Copyright 2000 Star Tribune
Star Tribune
(Minneapolis, MN)
November 19, 2000, Sunday, Metro Edition
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 28A
LENGTH: 555 words
HEADLINE:
Roadless forests;
Time for Clinton to be bold
BODY:
Despite his devotion to the politics of pleasing everyone, President Clinton
can expect history to grant him a decent record of environmental protection. Now
he has before him, for final revision, the probable centerpiece of this record:
a policy of protecting the last roadless areas of national
forest from despoliation.
After a
couple of years of acquiring loopholes and shedding them, the road-building ban
is nearly bold enough. Clinton must not fail to finish the job.
This initiative is not just about limits on
logging and mining in old-growth forest. It isn't about making new parks for
backcountry recreationists. It isn't solely about scientific land management
and, ultimately, it isn't even about saving what Clinton has called "the
enduring remnants of an untrammeled wilderness that once stretched from ocean to
ocean."
Preserving these oases in the
federal forests is about deciding, as a nation, that it's time to stop
squandering what's left of the wild world for a bit more plywood or paper,
because we have better ways to meet those needs.
It's about recognizing that roadless areas
are reservoirs of clean water, fresh air, quiet landscape, a rich diversity of
plants and animals _ needs we cannot meet in any other way.
It is about applying at last the principle
that national forests belong not just to the people who live near them, but to
the whole country. Above all, it is about letting go of selfishness and
embracing stewardship.
This is why the
president must insist that his policy give full and immediate protection to
roadless portions of Alaska's Tongass National Forest, the last sizable remnants
of the temperate rainforest that once covered the Pacific Northwest.
From the beginning, the Tongass has been
specifically excluded from the roadless policy on the argument that a recent
management plan offered adequate protection. Under a revision issued last week,
its 9.3 million roadless acres will be subject to the same rules that apply to
the other national forests _ but only after 2004.
Meanwhile, the Tongass loggers will get
perhaps 450 miles of new roads, even though there's plenty of timber to cut
within reach of existing roads. They will thereby keep collecting a federal
subsidy that has been running about $33 million a year _ or
$63,000 per logging-related job _ for cutting out-of-the-way,
old-growth forests.
Timber harvests in the
Tongass offer a perfect illustration of why the nation needs to reverse a
road-building policy that encourages logging, wrecks wilderness and permanently
burdens the taxpayers, who now bear an $8 billion repair
backlog for roads the U.S. Forest Service has already built but can't maintain.
Exemption for the Tongass can't be made to
fit within the new policy. Nor can it achieve, for long, its purpose of
appeasing Alaska's timber industry and representatives in Congress, who control
the key environment committees of the Senate and the House.
The Alaskans will keep pressing for more
timber out of the Tongass _ by executive order if the presidency goes to George
W. Bush, by congressional meddling if it goes to Al Gore. Recognizing this, Bill
Clinton must see that the time for pleasing everyone is over, and the time to be
bold is at hand.
LOAD-DATE: November 20, 2000
