Roadless area conservation
Encyclopedia
Road
A road is a thoroughfare, route, or way on land between two places, which typically has been paved or otherwise improved to allow travel by some conveyance, including a horse, cart, or motor vehicle. Roads consist of one, or sometimes two, roadways each with one or more lanes and also any...
and the resulting environmental impact
Environmental degradation
Environmental degradation is the deterioration of the environment through depletion of resources such as air, water and soil; the destruction of ecosystems and the extinction of wildlife...
on designated areas of public land
Public land
In all modern states, some land is held by central or local governments. This is called public land. The system of tenure of public land, and the terminology used, varies between countries...
. In the United States, roadless area conservation has centered on U.S. Forest Service areas known as inventoried roadless area
Inventoried roadless area
Inventoried Roadless Areas are a group of United States Forest Service lands that have been identified by government reviews as lands without existing roads that could be suitable for roadless area conservation as wilderness or other non-standard protections. The Inventoried Roadless areas include...
s. The most significant effort to support the conservation of these efforts was the Forest Service 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule (Roadless Rule).
Concept
Access roads provide convenient access for industry as well as for a variety of recreational activities, such as sightseeing, fishing, hunting, and off-roadingOff-roading
Off-roading is a term for driving a vehicle on unsurfaced roads or tracks, made of materials such as sand, gravel, riverbeds, mud, snow, rocks, and other natural terrain.-Off-road vehicle:...
. However, these activities can cause erosion
Erosion
Erosion is when materials are removed from the surface and changed into something else. It only works by hydraulic actions and transport of solids in the natural environment, and leads to the deposition of these materials elsewhere...
, pollution
Pollution
Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into a natural environment that causes instability, disorder, harm or discomfort to the ecosystem i.e. physical systems or living organisms. Pollution can take the form of chemical substances or energy, such as noise, heat or light...
, species loss, and loss of aesthetic appeal.
In the United States, roadless areas make up 58.5 million acres (237,000 km²), or about 30%, of National Forest lands in 38 states and Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...
. These areas provide critical habitat for more than 1,600 threatened, endangered, or sensitive plant and animal species. Roadless rules are also seen as a way to save taxpayers money. America’s National Forests are currently covered with 386000 miles (621,205.2 km) of roads, enough to encircle the earth 15 times. A $4.5-billion maintenance backlog exists on National Forest roads, according to the agency's own estimates.
One example of roadless area conservation is Alaska
Alaska
Alaska is the largest state in the United States by area. It is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait...
's Denali National Park, which is prized for its expansive roadless area. There is but one 90 miles (144.8 km) access road into the park; only official vehicles are permitted after 30 miles (48.3 km).
Opposition
Roadless area conservation is not without criticism—especially from miningMining
Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the earth, from an ore body, vein or seam. The term also includes the removal of soil. Materials recovered by mining include base metals, precious metals, iron, uranium, coal, diamonds, limestone, oil shale, rock...
and lumber
Lumber
Lumber or timber is wood in any of its stages from felling through readiness for use as structural material for construction, or wood pulp for paper production....
industry officials, as well as from politicians, Libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
and Federalist
Federalist
The term federalist describes several political beliefs around the world. Also, it may refer to the concept of federalism or the type of government called a federation...
political groups, and ORV
Off-roading
Off-roading is a term for driving a vehicle on unsurfaced roads or tracks, made of materials such as sand, gravel, riverbeds, mud, snow, rocks, and other natural terrain.-Off-road vehicle:...
enthusiasts.
Political conflict in the U.S.
On January 12, 2001, after nearly three years of analysis, the U.S. Forest Service adopted the Roadless Area Conservation Rule to conserve 58.5 million acres (237,000 km²) of pristine National Forests and Grasslands from most logging and road construction. When he entered office, the U.S. President at that time George W. BushGeorge W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
modified these regulations to allow a more autonomous approach, wherein state governments would be permitted to designate their own roadless areas.
On September 20, 2006, U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Laporte ruled against the Bush Administration's plan to reverse the Clinton-era regulations, saying that the Bush plan "established a new regime in which management of roadless areas within the national forests would, for the first time, vary not just forest by forest but state by state. This new approach raises a substantial question about the rule's potential effect on the environment."
On November 29, 2006, Judge Laporte issued an order to ban road construction on 327 oil and gas leases issued by the Bush administration since January 2001, most of them in Colorado, Utah, and North Dakota—areas that were already protected before the Bush Administration's reversal of the 2001 law.
On May 28, 2009, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack
Tom Vilsack
Thomas James "Tom" Vilsack is an American politician, a member of the Democratic Party, and presently the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. He served as the 40th Governor of the state of Iowa. He was first elected in 1998 and re-elected to a second four-year term in 2002...
issued a directive giving the Secretary of Agriculture final authority on most road development and timber activity in National Forests, for a period of one year.
In 2011, a federal appeals court in Denver, Colorado upheld the government’s authority to prohibit Western states from building roads on public land. The unanimous ruling, issued by a three-judge panel, said a lower court had erred in finding for the State of Wyoming, the plaintiff in the case, and ordered that the rule be put into force nationally. Wyoming had argued that preventing road construction into or on national forests or other lands is a de facto wilderness designation, something that only Congress can do, and that the Forest Service had exceeded its own authority in trying to put the system into effect. "The Forest Service did not usurp Congressional authority because the roadless rule did not establish de facto wilderness," the court said in a decision written by Judge Jerome A. Holmes, who was nominated to the court by President George W. Bush
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
.
In literature
A notable AmericanUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
proponent of roadless wilderness areas was writer Edward Abbey
Edward Abbey
Edward Paul Abbey was an American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues, criticism of public land policies, and anarchist political views. His best-known works include the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which has been cited as an inspiration by radical environmental...
in his book Desert Solitaire
Desert Solitaire
This article is about the book. For the album dedicated to Edward Abbey see Desert Solitaire .Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness is a literary nonfiction work by Edward Abbey , published originally in 1968....
. In his essay Industrial Tourism and the National Parks, Abbey describes road construction as "unnecessary or destructive development" and the loss of wilderness as a consequence of what he called industrial tourism, where once-secluded natural
Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
areas become popularized and degraded
Environmental degradation
Environmental degradation is the deterioration of the environment through depletion of resources such as air, water and soil; the destruction of ecosystems and the extinction of wildlife...
.