Dear Whoever,
I serve on the board of the Yaak Valley Forest Council (YVFC) in northwest Montana, an organization founded in 1997 whose mission has focused on preserving the Roadless Areas (RA’s) in the Kootenai National Forest, and particularly in the Yaak River watershed. The Yaak’s RA’s largely consist of what was left over after the lush forests at lower elevations had been clear-cut, that is, the mountain tops. That is not say that there are no resources worth pursuing within RA’s in general, but for the most part, the biggest and best timber was never to be found in the Yaak’s RA’s: if it were, they would not be RA’s.
We value our RA’s precisely because they are roadless. With roadless-ness comes solitude, quiet, a sense of wildness not found where logging roads and old and new timber cutting units dominate the landscape. In the Yaak many of our hiking trails leave the valley floor and proceed up to the top of a ridge or mountain. As you gain elevation, you cross one logging road after the other after the other until you have crossed the last one shown on your map, and know that you are entering a different kind of space, an intact forest. For RA’s are not just areas without roads: they are areas without stumps and without weeds.
This latter, the lack of invasive plants, is crucial. For logging roads serve as conduits of invasive plants far into the back country. I have walked for miles on logging roads that have been closed to vehicular traffic for decades, and failed to outwalk the hawkweed, knapweed, oxeye daisy that have taken permanent possession of the disturbed ground in and between the tracks.
Another of the main objectives of YVFC is preservation of the precarious grizzly population in the Yaak, which numbers 25-30 bears—a count that has not increased since I moved here a quarter century ago. This number needs to increase if the population is to remain viable. But it has not increased because people keep killing bears. And most of the bears that are killed, are killed in the vicinity of roads. A strong correlation exists between open roads and dead bears. Thus, our grizzly bears need habitat that is either roadless or where roads are closed to vehicular traffic.
One of the arguments we hear in favor of doing away with RA’s is that roads are needed for the purpose of fighting fire; however, the reasoning behind this claim is exactly backwards to the real life situation. Research conducted by the United States Forest Service (USFS) itself revealed a robust link between roads and wildfires, with most ignitions occurring within 164 feet from a road. In other words, the reasoning must go, that you need roads to combat fire that would probably not have occurred in the absence of roads??
And really, how many more roads do we need in our public forests? It is often cited that the current milage of roads in all lands managed by the USFS is estimated to be 370,00-380,000 miles, or enough to encircle planet earth 15 times. But another way to look at this, which is rarely considered, is the actual area in square miles of the forest that is displaced by roads. Using 20 feet as a conservative estimate of the average width of a roadway—from trees on one side to trees on the other—and a length of 375,000 miles, you arrive at a total area of about 1,300 square miles. This is approximately equal to the area of the state of Rhode Island, or of Yosemite National Park.
How many of these roads were built to current standards is also a good question, but I can say for certain that some in the Yaak were sloppily constructed in order to quickly facilitate logging operations, and continue to bleed sediment into our watershed even after decades. But even the “good roads” spread weeds, fragment wildlife habitat, constitute a danger to bears and are associated with wildfires.
The current plan to do away with the Roadless Area classification on the public’s forest lands strikes me as ideologically, rather than practically, motivated. It appears to me to be yet another element of a broad anti-environmental agenda that neither I nor most other Americans support. It is beyond nonsensical: it is antithetical to responsible ecosystem management, and just plain wrong.
Sincerely,
Mary Campbell