Who manages national forests and what’s the difference between a regular forest and a roadless forest? Find out these answers and more about our nation’s forests in these National Forest FAQs.
Whether its water, wildlife, or wildlands, roads have been identified as the major impact on the forest environment. Many national forest roads were built during the frenzied decades of the logging boom and were simply abandoned.
You might remember that The Wilderness Society and supporters like you created a comprehensive set of comments last May on the Forest Service’s proposed rule for managing 193 million acres of America’s national forests.
This year your support helped pull 44,700 acres of western Wyoming’s beautiful Bridger-Teton National Forest lands off the oil and gas chopping block, but now we must report to you that our victory is being threatened — and could even be reversed — by the powerful oil and gas i
Whether its water, wildlife, or wildlands, roads have been identified as the major impact on the forest environment. Many national forest roads were built during the frenzied decades of the logging boom and were simply abandoned.
The Forest Service currently has around 375,000 miles of known system roads – enough to travel around the earth 15 times. Many of these roads are unneeded, causing tremendous environmental damage, and should be reclaimed and reforested.
This comment letter addresses how our country’s 193 million-acre National Forest System should be managed to meet the challenges and demands of the 21st Century.
The letter was composed specifically in response to a Forest Service request for comment on how the agency should re-write the rules to implement the National Forest Management Act of 1976. The NFMA is one of the most important public land laws that Congress has ever passed. It requires the Forest Service to involve citizens and scientists in designing the management plans for each National Forest and Grassland.
The main threat to water quality in many national forests is the Forest Service’s vast and crumbling road system, an environmentally-harmful vestige of the agency’s industrial logging era.
With The Wilderness Society’s strong support, Congress has stepped forward with new funding to address the problem, including $90 million in the Forest Service’s FY 2010 budget for urgent road decommissioning and repairs.
An overlooked opportunity to sequester carbon on National Forests rests with its massive road system.
Preliminary analysis by TWS has indicated that returning unneeded Forest Service roads back to a natural state would be equivalent to revegetating an area larger than Rhode Island. We estimate that carbon storage from decommissioning and revegetating unneeded roads on our national forests is 39.5 — 48.5 million metric tons.
