by Alan Tweddle, REP's West Virginia Coordinator,and Policy Director Jim DiPeso published August 1, 2004 in the Charleston (WV) Gazette
Under pressure from the Bush administration, the U.S. Forest Service has proposed to drop a 2001 rule that gives national protection to 58.5 million acres of roadless areas in national forests, including 202,000 acres in West Virginia.
This proposal is a frontal attack on the long-term national interest for the short-term gain of a few timber corporations.
The new policy forces governors to petition the Secretary of Agriculture to maintain existing protections on National Forests within their states. Such a convoluted policy gives governors unprecedented influence over lands owned by all Americans — equivalent to giving control of the Grand Canyon to the governor of Arizona.
Why is this important? Three big reasons: money, water, and a natural resource and endowment that would be impossible to replace within our lifetime.
America’s system of national forests, first established in 1891 and greatly expanded by Theodore Roosevelt, covers 191 million acres. In West Virginia, national forests cover 1.13 million acres, within the Monongahela and portions of the George Washington and Jefferson national forests.
Unlike national parks, national forests have been used for commercial timber harvest. In the forests, 383,000 miles of logging roads, more than 10 times the length of the entire Interstate Highway System, already snake through 51 percent of our national forests. About 80 percent of these roads are not open to passenger cars — only heavy logging trucks.
Our national forests contribute $145 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product every year — but less than 3 percent of that comes from timber, according to a 1995 study prepared by the Forest Service. The rest comes from recreation, fish and wildlife, and other goods and services. The same analysis estimated that national forests contribute 3.3 million jobs to the national economy with, again, less than 3% coming from harvesting timber.
Yet, we subsidize the cost of building these roads — $140 million from 1998 to 2002 alone — in the form of credits against the price timber companies pay for harvested timber.
After the timber is cut and sold, the maintenance responsibility for the roads falls totally on our taxpayer shoulders.
Just the annual maintenance costs $568 million. That doesn’t count the current backlog of maintenance, repair, and capital improvement needs on the road network — an additional $8 billion to $10 billion.
In West Virginia, the backlog totals about $15 million. Failure to maintain these roads carries hidden costs: safety and liability concerns, soil erosion, endangered wildlife habitat, and increased chance of wildfires caused by arson or carelessness.
Without the protection of the 2001 rule, 188,000 West Virginia acres would be open to road construction, timber cutting, and other development.
The Forest Service would be free to build more roads the agency cannot afford, some adjacent to our state’s great natural treasures such as the Dolly Sods, Cranberry and Otter Creek wilderness areas. There is no justification for this. We need to protect what is left.
Another reason, more important than the money, is water.
Former Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck often called national forests America’s largest water company.
About 60 million people receive drinking water from watershed source areas within national forests — pretty important when scientists have reported that since the 1950s the world’s population has tripled and the available fresh water has been cut in half.
We have known for more than a century that preserving our forests is a low-cost, reliable method of protecting drinking water quality from sediments and other contaminants.
Water quality protection was the main reason the national forest system was established in 1891 and the reason for passage of the 1911 Weeks Act (sponsored by Republican Congressman John Weeks), authorizing the federal government to acquire lands for establishing national forests east of the Mississippi. West Virginia is one of the 39 states where roadless forest areas, with more than 350 watersheds, produce clean drinking water for millions of Americans. West Virginia is blessed with the purest and most abundant water in the United States, but this rule change puts that precious resource at risk.
You don’t have to be a “tree-hugger” to recognize how vital our national forest habitat is to West Virginia’s economy and our personal pleasure. Our world-class habitat for fish and wildlife provide incomparable fishing and hunting opportunities.
Wildlife-related recreation injects $500 million a year into West Virginia’s economy, according to a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service survey published in 2001.
Without protection, we compromise all of this. Our eco-region has globally outstanding biodiversity — a rich variety of plants and animals, many of which are found nowhere else. Retaining the 2001 rule would increase protection of our outstanding moist forest habitat by nearly two-thirds.
Road building degrades habitat by chopping it into fragments and leads to increased human pressure on rare wildlife, wildfires, accelerated erosion and landslide risks, and spread of invasive weeds and pests that crowd out rare species in our central and southern Appalachians.
I urge all citizens who wish to protect the natural beauty of these ancient forests in West Virginia and throughout the country to write the Forest Service and their congressional representatives. Prohibitions now in place should be left in place. Withdraw this short-sighted proposal. Less than 5 percent of virgin forest is left in the United States. Leave it alone for us, our children and their children to enjoy.
