A Plague on All Your Forests

"I am filing this lawsuit because the Bush Administration is putting at risk some of the last, most pristine portions of America's national forests," announced California's attorney general, Bill Lockyer.

On the other hand, Idaho's elected officials--most notably Sen. Larry Craig and Governor Dirk Kempthorne--are positively giddy about the demise of roadless protection. This seems odd because the state's 9,322,000 acres of roadless national forestland is keeping imperiled fish and wildlife vital to the state's economy on the planet and, at least in some cases, off the Endangered Species List. For example, Idaho's roadless areas contain 68 percent of the state's remaining bull trout habitat, 74 percent of the chinook salmon habitat, 74 percent of the steelhead habitat, 58 percent of the cutthroat habitat, and 48 percent of the redband rainbow trout habitat. And these areas produce the biggest and most elk and deer. After construction of new logging roads on the Targhee half of Idaho's Caribou-Targhee National Forest, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game cut the elk rifle season from 44 to five days.

Idaho is also home of the most tireless and pernicious of all roadless-protection opponents--a wise-use, timber-mining front called the BlueRibbon Coalition. Here's an example of how it operates: In 2004 the Forest Service asked for local input in preparing a new travel plan for the Caribou half of the Caribou-Targhee, as if locals owned the forest. Accordingly, Marv Hoyt, Idaho director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, sat down with virtually all invested non-motorized user groups--such diverse outfits as the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, the Eagle Rock Backcountry Horsemen, the Idaho Conservation League, the Southeast Idaho Recreation Alliance, the Western Watersheds Project, and the Southeast Idaho Mule Deer Foundation--and hashed out an eminently fair compromise over a period of about three months. "We had some 50 individuals and organizations," Hoyt recalls. "We went over the maps of the whole forest, and we put together a balanced alternative that left 50 percent of the routes open to motorized use. Everybody signed it, and we sent it to the Forest Service. The BlueRibbon Coalition went after and obtained the document via a Freedom-of-Information-Act request, then mailed threatening letters to the organizations and individuals who had signed it, even boycotted businesses. They went after people in a really nasty way."

The BlueRibbon Coalition's letter, signed by its director, Clark Collins, read in part: "As representatives of recreation interest groups who enjoy the trails on the Caribou National Forest, we are offended by many of the recommendations you apparently support. . . . We would like to know what level of involvement you had with this document. We want to accurately represent your position to our readers. . . . A lack of response on your part will leave us no choice but to assume that you are in total agreement with the document, and we will so inform our members."

The Forest Service responded to the alternative offered by the non-motorized users with a draft travel plan that completely blew them off and gave the motorheads all sorts of new ATV and snowmobile roads. "So the message is this," says Hoyt, "'If you intimidate people and stymie public comments, you'll get rewarded.'"

With a few notable exceptions America's sportsmen have been strangely silent on roadless-area protection, despite the fact that about 85 percent of them want it. Unfortunately, many of these exceptions are among the 15 percent who don't want it. They include officials of make-believe conservation organizations such as the Ruffed Grouse Society (who obtain major financing from the timber lobby by whooping it up for roads and clearcuts at every opportunity) and outdoor writers who imagine that Clinton's rule was a conspiracy to separate their butts from their four-wheelers (despite the fact that roadless areas have plenty of off-road-vehicle access) and thereby allocate to predators the game they otherwise would have shot.

Burt Carey, president of Western Outdoor Writers and editor of Rocky Mountain Game & Fish, California Game & Fish, and Washington-Oregon Game & Fish magazines, complains about what he calls "the Clinton administration's thirst for creating wilderness and de facto wilderness (roadless areas) during Slick Willy's second term, and his zeal in repopulating the American West with wolves, linx, grizzlies and other carnivores, and portions of the Southeast with wolves and panthers."

According to Jim Shepherd of The Outdoor Wire--which bills itself as "the Outdoor Sports Industry's Daily Transaction Newsletter"--the effort to limit roads on public land is really a plot by the antis. "To keep hunting alive in America," writes Shepherd, "it's critical that hunting become easier, rather than more challenging. Anti-hunting forces recognize that fact. They've already changed their tactics from their failed full-on assault on firearms to a 'kinder, gentler' approach to eliminating hunting: protecting the environment by increasing 'protected' wilderness areas. As more and more federal lands fall under the ever-broadening definitions of 'protected' areas, hunters and the hunting industry must recognize the fact that what some perceive to be diminished efforts to eliminate hunting is, in fact, a retrenching of the efforts to a more subtle--but equally fatal--outcome."

In a rambling harangue delivered to conferees of the Outdoor Writers Association of America in June 2004--a year before the Bush administration officially killed Clinton's roadless rule--Kayne Robinson, then president of the NRA and formerly GOP chairman of Iowa, railed against such imagined slights to sportsmen as their alleged eviction from roadless areas. "The Clinton administration closed millions of acres to hunting and shooting," Robinson proclaimed. "Every acre should be reexamined."

Mike Dombeck, the architect of the roadless rule (which didn't close a single square foot of national forestland to hunting or fishing) happened to be sitting in the audience next to OWAA board member Tony Dean. Dombeck poked Dean in the ribs and asked him what the hell Robinson was talking about. (At a press conference later that day Robinson was unable to come up with a single example of land closed to sportsmen by Clinton's rule.) The following week Rich Landers of The Spokane Spokesman-Review offered this commentary: "The NRA's campaign to 'propel hunter rights into the public arena' stinks of opportunism. Robinson is trying to recruit uninformed hunters with the same big talk and promises a pimp uses to lure vulnerable girls into his realm. Some 12 million to 15 million American hunters are not NRA members, and this is no time for them to change their minds. Now, more than ever, a sportsman who is not an environmentalist is a fool."