Idaho ROADLESS Areas in Turmoil--What you can do to help!

This week the local Wilderness guide and author, Howie Wolke gave a colorful presentation about the history of conservation through John Muir and Aldo Leopold to the current regional efforts to thwart a "variety of subsidized destructive activities including industrial logging, road building, mining and various forms of frivolous and energy-wasteful off road motoring" if the 2001 Roadless Rule (which the Supreme Court ruled constitutional) is declassified (Friends of the Bitterroot).

Write to:
Roadless Area Conservation-Idaho
PO Box 162909
Sacramento, CA 95816-2909

This presentation held my eyes hostage. They were captured by the off-road scenic photos of old growth forests that have stood as reminders that humans can take one tree, but they can't take them all. These resilient ecosystems represent some of the only control variables in this uprooted country, some of North America's intrinsic beauties.

You can throw out your personal feelings towards Idaho, its politics, its Larry Craig's, and the characterization of Idaho being a colloquial territory, because this state holds more than 9.3 million acres of roadless, backcountry land that's open to people all across this country. This should be trumpeted through the cities of Green Bay and New York, the land preserved for future generations. In 2006, Idaho policymakers submitted the roadless-rule petition to the Roadless Area Conservation National Advisory Committee in Washington, D.C., 2001, which would exempt the state from a 2001 Clinton rule that protected the 9.3 million acres.

According to an Idaho Mountain Express news article, we are troubled.

Environmentalists are also troubled by an aspect of the Forest Service draft rule that classifies another 5.2 million acres of roadless forestlands in the state under a "backcountry restoration" management emphasis. That designation would allow road building when such an action is "needed to protect public health and safety in cases of significant risk or imminent threat of flood, fire, or other catastrophic event," the draft plan states.

I submit to you that retaining about 9.3 million acres of these roadless wildlands "in a state of high to very high scenic integrity" (even in the case of natural disaster) is more important than giving legislators the opportunity to admonish the previous roadless rule, to divide the land with roads, and reduce this number of natural integrities to the new state-specific plan of about 3.5 million acres.

John McCarthy, Idaho forest campaign director for the Wilderness Society, said the Forest Service plan's heavy focus on mitigating wildfire threats could justify projects taking place in the middle of roadless areas far away from any at-risk communities. Saying the forests of Idaho are wildfire-dependent ecosystems, he said the new plan is just an excuse to develop roadless lands under the guise of forest health (Idaho Mountain Express).

"We want wildland fires."

I submit that the Idaho state petition is indeed a regression. If we do not fight to uphold and preserve the laws that currently protect these roadless areas, we deserve our cubicles. We just have what's coming to us... Blade Runner-esque conditions.
And to those of you who write letters, who believe democracy works-- this is another opportunity to prove your rights of citizenship. A national ID does NOT establish sense of place in this country. I submit to you that our active nature, our willingness to be counted in the system, and in this case our unwillingness to accept pre-1990 forest management.

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees the Forest Service, would have you believe these areas are unimportant if we don't develop them, and in a sense if we don't recreate in them. "Two-thirds of the Forest Service is still roadless wilderness and undeveloped, and the recreational use of those is not increasing nearly as much as the demand for the developed uses," Rey said. "What's decreasing is the amount of wilderness use."

So, what?

You'll have us sell off and pave roads in the land that we're not using?

The Forest Service is accepting comments on the draft plan for Idaho's roadless areas until April 7, 2008. These threatened wildlands need your help.

Write to the Forest Service, if not simply to say you support the preservation of the 2001 ROADLESS RULE.

Roadless Area Conservation-Idaho
PO Box 162909
Sacramento, CA 95816-2909