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End of the roads

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The US Forest Service (USFS) must halt road-building in 58 million acres of national forest for one year, according to a directive issued yesterday by the US agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack. The move is a reversal of a Bush-era environmental policy, which in turn undermined a rule Clinton instated late in his presidential term.

The Clinton and Bush rulings spawned numerous lawsuits, according to today’s AP report. Vilsack, who oversees the USFS, said in a statement yesterday that “this interim directive will provide consistency and clarity that will help protect our national forests until a long-term roadless policy reflecting President Obama’s commitment is developed.”


Republicans and logging and mining groups were not pleased, since USFS roads are often the only means of reaching the remote resources they seek to extract. “This is just one more example of the Obama administration choosing to centralize all decision making into a few hands in Washington,” said Rob Bishop, a Utah Republican, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

The new directive means Vilsack will be able to authorize individual road construction projects, but an aide said “that any project put forward in a roadless area will have a high degree of scrutiny,” reports the New York Times.

An editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times welcomed the the directive:

National forests aren’t the property of individual states. They are national treasures paid for with federal dollars, not a convenient source of local enrichment.

It continued:

Construction of the roads, which almost solely benefit loggers and other industrial operations, is paid for by the federal government, leaving taxpayers in the odd position of funding damage to their own forests.

USFS site on roadless areas here.

Photo: Sam Beebe / Ecotrust

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