A Plague on All Your Forests

If you want to locate the best fishing in our national forests, find the logging roads; then go somewhere else. Road building is the federal government's single most destructive land-management practice. Roads are mortality sinks for all manner of fish and wildlife. They fragment habitat; they cause landslides; they block fish migration with their frequently impassible culverts; they serve as delivery systems for silt that bleeds off clearcuts; they provide conduits for invasions of cowbirds and invasive exotic plants.

Consider Deer Creek in Idaho's Caribou-Targhee National Forest. Because it is in part of the forest that, until recently, was officially roadless Deer Creek runs cold and clear, and it ripples with big Yellowstone cutts--one of the most beautiful and ephemeral essences of the American West and recently petitioned for listing under the Endangered Species Act. So pristine was Deer Creek that, in August 2003, a Forest Service survey crew determined that it should be used as the standard of excellence, "a reference area for comparison to streams impacted by various land uses." The survey team went on to recommend "that activities not be allowed which would reduce the quality of fish and amphibian habitat in the drainage."

That recommendation certainly is in keeping with the Forest Service's stated "fish mission" for the 150,000 stream miles and 2.5 million lake acres we've entrusted it with: "World-class fishing depends on world-class habitats, and the US Forest Service together with other federal, state and local partners, is working hard to protect, restore and enhance your streams and lakes." Well, not really.

Deer Creek, along with other pristine trout streams in the Sage Creek Roadless Area, had been protected by President Clinton's roadless rule. Last August--two months after the Bush administration rescinded that rule--Deer Creek became the first victim of the administration's substitute, which relies on "local control" for roadless-area management. In Idaho, dominated by timber and mining interests and with more roadless national forestland than any state other than Alaska, that's like asking two racoons and a hen to vote on what to have for lunch. A major road was punched into the Deer Creek watershed for the benefit of J.R. Simplot Company, which will now drill 25 exploration holes and, if it finds the phosphate its geologists say is there, will expand its open-pit strip mine for another 6.5 miles--through the Deer Creek drainage and the drainages of Manning, Wells Canyon, and upper Crow creeks, all prime cutthroat habitat.

"The Sage Creek Roadless Area, which protected the headwaters of what I consider some of the best cutthroat trout streams in the state, is no longer a roadless area," laments Pete Zimowsky in The Idaho Statesman. "It was a place where many big game hunters packed in on horseback to hunt trophy mulies and elk. It was a place where you could wander through groves of aspen on fall hikes and be amazed by the colors. . . .Will [the area] be the same for my grandson, as it was for my kids? No, it won't."

How did we get from a "roadless rule" that protects trout streams to one that sacrifices them? The story starts in the late 1990's when a young, utterly aberrant bureaucrat was running the US Forest Service. His background was not in timber extraction but in fishing, guiding, teaching and fisheries biology. His name was Michael Dombeck, and he understood what no chief before or since has understood--that the most valuable resource produced by our national forests is water. Dombeck also understood that the best of that water comes from the healthiest woods, woods undefiled by roads, and that there aren't a lot of that kind left. In fact, only 58.5 million acres--two percent of the American landscape--were designated by his agency as "roadless," meaning they were greater than 5,000 acres and lacked the major, high-speed logging-truck highways taxpayers buy for timber companies. There were all kinds of smaller roads that allowed vehicular access by sportsmen.

If you just count major roads, the Forest Service has built or paid timber companies to build 383,000 miles worth--222,000 miles more than exist in all of our national highway system. You and I got to pay for these roads twice--first, with our fish, wildlife, plants, soil and water; then with our tax dollars. And we're paying for them still because the Forest Service can't begin to maintain them and, as a result, they're sloughing into the lakes and streams it claims to be "working hard to protect." The road-maintenance backlog is now $10 billion. Meanwhile, we're paying for new national-forest roads. Roads are the main reason sales of the public's timber cost the public about $400 million a year.

Roadless areas are roadless for an excellent reason; they were the places Big Timber didn't want to go--the steep, infertile, icy, fragile, water-rich, trout-filled places. In fact, the national forests themselves were acquired because the timber industry didn't want them. Even today, after the industry has high-graded its own holdings, the national forests contribute less than five percent of the nation's lumber and pulp. If all national-forest logging ended tomorrow, our economy wouldn't flinch, and private-land operators would be spared subsidized timber sales that drive down fair-market value of their logs.

Dombeck, like every other thinking conservationist, concluded that the last thing our national forests needed was more major roads, especially in areas greater than 5,000 acres where none exist. So in January 1999, as part of a modern "transportation policy" for his agency, he proposed an 18-month moratorium on road building in 130 national forests. The industry, accustomed to doing whatever it pleased on our national forestland, was apoplectic. In separate, ultimately unsuccessful, actions the State of Idaho and the Wyoming Timber Industry Association sued in federal district court.

In the most extensive and wide-ranging environmental review in the history of federal rule making, the Forest Service held 600 hearings in 37 states and collected 2.5 million public comments, 96 percent supportive. A poll by Responsive Management of Harrisonburg, Virginia, revealed that 84 percent of America's hunters and 86 percent of America's anglers favored keeping roads out of roadless areas. It was by far the most popular rule ever hatched by a federal resource agency.