Our nation's public lands offer extraordinary opportunities to enjoy nature and the outdoors. With a rich diversity of plants, animals, and ecosystems, archaeological ruins, caves, canyons, and other geologic features, our public lands serve as a remarkable classroom and recreational venue where people can both challenge themselves and experience the natural world, including some of the most remote and wild places in the Americas.
Managing public lands recreation is a balancing act. Although recreation provides a host of benefits to our society, it also has a cost to wildlife, land, water, and scenery. Land managers have the difficult, yet truly important, task of finding the right balance on the lands they manage. In other words, recreation needs to be in harmony with the land, and not be allowed to overwhelm it. Consider that each year on our National Forests there are nearly 205 million recreation visits for a total of nearly 246 million site visits. Of particular concern is the increasing damage from dirt bikes, jet skis, ATVs, snowmobiles, and other off-road vehicles. Enabled by new technologies, modern off-road vehicles are able to access previously remote and unmarred places. By the most conservative estimates, there are at least 11 million dirt bikes, jet skis, snowmobiles, four-wheelers, and other off-road vehicles in the United States. The cumulative damage of these vehicles traversing public lands and waters is staggering, affecting the health of our wildlife, the quality of our water, and the natural experiences that millions of Americans seek when they visit public lands. Hunters, anglers, bird watchers, cross-country skiers, hikers, kayakers, and the multitude of other traditional recreationists - which make up the largest user group on public lands - are losing access to natural places, as our public lands lose their ecological integrity and naturalness to the cumulative impacts of motorized vehicles.
We can do better. We can design recreation systems that provide a variety of recreational opportunities in balance with the natural systems and landscapes. Doing so, however, requires scientifically-grounded planning. Well-conceived recreation systems not only minimize our 'footprint' on natural systems and processes, but can actually contribute to protecting land and water resources by ensuring that sensitive resources and multi-scale ecological processes are protected.
An Immediate Opportunity
Over the next few years, all of our 155 national forests and 20 grasslands as well as millions of acres of lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management will undergo major efforts to address off-road motorized vehicle use. Eventually, other federal land managing agencies including the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will also undertake the task of addressing and reforming how off-road vehicles are managed on individual units in the National Park and National Wildlife Refuge Systems. Forest by forest, desert by desert, hundreds of millions of acres of wetlands, wildlands, basin and plains that exist on the federal estate will come to a cross-road: change for the better or continue down a path of excessive, unmitigated and potentially irreversible damage by off-road vehicle use. Learn about what the federal land managing agencies are doing and should be doing to control off-road vehicle abuse by reading the summaries below.
National Forests
The greatest opportunity for reclaiming our national forests from off-road vehicle abuse is the Forest Service's current process to designate roads, trails, and areas for use by motorized off-road vehicles. Unlike any other time since the inception of the National Forest System, our national forests are at a monumental cross-road to curb the damage from off-road vehicles. The Forest Service is currently in the process of designating which areas of each forest are for use by off-road vehicles. By default, this will determine the scope of the impact these vehicles will have on the land and will decide where other quiet recreationists must go to have a natural experience outdoors.
>> Read about our work on recreation policy in national forests
Bureau of Land Management
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages 264 million acres of some of most magnificent public lands in the American West - nearly as much as the Forest Service and National Park Service combined. With a majority of BLM's land open in some form to off-road vehicles, the agency is not adequately managing to protect healthy, functioning ecosystems or nature-based forms of recreation. Our best opportunity to secure a sustainable approach to managing recreation rests with the agency's various local land planning processes such as resource management planning and comprehensive travel management planning.
>> More about sustainable recreation policy on BLM lands
National Park Service
The Park Service has made genuine efforts to control off-road vehicles more effectively, but higher-ups in the Department of Interior and the Administration have thwarted those efforts, and Congress has attempted to turn back some of the reforms. A phase-out of snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks is in jeopardy, and restrictions on jet skis in several national park units are proceeding, albeit with challenges at every turn from industry.
>> Snowmobiles in Yellowstone & Teton National Parks
>> Snowmobiles in Denali National Park
>> Swamp buggies in Big Cypress National Preserve>> Where are snowmobiles allowed on our national park units?
National Wildlife Refuges
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has no national policy on off-road vehicles or personal watercraft. As a result, some refuges permit these activities, while others do not. The Wilderness Society is monitoring management plans drafted for each of the refuges, working to modify or eliminate off-road vehicle use when the use of such vehicles threaten wildlife and wildlife habitat.
>> More on Refuges
Much of the material in this section has been excerpted or reprinted from the Natural Trails and Waters Coalition web site.
