Americans collectively own 58.5 million acres of roadless forest lands. These are lands on national forests that have no roads, mining, industry or other development.
In early March a Wyoming federal district judge officially lifted a nationwide injunction that had blocked the U.S. Forest Service from implementing the roadless rule.
The Roadless Area Conservation Rule was adopted by the U.S. Forest Service on January 12, 2001, after the most extensive public involvement in the history of federal rulemaking.
More than ten years after President Clinton banned roads and logging on the last roadless areas on our nation’s forests, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has the final say — 49 million acres of America’s national forests will remain wild under the Roadless Rule.
How is it that an oil and gas industry rolling in profits can manage to receive government subsidies and tax breaks while conservation programs that are only a small part of the federal budget are threatened with the ax as Congress attempts to balance America’s budget?
On Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska, a coalition of conservation organizations, including The Wilderness Society, is working with partners to undo the damage caused by decades of clearcut logging in the Tongass National Forest—logging that had devastated t
We were sitting at the kitchen table of a B&B on Prince of Wales Island a few years ago when the owner – a former logger – looked me straight in the eye and asked about an idea that could improve his future: “Do you think other people want to do this?”
Roadless forests in Colorado, aka., the most pristine and exceptional forests lands in the state, are about to get a bad break—unless we can convince the Forest Service otherwise.
I have never visited the Tongass National Forest, and there’s probably a good chance that I never will. But like many other silence-evoking places, I find both comfort and pride in knowing it exists today much as it did in the past.
