Roadless Reflections  
by Gloria Flora 

To road or not to road that is the question... and millions of Americans have an opinion when the road building is proposed for currently unroaded areas in our national forests.  The interesting fact is that most Americans are very much in favor of keeping current roadless areas unroaded.   

In 2000, the GOP polling firm, American Viewpoint reported 76% of respondents supported the proposal to stop development of roadless areas (54% strongly) and 19% opposed (15% strongly).  Eleven new state polls in 2003 conclude that an average of 74% of residents support leaving roadless areas undeveloped.   The poll included three states from the Intermountain West (ID, MT, CO) and three heavy timber-producing states (CA, WA, OR).   (see poll reference below for newer survey.   Older info from an unfooted article I wrote in 2001)

Obviously, a powerful issue but even more obviously, it's a very popular notion.

Intense public interest in the Forest Service Roadless Area Conservation Rule bodes well for the future of our national natural resource heritage.  There were six hundred public meetings and over a half a million official comments supporting the initiative during the first eight months of discussion.  That kind of interest in any issue is a sure indicator that the United States Forest Service (USFS) is doing its job, i.e., engaging the public in addressing vital issues in contemporary land stewardship.  

  	Better check the figures for the number of official comments… I think it’s even higher but I don’t have time to dig for it.

Claims that the recent definitive action to protect roadless areas was a political stunt are simply untrue.  The most contentious and aggravating issue throughout my 23 year career with the USFS was, and continues to be, access.  Questions of travel management and roading have been at the forefront of public land management debates for over three decades.  Travel Plans resulted in more agency employees hung in effigy than any other subject.  Litigation over timber sales planned in roadless areas were decadal affairs that usually resulted in the Forest Service losing, in the court of law and the court of public opinion.  

It was more than past time to address roadless areas in a comprehensive manner.    Regardless of personal opinion, most Forest Service employees quietly rejoiced that finally, the question of what to do, or not do, with roadless areas would be resolved and we could focus on managing the rest.  

Under the Clinton Administration, the huge public involvement effort demonstrated that the arguments for and against roading in roadless areas have been made repeatedly for years; there wasn’t any real new information.  Despite that, the current administration decided to re-open the comment period, just in case opinions would swing in a different direction.  They were inundated with over 700,000 comments, again the majority in favor of protecting roadless areas.

Roadless Area History 

Protecting a portion of undeveloped public land has long been a national priority.   Starting in the 1920’s, the first wildlands inventories in the U.S. Forest Service were conducted by Aldo Leopold and Arthur Carhart.  Those surveys lead to designation of Primitive Areas.  Primitive Areas were the first lands protected under the Wilderness Act of 1964.  The Wilderness Act also directed that further inventories be conducted in what came to be known as the Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE I).  The first RARE I inventories were publicized in 1973.  A bevy of lawsuits and administrative direction from the White House put that attempt on ice and a revised and streamlined process was initiated.

In 1976, the Forest Service began another inventory of unroaded areas: RARE II.  Theoretically RARE II was completed in 1979, but actually, the Forest Service just stopped.  It was taking too long and roadless areas were being roaded faster than they could keep the inventories updated.   (During the decade of the 70’s timber harvest increased three-fold.)  And the Forest Planning process as directed under the National Forest Management Act of 1976 was finally stumbling into existence.  The Forest Service determined that roadless inventory and management would be done on a forest-by-forest basis through Forest Plans.

Despite direction that roadless areas should not be roaded until thorough assessments were completed, there are now four million acres less of roadless lands than reported by RARE II.  Much of the roading “just sort of happened” and was neither recorded nor mapped.  The rate and methods by which unroaded lands were being converted were not sustainable.  That is why when the roadless initiative was announced, much of the Forest Service panicked.  We were not sure as to what areas actually remained unroaded.  

By 1999, budget issues, the realization of the true magnitude and condition of USFS road system, and the irrefutable science on the negative impact of roads on water quality, fisheries, and wildlife culminated in finally facing reality;  the question of how to manage a road system and roadless lands was over-ripe.

More Roads than You Can Shake a Stick At 

The Forest Service has over 380,000 miles of road, that they know about.   (“Two-track” or user-created roads multiply every year, entering any area terrain allows.)  Maintenance, simply to the level of making a road safely passable in dry weather, was limited to about 12% of the road system on any district or forest and most of those roads require annual attention.  The backlog of road maintenance now exceeds $8.1 Billion.  Lack of road maintenance exacerbates erosion, sedimentation of streams, management complexity, driving hazards and liability.  The backlog of maintenance needs and environmental damage grows yearly.

