A federal judge reverses Bush policy on roadless areas,

and challenges are likely

By Alex Danoff

California's national forests -- pristine lakes, lush greenery, and towering redwoods come to mind.

One reason for their presence is obvious. Parts of these forests, unexposed to industry and exploitation of their resources, are roadless.

Roadless areas are defined as pieces of land within national forests in which there are no roads and where no logging or development has occurred. In California, there are close to 20.7 million acres of national forest, 4.4 million of which are roadless.

In the entire country, there are 193 million acres of national forest and 58.5 million are roadless.

On Sept. 20, 2006, roadless areas in California and across the country faced a decisive moment in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte presiding.

The judge threw out the federal government's roadless plan and reinstated the Clinton administration's January, 2001, ruling on roadless areas, which declared those 58.5 million acres of national forest off-limits to road building, logging, and other development.

The Clinton rule was immediately suspended by the federal government when George W. Bush began his first term as president in 2001. The administration finally addressed the matter in May of 2005 when it began its state-centered program of the management of inventoried roadless areas (IRAs).

This rule set up a process by which the governor of each state could send in a petition to the U.S. Department of Agriculture stating their preference for how the roadless areas would be managed in their respective state.

With the court's reinstatement of the original rule, these petitions have, for the time being, become obsolete.

The Bush administration, which has denounced Judge Laporte's ruling, has more than a month to decide whether it will appeal to other courts, said Mike Anderson of the Wilderness Society. The USDA will continue to accept the state petitions, he said.

"There are going to be appeals, I'm sure, of this court decision," he said. "There could be other courts that will be making other decisions that could make it a good idea for the states to continue the petition process."

The state of Wyoming has already filed briefs to reinstate the petition system in the state, and because of this there could be no roadless rule at all, said Chris West of the American Forest Resource Council.

"I think the saddest part of this whole debate is that many of the western Democratic governors could have initially developed a petition process and this issue would be resolved for their states," he said. "But instead they chose to go the route of the courts, and as a result we may not have a roadless rule."

Carl Zichella of the Sierra Club said that the decision to enforce the original Clinton rule was encouraging for environmental groups.

"This was a very critical decision," he said. "[The Sierra Club] had been involved in this litigation from the very beginning. I think it restores the will of the American people.

"Several million comments in favor of the roadless rule were submitted to the government. Probably more than 250,000 comments came from California alone."

But many groups that support the petition process argue that some roadless areas need to be logged for forest health so that brush and dead timber will not accumulate and cause forest fires.

"This summer, as previous summers, we've seen hundreds of thousands of acres of roadless wilderness and national parks destroyed by catastrophic wildfire," West said. "One of the things that the public needs to decide is how do we want to manage these important wild lands for future generations of not only humans but of threatened and endangered species.

"Clearly, the condition in these western wild lands and the risk of catastrophic wildfire is not boding well for anybody's future."

But creating and using roads can have a negative impact on the surrounding lands, Anderson said.

"The roads have a lot of harmful environmental effects and the areas that were not roaded were becoming increasingly scarce," he said. "But those areas that do not have the roads are especially important for good water quality. They don't have sediment erosion coming off the roads into the streams, and they have more protected wildlife habitats because there's less human presence in those areas."

In an effort to balance the negative aspects of building roads with the advantages of doing so in certain regions of the country, the federal government decided to employ the petition system to give each state the power to decide for itself.

Under the original rule, exceptions laid out in petitions would not be followed. The result of the reinstatement of the 2001 rule is that complete protection of IRAs is in effect immediately.

"We don't have to wait for the state petitions to be reviewed and approved by the administration and then have to go through an involved state-by-state federal rule-making process," Anderson said. "So it makes the state petitions somewhat redundant."

Still, it is highly probable that states that have not already done so will continue to develop petitions because there will likely be appeals of the Sept. 20 decision, he said.

West said that the original roadless rule was flawed in that it did not allow states any input as to what areas would be declared roadless. The Clinton administration was petitioned by many western states to help formulate the original roadless rule, but that request was denied, West said.

When the original rule was drafted, there were no maps that laid out which acres the proposal included, so the public and the state governments could not provide informed comments on the proposal, West said.

"The Bush administration, knowing that the states wanted to be involved, put forward a petition process that allowed the public the opportunity, through elected officials, to provide informed comment into what areas should and shouldn't be part of a roadless protection initiative," he said.

But Zichella said that the Bush administration's original suspension of the Clinton rule was nothing more than a way of allowing states to extract resources from certain forests that would have been protected under the Clinton plan.

"They wanted to allow logging and they thought that there would be a much better chance to do that if they put the decision in the hands of western governors," he said. "A lot of western states are very much enthralled to these industries. You have states like Idaho and California with large national forests and timber industries that have not been able to get in and log in these areas."

But despite being at odds over the specific ways in which the national forests should be managed, both Zichella and West emphasized that the immediate designation of roadless areas was in the best interest of both the state of California and the country as a whole.

"We need to take that hard look and truly evaluate, not just for the short term but for the long term, how to best manage these lands," West said.

Graphics courtesy of The Wilderness Society.