by Melanie Griffin
From the nation's capital to small-town city halls you could hear
the chainsaws buzzing, revving up to shred habitat-protection laws
across the country in 1998. Lawmakers were more than willing to
listen to industry lobbyists who pushed for more logging, more
drilling, more wetland destruction, more water pollution.
Enter Sierra Club activists.
Last January, when U.S. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck
announced a partial moratorium on timber road construction in some
of the last remaining unspoiled wild forests, he heard the public
roar with approval. Club activists turned out in force at citizen
hearings across the country, wrote letters to the editor and
garnered extensive press coverage of rallies and other events.
Congress took note, and by the time the timber industry brought
its first wish-list bill to the House floor in late March, the
forest protection issue had been in editorial pages across the
country for months. The House rejected Rep. Bob Smith's (R-Ore.)
H.R. 2515 - the so-called Forest Recovery and Protection Act - and
voted instead to specifically protect wild roadless areas.
The annual appropriations process has become a regular
battleground on forest issues, as conservationists come closer each
year to dramatically cutting back taxpayer subsidies to the timber
industry. After their defeat on H.R. 2515, timber-industry allies
got nervous and decided to pre-empt this year's subsidy vote by
signing off on a compromise to eliminate a small part of their road
building subsidy. A big win was in reach, but this political deal
resulted in less than half a loaf.
As the election loomed, the anti-environmental agenda in Congress
began to lose steam and public opinion polls continued to show
strong support for habitat protection. Bills to designate more
wilderness in Alaska and Utah garnered more co-sponsors than ever
before, each topping the 150 mark. H.R. 2789, the first bill ever to
propose an end to all commercial logging on federal lands, secured
36 co-sponsors in its first year.
But anti-environmentalists took the campaign underground. During
the last months of the Congress, activists were kept busy trying to
fend off anti-environmental "riders" that were tucked into every
massive spending bill. We lost some battles. Because of riders that
were signed into law, motors are allowed in Minnesota's Boundary
Waters Wilderness, an Air Force bombing range will expand into
Idaho's wild Owyhee canyonlands, lands will be removed from the
Petroglyphs National Monument in New Mexico for highway construction
and logging in three of California's national forests will be
doubled.
The chainsaws - and the Club's activism - weren't confined to the
halls of Congress. In the southern states we fought chip mills, in
California we fought for less destructive logging rules in the
Headwaters Forest, and all across the country we were doing
inventories, taking pictures, and otherwise working to get
wilderness area protection for more forests, deserts and canyons.
There was good news from Utah, where two and a half years of
inventory work by Wayne and Gayle Hoskisson and 600 other volunteers
in the Utah Chapter and Utah Wilderness Coalition produced the most
detailed citizen wilderness inventory the nation has ever seen. The
groups mapped 9.1 million acres eligible for wilderness protection -
5 million acres more than were deemed eligible by a 1970 Bureau of
Land Management survey. With the help of activists like Gordon
Swenson, who volunteers his legal expertise to expose phony
right-of-way claims by local government, the chapter will forge
ahead into 1999 with a plan to educate the public on the need to
protect all of these vanishing wildlands in Utah.
The lessons of 1998 are clear. Lawmakers find it hard to ignore
public sentiment, but if unpopular moves are hidden as riders on
spending bills, they can get away with it. In 1999 we'll urge
President Clinton to demand a clean and clear appropriations process
free of anti-environmental riders. (Send him a letter like this one
, if you'd like.)
We'll also go to work to improve the interim roadless moratorium.
Previews of the document indicate that it won't be good enough.
We will continue to push for wild lands protection in Alaska,
Utah, the Northern Rockies and elsewhere. And we will continue to be
out front in the fight to permanently protect all of our national
forest lands by ending commercial logging on them, once and for all.
Go on to the next
article, "Animal House . . . and Senate."
http://www.sierraclub.org/planet/199901/road.html
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