Roadless areas cover 58 million acres, about one third of our national forest system lands.  Another sixteen percent is protected through special designations such as Wilderness.  The rest is roaded, logged, mined and otherwise available for extracting natural resources, renewable and non-renewable.  Roads, at more than ten times the miles in our interstate system, lace these lands.  Millions of these acres have lost their biodiversity and native species due in large part to mis-located or poorly executed traditional uses.  

Despite the overwhelming evidence that our national lands have not been managed sustainably, there are still those who fight vigorously to maintain business as usual.  Those folks are in future shock.  (Alvin Toffler defined future shock as "the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” )  That’s why a movement towards more sustainable practices seems so radical.  In 1960 our knowledge of the world doubled about every 7 years.  It is now estimated to be doubling every 18 months.  Knowing what we know now, we can no longer deny that most activities conducted on public lands are not sustainable.  

Alvin Toffler, Future Shock., Bantam Books, NY, NY.  July 1970. See Introduction (page 2 in paperback copy) for quotation.

Peter Russell, Waking Up in Time, Origin Press, Novata, CA.  1998.  Page 19 (the rate of human knowledge increasing)

Put in lay terms, we’re using our grandchildren’s share of resources from our national treasure chest of natural capital.  We know that that cannot continue.  If we were using roaded areas in a sustainable manner and restoring them as we went along, we could be enjoying a steady flow of resources from those developed lands.   We’ve dismissed restoration as too costly yet have never stopped to calculate the ever-accruing social and environmental costs of not restoring degraded habitats.

Let’s make this even easier.  Think of our public lands as a checking account of natural capital.  You cannot continuously withdraw assets from the account without reinvesting and rehabilitating the future source of capital.  If you overdraw the account there are stiff penalties and you can no longer get what you want or need.

But There’s Something There I Need

The argument that not developing roadless areas denies people access to resources is weak.  If the areas were reasonable to get into and had critical resources, we already would have been in there extracting.  We've had well over a hundred years to build roads into currently unroaded areas.  Most of these remote areas have no roads in them for very good reasons: 
•	the value of the resources desired for extraction have little market value, and/or 
•	the cost of retrieving them is too great, and/or 
•	the cost to mitigate impacts to co-existent sensitive resources exceeded the value of the proposed activity.  

Prices for natural resource products have not kept pace with other commodities.  Costs of extraction, although lowered by technological advances, are still insufficient to offset some natural values.  Simply looking at short-term economics without considering the triple bottom line, which includes social and environmental costs and benefits, gives a false impression of true trade-offs.

Arguments that unroaded areas are an important source of timber are based on the fact a number of forests scheduled harvest in those areas.  It was political necessity, not the quality or accessibility of the timber that drove those harvest plans.  The 2000 Committee of Scientists Report (charged with laying the groundwork for new planning regulations) and other investigative reports have confirmed what many Forest Service employees have known.  Older Forest Plans were built using a timber optimization computer model, not a sustainable resource allocation model.  

During the forest planning process, political and industry forces pushed for higher annual timber volumes.  After decades of unsustainable timber harvest, the only places where it could even be suggested that more timber was available (without laughing) were in those blank, unroaded spots on the map where there were little data on trees or anything else.  The Forest Service knew that there would be significant limitations and very high costs associated with roading in those unroaded areas.  But taxpayers have always subsidized commodity and amenity activities on national forest lands.  If the timber were sold cheaply enough, roads could be built.

To add perspective, note that national forests provide only 4% of the country’s wood fiber production, less than 5% of our beef and 0.4% of oil and gas.  One can hardly claim that our nation’s gross domestic product or our marketplaces require incursions into roadless areas to stay afloat.

Science tells us that intact, large tracts of unroaded forests are less susceptible to disease, insect attacks and catastrophic fires.  Four different studies in the last eight years conclude that fires are generally less severe in unroaded areas and the risk of fire starts lower.  In the Roadless Area Draft Environmental Impact Statement, the Forest Service concluded that 12% of roaded forests are at high fire risk, compared to less than 3% of unroaded areas.  
 
Another spurious argument is that roading allows better access for fighting fires.  Most roads are not located for safe and effective fire-fighting.  Roads in canyon bottoms are particularly hazardous and unsuitable for launching an attack.   More fires start in roaded areas than unroaded due primarily to greater presence of humans and motorized vehicles.  Given drought patterns and over ninety years of fire suppression, fire behavior and intensities call for a different approach then driving a crew around with hand tools.  Now firefighting, including initial attack,  is largely done from the air. 

A New Modus Operandi

People frequently complain that the Forest Service doesn't operate like a business.  True enough, it is not a business, it's a trust and asset management company, but prudent practices are still necessary.  With hundreds of thousands of miles of road in existence and over an eight billion-dollar backlog of road maintenance, what sense does it make to build more roads?  Until we can close unneeded roads and maintain necessary roads, both of which fragment habitat and dump sediment into streams, we shouldn't be building more.

