Clinton to lock up national forests

October 23, 2000

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The United States Forest Service is rushing to make final by mid-December — before President Clinton leaves office — a rule that would prohibit all road building in the 54 million acres of national forest that are currently roadless.

The proposed rule has come under fire from many in and out of Congress, including the supervisor of a national forest in Idaho who says that Washington is trying to dictate something that is best determined on a local basis, forest by forest.

Republicans in Congress have also attacked the proposed rule as a politically motivated measure, crafted by extremist environmentalists, which would increase the risk of devastating wildfires on Forest Service land.

Jim Caswell, supervisor of the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho, in an interview with Human Events called the plan “shortsighted” and said that it fails to recognize the unique local factors that individual field offices take into account when planning the use of forest land.

Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, like many who are watching the issue closely, argues that the Forest Service, a division of the Agriculture Department, is usurping congressional authority and disregarding the federal laws that govern bureaucratic rulemaking.

In 1897, Congress passed the Organic Act, which created the National Forest System. This act explicitly set aside national forests to serve a purpose different from national parks. While national parks are more or less scenic national playgrounds and nature preserves, national forests exist to serve as repositories for the nation’s exploitable timber and water assets.

The federal government intended to assure a sustained, renewable timber supply by taking ownership of these forests and regulating the logging there in the interests of preserving a long-term supply of lumber and other wood products. The forests were also intended to be protected watersheds.

Road not taken
In the 1960s, Congress started designating certain federally owned lands “wilderness” areas. In these special reserves, mechanized equipment — cars, chainsaws, bicycles — is prohibited. Typically, a “wilderness” area is set aside within a national forest after the congressional delegation from the state in which the forest is located encourages Congress to make the designation by law.

President Clinton’s unilateral roadless rule would impose on regular national forest lands many of the same restrictions currently considered the prerogative of the states and of Congress through its ability to designate “wilderness” areas.

Craig attributes the Clinton rule to a “political agenda and not a real time problem on our political lands.” A few environmental special-interest groups have basically crafted the rule without any public input, he said.

Craig thinks the Clinton administration — which has been accused of politicizing the INS, IRS, Department of Justice, Census Bureau and strategic petroleum reserves — is using the proposed rule in an effort to buy environmentalist votes for Gore and the Democrats. He is convinced the Forest Service has been politicized because, during the recent fire season, “they were willing to shut down all other activities that were involving staff and delegate the staff out to the fires, except those who were working on this issue.”

Craig also questioned the prudence of the law.

“What I think the public saw this summer … was that a well-managed road system can be a tremendous asset during certain conditions. During the catastrophic fire season we just went through, we probably lost hundreds of thousands of acres of habitat simply because roads had already been closed or were not passable for fire-fighting equipment and people.”

Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt rejected that reasoning this summer when he told ABC’s Sam Donaldson on Aug. 27, “Sam, I’ve been out on the fire lines, year in, year out, since I was 18 years old as a firefighter, and I can tell you one thing: The way we get to fires today is by helicopter. This is rough, tough country. What does building roads have to do with suppressing fires? I’m put on a helicopter when I go to a fire line.”

Doug Crandall, a senior aide with the House Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health, found that statement laughable. Large forest fires, he said, can effectively be fought only where there are roads, and that the maintenance necessary to prevent fires also requires roads.

Crandall provided Human Events with information on the comparative damage caused by fires in roadless as opposed to roaded tracts of National Forest in Montana and northern Idaho last year. While the regions covered by the study were almost equally divided between roadless (24.3 million acres) and roaded (23.6 million acres), the roadless areas were much more devastated. While 397,000 roaded acres burned, 622,000 roadless acres burned — well over 50 percent more.

Les Rosencrantz, a former firefighter with the Bureau of Land Management agrees that Babbitt’s claim is “a pretty dumb statement,” and that roads are primary tools for fighting fires.

But Ron Dunton, the current fire program manager at the BLM’s national office of Fire and Aviation in Boise, Idaho, says the pro-road forces are politicizing the issue as much as the anti-road groups.

“The whole roadless issue, from a fire standpoint, depends on whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat because both sides have politicized it. It’s a non-issue,” Dunton said.

But he did concede the seemingly obvious point that roads make firefighting easier, adding that a cost/benefit calculation needs to be made. Where there are no roads now, he said, there tend to be few precious resources to protect, such as timber.

George Lennon, spokesman for the Forest Service, echoed that sentiment when he said that the rule would limit access only to places where loggers or harvesters have so far found no reason to harvest.

Additionally, Dunton claims that roadless areas have fewer causes of fires, because people and machinery are absent. Dunton also rejects the claim that active forest management — which requires roads — can prevent fires. He said such management is helpful in certain forests, such as the Ponderosa forests in California, but not in most of the West.

Yet, it is precisely this complexity — that different forests call for different management plans — that makes the nationwide rule ill-advised, says Clearwater National Forest Supervisor Jim Caswell.

Caswell said Babbitt’s statement about the need for roads was a “simplification.” Fires “are more difficult to fight, more expensive to fight” from the air, he said. “If it’s big and it’s really moving, as was the case in some of the major fires that burned this summer, less access means you’re less effective.”

Dunton’s paradigm of roadless-equals-worthless is “baloney,” says Caswell. Agreeing that for the most part if timber is there, roads are, too, he added, “That’s not the only resource.” There are “a lot more valuable resources out there than just trees and the products that trees make,” he said, listing fish habitats, wildlife habitats and recreation as national forest resources threatened by fires.

Caswell’s central disagreement with the rule is its repudiation of the principle of local control of the national forests. Over half of the 1.8 million acres in Clearwater National Forest are roadless and would be “locked up,” as Caswell puts it, by Clinton’s rule. That would undo months of work put in by an interdisciplinary team of specialists on how the local timber, water, soil and wildlife should be utilized, as well as how local fires should be fought.

Clearwater’s team worked together, weighing the value of the harvesting potential against the value of unique habitats and wildlife. They recommended that Congress set aside 198,000 acres as wilderness, and leave 235,000 acres available for recreation, but not for harvesting or roads. That would have left another 550,000 acres available for eventual timber harvesting and the roads necessary to do that harvesting.

Because Clearwater is unusually wet for an inland forest, it has a rich timber supply in currently roadless areas, said Caswell — refuting Dunton’s argument.

Clinton’s rule would shut that land down, foreclose timber harvesting jobs, and put upward pressure on the price of timber used to build American homes.

Caswell sees the rule as an effort by environmentalists to end-run the current process.

“I don’t think it’s the right approach, quite frankly, I don’t. The forest plans have already made these decisions once. It’s just that some people don’t like the answers.”

“The local people look at this national forest as in their backyard,” Caswell explained. “Most of those people want to see this forest managed. They do not want to see it locked up.”

“Once you draw a line around it and once you proclaim, ‘You can’t do X, Y, Z on those acres,'” he said, “then the fear is that next week, next month, next year, it’ll be, ‘Now you can’t do A, B, C.’ And then you’re not going to be able to do D, E, F either.”