The Shoshone is unique in the quantity and quality of wilderness and roadless areas. We’re defending these wild lands against reckless development and road building.
As the nation’s first national forest, the Shoshone is uniquely wild and scenic. More than half is designated as wilderness and another 30 percent is considered pristine.
Covering almost 800,000 acres in New Hampshire and Maine, the White Mountain National Forest (WMNF) contains some of the most untamed country remaining in the Northeast – yet the Forest Service is approving more destructive logging projects on this single protected “roadless” forests than it has for the rest of the entire country combined.
Excerpts: Gentlemen, start your bulldozers. The race to the end of the Bush administration has begun for the US Forest Service, whose leaders have spent much of the past eight years trying to undo President Clinton's protection of one-third of national forest acreage as forever roadless. In New Hampshire, the service wants to log 300 acres of the Kilkenny area in the White Mountain National Forest that were classified as roadless after 2001.
Some of the US's pristine forests could soon be criss-crossed with roads for logging and mining as the federal government once again relaxes conservation rules - this time in Idaho.
In the last decade, the US Forest Service has placed timber harvest in southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest above all other priorities in the region, pouring federal dollars into the timber industry’s clearcutting of old growth forests. A new report from The Wilderness Society outlines a fresh vision for management of the Tongass—one based on ecological restoration and stewardship.
I spent a recent Friday afternoon uncharacteristically dressed in a jacket and tie, sitting in a court room, not particularly focused on what was being said. I found my mind wandering back to remember some of Idaho’s spectacular backcountry that I’d hiked this summer. It was the fate of much of that backcountry that was being debated by attorneys in that courtroom.