As our unroaded areas diminish, ecosystem and human demands are increasing.  We must retain some unroaded lands to conserve biodiversity and to allow future generations options.  Biodiversity is critical to the recovery of land and the health of the environment.  Past actions in roaded areas prove that we are not very good at retaining biodiversity once we get motorized access. 

Current trade policies and tax incentives favor major corporations (coupled with price controls, subsidies, mergers and deregulation).  Prices for raw materials are kept absurdly low.  Small towns aren't going to make it without help.  One serious weakness in this roadless area conservation rule as well as other well-intended environmental protection actions is that there is no transition policy or program to help small towns and resource dependent communities adjust their practices and businesses to operate under a new paradigm.  There is no policy to deal with future shock.

The primary reason for this lack of a transition strategy is that corporations don't gain directly.  Therefore, it doesn't register on the political scale.  It's easier to lobby for status quo (follow the money to multi-national corporations) than to lobby for innovative new programs that emphasize restoration, value-added on-site manufacturing and true sustainability (follow the money to communities and small businesses). 

We, as a nation, have to take definitive action to support small farmers, ranchers, and loggers, and small sustainable businesses in general, if we want to diversify and maintain resource-dependent communities.  That doesn’t mean we should simply continue unsustainable practices, spreading them out over unroaded areas, once we’ve exhausted the roaded zones.  Community health can be accomplished by reinvesting in our capital assets – our natural resources.  There is a tremendous amount of work to be done.  And there is a great skill bank in resource-dependent communities to perform the kind of work necessary to restore watersheds and forest health.  Putting the two together means jobs now and an investment in our natural capital for the future.  Honorable work for a trust management agency and completely viable for the richest nation in the world... there's no excuse for inaction.

The roadless initiative is just one example of a public land management agency finally admitting that we cannot continue doing what we’ve been doing and expect conditions to improve, or even stay the same.  The long-term health of our public lands and communities, and indeed the nation is dependent on public lands being managed in a truly sustainable manner.

Gloria Flora served in the USFS for 23 years, most recently as Forest Supervisor on two national forests.  She now heads Sustainable Obtainable Solutions, a non-profit dedicated to ensuring the sustainability of public lands and the plant, animal and human communities that depend on them.  

© Gloria Flora, September 2003

 
Most of my sources:

USFS Websites:  
	Fact Sheets:  www.usda.gov/news/releases/2003/06/fs0200.htm  and fs0200a.htm
	Roadless Area Conservation Final Rule, Questions and Answers (long and short versions)
	http://roadless.fs.fed.us/documents/rule/qa/fr.shtml 
	Abstract of Final FEIS, www.roadless.fs.fed.us/data/pdfdocs/abstract.html
	Roadless Public Comment – Executive Summary.  Pdf document on website.

Alvin Toffler, Future Shock., Bantam Books, NY, NY.  July 1970. See Introduction (page 2 in paperback copy) for quotation.

World Wildlife Fund Issue Brief, “What do Scientists Say About Roadless Areas?” on their website.

Letter from Scientists to Bush, signed by over 100 scientists, supporting Roadless Initiative.   Key signers – Orians, Redd Noss, Donald Dahlsten, Alan Kohn.  I think I found this on WWF website.

“Reflections on the Roadless Initiative Debate” by Gloria Flora Sept 2000, published in Goat Tracks, Journal of the Working Goat.  (I was the public lands advisor for this magazine about pack goats.)  The basis of the current paper comes from this article.  It wasn’t footnoted so will likely be of little use reference-wise.  

“Dirty Secrets” by Osha Gray Davidson, Mother Jones Sept/Oct 2003.  www.truthout.org/docs_03/printer_100903G.shtml.  4th to the last paragraph starts references to roadless.
 
National Polls Show Support for Roadless Area Protection.  www.efn.org/~ntarp/news/polls.htm

Roadless Rule Judge Had Money in Interests over Ruling.  Various news articles on Judge Brimmer’s alleged conflict of interest in July 14, 2003 ruling.

History from personal knowledge and from a peripheral document on RARE II such as http://www.nps.gov/band/adhi/adhi7e.htm Chapter 7 of a book? On the administrative history of Bandelier NP.  

I don’t think I used anything from these but had them for reference.
“Stop Demagoguing- Roadless Initiative was Overdue”  editorial in Great Falls Tribune. Jan. 15, 2001

Hunters and Republicans Support Roadless Initiative, by Jim Scarantino and Oscar Simpson.  Found on Republicans for Environmental Protection website.  www.rep.org/opinions/letters/8.html