No More New Roads
July 2004
On July 12, 2004 Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman announced the Bush administration’s intentions to reverse the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. This policy was established in the last year of the Clinton Administration after 600 public hearings and over two million citizen comments overwhelmingly in favor of no new road building on public national forest lands. President Bush now wants to open up our national forests to new road building. In his proposal, the Forest Service is free to build new roads with input from state governors. To prevent new road building, governors would have to petition the federal government to recommend that no new roads be allowed in a particular forest. The final ruling would then be made by the undersecretary of agriculture for environmental and natural resources, currently Mark Rey, a former lumber industry lobbyist. (Leopold, 17 July 2004)
There are approximately 57 million acres of roadless areas within national forest lands located in twelve western states. Those states are dominated by Republican governors and legislators with free market, capitalistic ideas, who see big government getting in the way of big business. Some of the western Republican governors along with industry lawyers have been filing lawsuits against the federal government to overturn the Roadless Area Conservation Rule developed by Democratic President Clinton. These areas are essentially wilderness areas without official Wilderness Act designation; consequently, lacking protection from development. National Forest land is more vulnerable to the political process and partisan politics. Now, the Republicans are in power and want to build new roads in these currently roadless wilderness areas.
What business do the Republicans have building more roads in our National Forests? Big business! The special interests of the timber, mining, oil, coal, uranium, cattle, natural gas, and tourist industries all want new roads built so they can get their machines into the last remaining wilderness areas and their hands on the last remaining natural resources currently controlled and protected by the federal government. I think the Republican administration is trying to establish a natural resource management policy of Exploration, Extraction, Exploitation, and Extinction in these roadless areas.
At the beginning of the summer, I bought a brand new 2004 multi-page Rand McNally road atlas. It shows all the interstates and state highways, most of the major paved county highways, and occasionally some of the main unpaved roads for every state. It also has road maps for every major city. Looking through the atlas, I see that almost everywhere is connected by road to everywhere. The atlas shows only a fraction of the existing roads. To see the difference, there are multi-page individual state atlases that show most of the minor roads. Surveying various states in my Rand McNally, I see roadless areas ranging in size from 5 to 30 square miles. Occasionally, I see a few larger roadless areas in the western states. The national forests and designated wilderness areas have up to 30 square miles that are roadless and occasionally larger areas out west.
My home state of Wisconsin has a total of about 108 square miles of national forest lands. In my atlas, the largest roadless area looks to be about seven square miles and there are only four such areas. However, according to Department of Natural Resources maps, Wisconsin’s national forests have about 4,800 miles of logging roads in them, with 79 percent of the forestland within a quarter mile of a road. I believe all our national forest lands have a somewhat similar extensive network of existing roads dividing them up into small roadless areas, with perhaps some larger truly roadless zones in the mountain areas of the western states. It is these wild areas that the Roadless Area Conservation Rule has been protecting for the past four years. President Bush and the special interests he represents are about to change all this. Once a road is bulldozed into existence, all the land surrounding it changes forever, succumbing to the policy of Exploration, Extraction, Exploitation, and Extinction.
In the continental United States, there is not much roadless area or wilderness left. Most of what remains is federal lands and national forests. Most of the private, state, and county lands have already been exploited for their resources. That’s why the Republicans want what’s left.
Worldwide there’s not much left either of roadless areas or of original wilderness. Perhaps some areas in Alaska, Canada, in the Arctic and Antarctic Polar Regions, Africa, South America, Siberia, and maybe yet in the outback of Australia are still roadless. At least we still have ocean depths without roads. There’s not much left that hasn’t been directly altered by humans and is now controlled by humans. We’ve been almost everywhere by way of roads. And, according to the TV commercials for sport-utility vehicles, four-wheel drive trucks, and all-terrain vehicles, we can now bulldoze our own personal roads practically anywhere there isn’t a road already. For the most part worldwide, humans are permanently everywhere. Humans can’t leave anything alone.
I’m reminded of the old story about a god who created a unique planet in a big universe, then made a special Garden of Eden, and then created a man and a woman to live in the garden. The god gave human creatures control and dominion over all the garden and its plants and animals, except just one tree. The god told the creatures not to eat of its fruit. However, the humans had to have it all. They could not leave the fruit from that one tree untouched, untasted. They could not resist their own greed. They ate of the fruit. Then the god banned them from the Garden of Eden.
I now see the roadless wilderness areas as gardens of Eden: small areas left mostly unaltered by human activity or permanence, places where human domination and control has now been banned. I believe these areas contain some of the original material of creation, which has evolved on its own, mostly unchanged by the hand and machines of man. Some politicians, special interests, and multi-national corporations cannot resist their own greed. They want to control everywhere and everything. They cannot leave what little is left of the wilderness untouched by their greed. They want it all.
We need to save and protect all the remaining roadless and wilderness areas before they are all gone. There is not much time left to save them from extinction. In “Walking” Henry David Thoreau writes, “that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.” If we can not preserve what little wildness remains, we will deserve to perish.
I believe that if we can save enough of these original places of Eden and leave them alone to continue to evolve on their own, and if they are given enough time, perhaps someday a higher life form than humans will be created out of the primordial evolutionary ooze found only in these special wilderness places. Or maybe the god from the old story will decide not to intervene with what seems to be our human destiny to destroy the life sustaining conditions on planet Earth, causing the extinction of all life. Maybe God, after a period of time (somewhere between six days and six billion years), will reform and refashion the Earth. Maybe God will then recreate humans to inhabit the Garden of Earthly Eden. This time, however, God will not give them permission to dominate and control nature, but rather, will create a new and improved model of humans who will wisely coexist with nature.