Roadless Policy Decisions:
Three Questions When Crafting A Policy
May 2005
After a long legal battle, the Bush Administration returned control of roadless areas of federal forestland to the states. Federal courts had ruled that the previous rule, enacted in the final days of the Clinton Administration, had not considered public input or the science behind the policy.
Instead of simply overturning that rule, the new policy gives states more control over how those federal forests are managed.
The expected political attacks against the policy have already been made. Some who praise the Clinton Forest Plan’s tangle of bureaucratic rules, attacked this new plan, without irony, as too "process heavy and pretty burdensome."
When the politics subsides (let's hope it does), policymakers will need to answer three key questions.
What is "pristine?" Advocates of the Clinton policy call these roadless areas “pristine." These activists express concern about timber harvesting and that these unpaved, gravel roads will allow more people to recreate in these areas.
Ironically, "pristine" does not appear to mean that the forests provide good habitat.
In 2003, a large fire burned nearly 100,000 acres in the North Cascades. A road and fire line was built to prevent the fire from threatening tens of thousands of acres designated as a Natural Resource Conservation Area in part to protect the threatened Canada Lynx. Environmental activists, however, condemned the building of the road. The head of the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance even seemed to relish the thought of a fire, calling it a "makeover" for the forest.
In this view, a road that covers 120 acres is unacceptable damage, but a catastrophic fire that destroys hundreds of times more area is "pristine."
Roadless or not, no part of the state is unaffected by human contact. More than half of all forest fires are human caused, and these fires move from roaded areas to roadless. Allowing this increase in fire activity while opposing efforts to control that increase ignores the impact humans have, and will continue to have.
What should we do to manage and protect habitat? As habitat declines for a variety of reasons, including the impact of poor forest practices 50 years ago, the remaining habitat becomes more important. This is the justification for the roadless policy. There is a countervailing consideration. Fires, disease and insect infestation don't honor boundaries we have set, and move across landscapes. Long ago, these events were an important part of creating habitat diversity.
Today these events threaten a balance of habitat that is already under stress. It makes little sense to protest a 100-acre timber harvest while praising the natural majesty of a 100,000-acre forest fire that destroys large areas of habitat. There is agreement that we need to protect and care for the habitat we have. Ignoring significant threats to that habitat, and forbidding a tool to fight them, simply because they are "natural" does not make sense. That is akin to allowing toxic waste to sit at the bottom of Puget Sound simply because the ebb and flow of the tides will naturally solve the problem.
Finally, policymakers need to decide what role family-wage jobs play in this decision. Too often, discussions about forestry policy devolve into discussions about the "motivations" of each side. Environmentalists attack others as being motivated by money and jobs. Undoubtedly they are to some extent. There will be some who argue that the economics of timber harvests in these areas are a justification for removing the roadless policy. That makes environmental activists nervous. It does not, however, mean that there are not good environmental reasons to build roads.
Governments are frequently complaining that they do not have the funds to care for lands, including forests, the way they should be. Giving harvesters a strict harvest prescription and allowing them to earn revenue can assist governments in doing the work that needs to be done to improve the health of forests and restore burned areas.
During the next 18 months, Washington policymakers will have the opportunity to make decisions about how to be good stewards of federal forestlands. If they use good science and balanced values to answer these key questions, they will likely find that some areas should continue to be roadless. They are also likely to find that roads are appropriate in some areas – not only to create jobs, but also to allow firefighting and other stewardship that can actually help improve the balance of habitat in these forests.