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Protect Large Roadless Areas

by REP member Tom Pelikan
statement at a public hearing on protecting roadless areas, Arlington, Virginia; June 26, 2000

Good evening.

My name is Tom Pelikan and I’m here on behalf of Republicans for Environmental Protection, a national, grassroots organization dedicated to restoring the conservationist principles of people such as Theodore Roosevelt, the Forest Service’s own Gifford Pinchot, Barry Goldwater and John Chafee to the mainstream of the Republican Party and to shattering the notion that the term “Republican Environmentalist” is an oxymoron.

We support, 62% of Republicans in a recent poll support, and we urge others to support the USFS alternative of stopping all road construction in National Forest areas of 5,000 or more acres. Actually, we believe that all new road construction should be stopped in areas of 1,000 acres or more.

Most of REP's members are fiscal conservatives. Few ideas are more conservative than the notion that you don’t build more roads when you can’t take care of the ones you have. The Forest Service has an 8.5 BILLION, that’s billion with eight zeroes after the 8.5, dollar maintenance backlog on its roads. Continuing to build more roads with an increasing maintenance backlog only means that, in addition to the harm that the new roads do to wildlife and the ecosystem, the risk of harm to human users, including loggers and recreational users, significantly increases. No accountant would support such a building program and no lawyer with her client’s best interests at heart would do so, either. In fact, if I were still a lawyer in the ambulance chasing game and looking at a group that builds new facilities while letting existing ones decline, I'd be looking at a potential gold mine for a lot of personal injury law suits.

Not only is this reckless build-but-don’t-maintain policy reducing the safety for Forest users and visitors, it’s also reducing the incentive for visitors to come. Maybe I just hang out with the wrong crowd, but I don’t know anyone who goes to a park or woodland to see a road being built or rotting away or who waxes poetic about the glorious sound of chainsaws in a forest morning. In an era in which tourism in general and eco-tourism in particular is forming an ever-growing part of our economy, preserving America’s National Forests for recreational users who crave unspoiled wilderness not only makes sense, it makes dollars, too.

I have a brother in the paper business. I know some of the innovative and creative measures his company takes to regenerate their resources. Stopping new road construction will not cost the industry one job, and might well increase employment as an incentive to developing better forest management techniques on the land they have access to right now. Encouraging that sort of creativity is also a fundamentally conservative, conservationist and progressive concept.

Following in the footsteps of Pinchot and Roosevelt, we of REP strongly urge the Forest Service to take care of the roads it has, encourage the timber business to better use the resources it has access to and ensure that America’s remaining forests remain unsullied by the bulldozer and the buzz saw.