism for its new policy on roadless areas. More than
40 million acres would be off-limits to bulldozers and, generally, to loggers.
This is a major step forward in wilderness protection, and a long stride toward
forest management that treats timber production as one use among many for the
public's best woodlands. But the proposal has its
disappointments, too. In several significant departures _ and one huge omission
_ it falls short of the vision President Clinton voiced last October when he
sought lasting protection for the "enduring remnants of an untrammeled
wilderness that once stretched from ocean to ocean."
Some of those remnants, particularly in
the East, are too small to have been catalogued in earlier federal inventories
that generally focused on tracts of more than 5,000 acres. Clinton suggested
that the Forest Service might extend protection to these areas; for the most
part, it has not.
Nor does the proposal
specifically ban timber-cutting and mining from roadless areas. This opens a
loophole large enough for off-road logging equipment and helicopters, and leaves
front-line foresters to decide who can drive through it.
But the proposal's biggest fault by far is
its exclusion from the general road-building ban of the 17-million-acre Tongass
National Forest in southeast Alaska _ the biggest unit in the system and part of
the largest temperate rain forest in the country.
If any national forest deserves special
protection for its wildest parts, it's the Tongass. But the Forest Service
proposal takes the opposite approach, forgoing any ban on new roads until at
least 2004 _ and probably much later. The Alaskan congressional delegation is
bitterly opposed to further restrictions on logging this forest.
It may be, as the Forest Service has said,
that current management plans for the Tongass respect the agency's new
philosophy of balanced use. Certainly the timber companies have a point when
they note that forests can be logged in ways that are sustainable,
environmentally sound and profitable. But those arguments are beside the new
policy's main point.
The roadless areas of
national forest represent a tiny fraction of the good timber land available to
loggers _ roughly 5 percent _ but the lion's share of federal wilderness
providing species protection, quiet recreation, scientific research, production
of clean air and water.
The Forest Service
has already built nearly 400,000 miles of roads _ eight times the mileage of the
Interstate Highway System _ which it can't afford to maintain, let alone expand.
Each new road represents a subsidy to logging companies at a time when plenty of
timber is already in reach of the trucks.
In the Tongass, for example, the federal
subsidy for logging has reached $33 million a year. Perhaps 10
billion board feet of lumber is waiting to be cut along the existing road
network, but timber sale after timber sale draws no bids. And yet the current
plan calls for about 100 miles of new road per year _ a perfect illustration of
why a national ban on road-building is needed, and why the Tongass must be
included.
LOAD-DATE: May 18, 2000
