STEVENS POINT — The Trump administration blitzkrieg on the environment is rumbling along, and 45 million acres of remote national forest lands are in their sights.
These are areas protected by the Roadless Rule, adopted in 2001 by the Clinton administration. Mike Dombeck, a Wisconsin native, was chief of the USDA Forest Service when the rule was adopted. Many consider it among the most consequential conservation actions of this century. Some say it’s the most important since President Theodore Roosevelt created the national forest system early in the 20th century.
But earlier this year, the administration announced it would seek to rescind the rule in order to open up these areas to intensive logging. In some cases, we are talking about pristine areas with trees up to 800 years old. Many consider these trees and the wilderness that nurture them sacred, but that is of little value to the forces of voracious consumption in charge today.
OK, so what about other values? These areas sequester huge amounts of carbon to mitigate climate change and provide watershed protection that assures pure drinking water and diverse aquatic life. And they remain among the only true wilderness areas that provide hunting, fishing, hiking and other recreational values. All of these are powerful economic drivers.
The administration is rushing the public comment period, with a deadline of Sept. 19. Conservation groups, including those representing hunters and fishers, will offer comments in opposition. The administration needs to hear from all of us. If you’re a citizen who believes that these remote areas should be preserved for their many values, you can submit comments to the Federal Register using this link.
Honestly, there’s a good chance the administration has already made up its mind. But there’s something to say in this moment about being on the right side of history, be it opposition to the Roadless Rule or any number of the other thoughtless actions of the current cabal. Take the time to go on the record.
Why should Wisconsin care about the Roadless Rule, which is a huge deal in the West? Reached in Sawyer County, where he’d rather be hiking than working the phones for meetings on this topic, Dombeck offered this assessment:
“For those who vacation out West, the best hunting and fishing areas are out there," he said. "It’s an important niche between wilderness and development. You can cut firewood, ride a bike, camp in there, follow ATV trails. Second, here at home, one could argue that because we have fewer of these areas in the East, our wilderness areas are more valuable because there are fewer of them. We need to take care of them. Once they’re gone, we won’t see them again in our lifetimes, or even our children’s.”
Wisconsin’s vast Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest includes 69,000 acres of inventoried roadless areas, so it’s not like there won’t be potential impacts here. In many ways, these acres could be more at risk than much of the western forests, which are frequently in more difficult terrain.
Dombeck has often tried to make the conservative economic case for the Roadless Rule, noting that much of the coveted timber is difficult to access, and the cost of extraction would far exceed any payback.
“I could never get this point to stick,” he said. “We have 386,000 miles of roads (in national forests), and they are cutting the (Forest Service) workforce, so we have less capacity to manage the forests. Why more roads in rough, fragile terrains, causing big problems for watersheds? I don’t hear any segment of the timber industry pushing this. The timber that’s easy to access is gone. It will hurt the timber industry more than it will help it. It’s clear that the future of these lands is recreation rather than extraction.”
It took a long time for us to recognize that suppressing fire actually contributes to uncontrollable wildfires. Prescribed burns on some of the areas protected by the Roadless Rule actually serve to reduce wildfire risks. Fire has been a forest management tool for eons.
Efforts to sell off public lands earlier this year brought green groups, hunting and fishing organizations and western interests together to snub out that threat. Perhaps the Trump administration is unwittingly helping to forge a powerful alliance of people who are on the right side of history.