Agriculture Department Announces Forest Roads Moratorium

From the March issue of The Forestry Source

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Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, joined by Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment Jim Lyons and USDA Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck, announced February 11 an 18-month moratorium on new road construction in roadless areas in most national forests.

While the 18-month road construction suspension is in effect, the Forest Service will develop a long-term road policy for the national forest transportation system. The Forest Service said that it will establish new policies to guide decisions on identifying unessential roads, recommending roads to be eliminated or maintained, and assessing roads that need to be reconstructed and maintained.

"It is our responsibility to safeguard the often irreplaceable ecological value of unroaded areas until a permanent policy can protect our last great open spaces," Glickman said. "We are therefore calling an official time out, so we can examine the science, involve the public, and build a roads policy for the 21st century."

In all, the national forests include about 192 million acres, of which about 35 million acres of land without roads are already protected by wilderness status. About 33 million acres of additional roadless areas, mostly in tracts of 5,000 acres or more, will be protected by the moratorium; about 8 million acres of this land are actually suitable for timber harvesting.

The agency projects it will cost $8.4 billion to eliminate the current backlog for maintenance and reconstruction of existing roads. It receives only 18 percent of the funding needed to annually maintain roads to federal safety and environmental standards, according to a prepared statement by the agency.

The moratorium, in effect, began more than a year ago, when the suspension was proposed in January 1998. Meanwhile, the agency collected some 50,000 comments from the public.

Forest products industry officials bitterly criticized the ban. In a statement, the American Forest and Paper Association described the moratorium as a "disaster."

"Essentially, the Forest Service has put an 18-month hold on forest management," said W. Henson Moore, president and CEO of the association. "The end result of this decision will be forests filled with dead or dying trees, killed either by insects, disease, or catastrophic wildlife."

The environmental community, which has been campaigning strenuously to keep timber harvesting out of areas with no roads, responded with measured enthusiasm to the announcement.

"Chief Dombeck is trying to lead the agency in the right direction—his recent remarks and moves show that," said William H. Meadows, president of The Wilderness Society. "Ultimately this policy he's started should lead us to permanent protection of all 60 million [roadless] acres at stake."

The administration made few significant changes to its initial proposal for a moratorium. Several large forests where new management plans are already in place or proposed are still exempted; among them are the Tongass National Forest in Alaska and some Pacific Northwest forests.

Agency officials said the moratorium would defer 200 to 300 miles of roads that might otherwise have been built and would probably reduce the amount of timber cut in national forests during the next 18 months by about 200 million board feet. Agency officials said that much of that shortfall in output would be filled instead by nonindustrial private landowners.

Click here for the Society of American Foresters Position Statement on roads in national forests.