Oregon, California and New Mexico have sued the Bush admin over the repeal of the very popular Roadless Initiative. The R.I. was created by Clinton/Gore, and effectively protected the last remaining roadless wild lands on national forest lands. Over half of our national forest lands are roaded and worked for resource extraction. There are nearly 400,000 miles of road on our national forest lands. The R.I. basically was a plan that kept the status quo. It was a good compromise on saving the best of what is left. I know some of you travel, and enjoy what's left of our country's wildness. Well, I can ssure you these roadless places are the best of what is left in terms of scenery, solitude, wildife watching and hunting/fishing.
Do you think the Arctic refuge drilling is a big deal? It's nothing compared to the destruction of our last roadless wildlands on national forest lands.
When Bush got in office, his very first act, within hours after being innaugurated was putting a freeze on the roadless initiative in the federal register. After this, several paper companies in Idaho filed a lawsuit against the United States in hopes of trashing the rule. The Bush adminsitration defended the lawsuit with a
one paragraph statement - which of course was purposely no defense at all.
To make matters worse, a Wyoming judge with heavy stock in mining companies also ruled against the plan, which spun it to the 10 circuit court. While waiting, the Bush admin offered their plan, which turned the decisions of roadless lands to the states, which is exactly why the national forests were given local control to begin with. Wildlands dont exist in places where states have control simply because state governments are far too likely to be corrupted by local industry, thus making sure every last bit of wildlandis developed. This is why national parks and national forests were created in the first place. The 10th circuit court deemed conservationists appeals "irrelevent" because of the "alternative" plan just offered by Bush.
Currently, we get 4-7% of our annual timber consumption from national forest lands. The reason why the mining and lumber companies wanted to Roadless Initiative to go away so badly was because it in effect ended their subsidized way of life. Taxpayers flip the bill ofr the entire process. We pay for the roads(which is the most expensive part), and the companies get the timber far below cost. The road building/timber program on national forest lands is by FAR the biggest fund draining activity on those lands, losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Now you know why lawsuits were filed against the roadless initiative. And imsure you know why Bush doesn't want it either -those are his top contributors.
And while the national forest timber program could easily produce 4-7% on the already roaded and non pristine national forest lands, that's not good enough for Bush and his cronies.
they want it all. They want the last, hard to reach roadless wildlands as well.
Why?
* to make a statement*
So while the timber program sucks all the funds up for national forest use, in come the leeches like Murkowski, Don Young and Richard Pombo who say it's time to charge fee's for parking your car for 20 minutes in national forests because the forests are "underfunded".
Their plan?
- starve the national forests of funding
- creating a "must privatize" situation
- hand the rest over to commercial interests sop their campaign contributors get even more subsidation than the current timber and mining programs.
It's sick, it's twisted, and it's wrong. But did you expect anything less?
the news link is at: http://www.wilderness-sportsman.com/