MY TURN: Revisiting the roadless rule rescission
It’s impossible to pick up a newspaper today without witnessing some of the hysteria associated with the Trump administration’s proposed roadless rule rescission.
By my count, more organizations oppose the rescission than favor it. That’s unfortunate but understandable. People love wilderness but don’t understand that roadless areas aren’t designated wilderness areas. Not even close. There are no roads in wilderness areas. Thousands of miles of old roads crisscross roadless areas.
By way of introduction, I am Jim Petersen, founder of the nonprofit Evergreen Foundation. Our 15-word mission statement has not changed in 41 years: We exist to help advance public understanding and support for science-based forestry and forest policy.
Dan Wilson’s well-reasoned Aug. 25 guest opinion in the Coeur d’Alene Press is the best I’ve read in dozens of newspapers that I monitor. Mr. Wilson chairs of the Washington Chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.
We’ve never met, but we are both involved in collaborative work in the Inland Empire for years. More than 30 in my case. We probably know many of the same collaborators.
Where we differ is in our starting points. He argues that the cost of rehabilitating thousands of miles of decrepit Forest Service roads is jaw dropping. He’s right.
My starting point is the well documented fact that more than half of our nation’s federally owned forest — some 193 million priceless acres — are either dying, dead or burnt to a crisp. I believe that decrepit roads should be rehabbed because they are critical to reducing the risk of wildfire in these forests.
In 2001, I was asked to help with public outreach that led to congressional approval of the 2003 Healthy Forests Restoration Act. I attended several focus group sessions hosted by Frank Luntz, not as a participant but as an observer.
Most focus group participants favored the same forest values: Clean air, clean water, abundant fish and wildlife habitat and a wealth of year-round outdoor recreation opportunity. These values are what we are losing amid our nation’s wildfire pandemic.
The assertion that roadless rule rescission will allow loggers wantonly log old growth forests isn’t true. Moreover, there are only two sawmills in the West today that can handle logs larger than 16-18 inches in diameter and they buy their logs from tribes or in British Columbia.
What matters most to millowners is log quality and haul cost. The logs you see on trucks in the Inland Empire come from well managed private or state forests. The cost of diesel fuel limits the haul distance to 50-80 miles depending on diesel price, log species and quality.
The Forest Service rarely meets these standards. Log quality is lower and most proposed timber sales are too far from mills to make the sales profitable.
In today’s political environment, it’s difficult for a proposed federal timber sale to cross the finish line. Forest activists litigate the sales knowing there’s a good chance they can run out the clock before the Forest Service successfully navigates the regulatory maze that unelected policy makers have erected over the last 30 years.
Most federal timber sale offerings in the Intermountain Region are grounded in research initiated by the late Steve Arno in the Lick Creek Demonstration-Research Forest in the Bitterroot Valley south of Missoula.
Steve and I were friends for many years. He was a PhD fire ecologist with the Forest Service’s Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula. His research focused on thinning and prescribed burning in areas that held too many trees for the carrying capacity of the land.
Arno’s work has been replicated in several locations in the Interior West. His book, "Mimicking Nature’s Fire," co-written by the late Carl Fiedler, offers the best explanation of forest restoration I’ve ever read. You can buy a copy on the Internet.
We no longer have the flexibility needed to allow wildfires to run their natural course for ecosystem benefit. It might have worked had federal district judges permitted experimental harvesting on the 4 million acres of matrix land designated in the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan. Now, 42 years later, most of those acres have been destroyed by wildfire.
A friend who has flown over Idaho’s 2.4 million acre Frank Church Wilderness many times estimates that well over half of it is burnt black. This is a lousy way to “save” forests. I’m not suggesting that logging be allowed in wilderness areas. But it should be allowed on the 58 million acres that lie within designated roadless areas. Minus science-based thinnings, these areas will also be lost in stand replacing wildfires.
I close with this wisdom shared with me in October 1997 by my old friend, Alan Houston, a PhD wildlife biologist at the Ames Plantation near Grand Junction, Tenn. We were out hiking on the Cumberland Plateau when he turned to me out of the blue and said something so startling that I can still repeat it from memory:
“When we leave forests to nature, as so many people seem to want to do, we get whatever nature serves up, which can be pretty devastating at times, but with forestry we have options, and a degree of predictability not found in nature.”
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Jim Petersen is a Dalton Gardens resident.