The backdrop for the announcement at Reddish Knob, a scenic overlook in the George Washington National Forest in Virginia, was spectacular: an Appalachian valley ablaze with October color. The announcement, while not a bombshell (the Washington Post had broken the story a few days earlier), was equally stunning: the promise of permanent protection for 40 million acres of national forest land, more than 20 percent of the entire national forest system.

“Through this action, we will protect the land from activities such as new road construction, which would degrade the land,” said President Bill Clinton, the featured speaker at what was, by the somewhat creaky standards of the U.S. Forest Service, a star-studded gathering. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman was on hand, as was Undersecretary Jim Lyons, Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck and Peter Pinchot, a grandson of Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the agency.

“We will ensure that our grandchildren will be able to hike up to this peak, that others like it across the country will also offer the same opportunities,” Clinton continued. “We will assure that when they get to the top they’ll be able to look out on valleys like this, just as beautiful then as they are now.

“National forests are more than a source of timber,” Clinton added, “they are places of renewal of the human spirit and our natural environment.”

More than two months later, the impact of Clinton’s October 13 announcement is still settling in. And, a rarity in this age of political hype, Clinton understated the breadth of his proposal. Instead of 40 million acres, it appears that 50 million to 60 million acres—more than one of every four acres of national forest—may be declared off-limits not only to road building, but also to other activities, such as logging and oil and gas drilling.

“I’m so flabbergasted that I’m trying not to get my hopes up,” said Paul Hirt, a Washington State University professor who wrote a history of the Forest Service.

Of course, Clinton is a master at making people think he’s going to do more than he intends, so only time will tell how committed he really is to preserving the Forest Service’s extensive, if fragmented, network of unroaded lands.

Nonetheless, the sheer amount of land Clinton is talking about‚—roughly the size of Idaho, the eleventh-largest state—has prompted comparisons with Teddy Roosevelt, who created numerous national parks and monuments, and with Pinchot, who set up the system of national forests that we have today. (Curiously, no one is comparing Clinton to a more recent predecessor, Jimmy Carter, who set aside millions of acres in Alaska in the late 1970s.)

Clinton already has solid environmental credentials. He brokered the Northwest Forest Plan, which has reduced federal lands logging in Oregon, Washington and Northern California by 80 percent from the unsustainable levels of the 1980s. He unilaterally created the1.7-million-acre Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument in southern Utah’s otherworldly canyon country. And he has given free rein to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in his recent flurry of activity to protect more scenic areas in the West.

If he now shields Forest Service roadless areas from development, Clinton “would be stepping onto the same pedestal as Roosevelt,” said Ken Rait, a Portland, Oregon–based environmentalist. Michael Francis of the Wilderness Society agreed. “We’re talking 40 to 60 million acres of pristine forest. It would be akin to the legacy Roosevelt left.”

The big question is whether there’s enough time left in Clinton’s administration, which expires in a year, to get the job done. “The administration needs to move quickly,” Rait said. Although the president’s proposal may have seemed to come at the eleventh hour, it is just the latest—albeit the most dramatic‚—development in a process that started in 1997. That’s when Clinton, after signing the Department of the Interior appropriations bill, said he wanted the Forest Service to come up with a way to protect its remaining roadless areas.

Last February, after months of complaints from environmentalists that the agency was dragging its feet, Dombeck announced an eighteen-month suspension of new road construction on 33 million acres of Forest Service backcountry. The moratorium, billed as the first step toward a long-term roads policy for all 191 million acres in the national forest system, was panned by many environmentalists who felt the moratorium was a step in the right direction but failed to give Clinton what he asked for. In addition, the moratorium exempted Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, national forests operating under the Northwest Forest Plan, and several other national forests that had recently adopted new management plans. “It was a roads policy. A roads policy is not a roadless area protection policy,” said Rait.

Rait played a key role in turning things around. As head of the Heritage Forests Campaign, he directed a high-intensity, $1.4 million education and lobbying effort in the months that followed the moratorium announcement, targeting administration officials. Polls were commissioned to demonstrate to a public-opinion-conscious administration that the citizens want roadless areas protected. Campaign staffers saturated the Internet with appeals for support, generating more than 250,000 electronic messages in favor of the campaign. Organizers took out a full-page ad in the New York Times in which Smokey Bear, standing behind mug shots of Clinton and Al Gore, tells the reader, “Only They Can Save Our National Forests.” By summer, Rait could claim the backing of 300 religious leaders, 200 scientists and more than 600 conservation groups. A crucial moment came in August, when Rait and other environmentalists met with Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta. Two months later, Clinton made his announcement.

The Forest Service’s work, of course, has just begun. The agency spent much of November and December gathering public comments on the proposal. Those comments will be incorporated into a draft environmental impact statement that will be released in the spring and followed by a final version in the fall. The report, which will analyze various alternatives, ranging from no protection for roadless areas to a banning of all ecologically damaging activities, will also contain a preferred alternative. In light of Clinton’s Reddish Knob speech, the agency will almost certainly come down on the side of protecting roadless areas, although it remains to be seen to what extent the Forest Service will curtail activities such as logging, mining, livestock grazing, and oil and gas drilling.

The proposal has provoked heated opposition from western Republicans in Congress. During a November hearing in which Glickman testified that “the American people overwhelmingly believe that our forests and particularly our roadless areas have significant ecological and social importance,” Senator Conrad Burns of Montana became so agitated that he pounded the table and accused the administration of waging “a war of politics, rhetoric and administrative actions on the West.” After the hearing, Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska gave Lyons a personal dressing down, saying, “I don’t know how you think we’re so naive as to buy your double talk.” These outbursts were followed by a letter to Glickman from thirty-three GOP senators arguing for a four-month delay in the roadless initiative to give the public more time to consider the proposal. The letter was dismissed by Clinton officials and environmentalists as an obvious attempt to defeat the initiative by making it impossible for the Forest Service to get the job done before the president leaves office.

There have been other objections. Frank Gladics, an Oregon-based timber industry official, told a panel of Forest Service officials at a hearing in Portland that the effort to gather public comment was an obvious sham. “The end product is clearly preordained,” Gladics said. (It’s worth noting that those opposed to the proposal at the Portland hearing were overwhelmingly in the minority.) A logger at the same hearing testified that “we all know this is being done for Al”—a reference to the much voiced claim that the real reason for the roadless proposal is to give a boost to Gore’s stumbling presidential campaign.

Mark Rey, an aide to Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, said the proposal amounts to an attempt to designate wilderness without congressional approval. That claim was countered by Dombeck aide Chris Wood. “Mark is mistaking an effort to recognize the many other values of roadless areas [such as producing clean drinking water] with a wilderness designation effort. This is not a process to allocate wilderness.”

Rey said the compressed time frame would prove to be the proposal’s Achilles’ heel. “The effort will move so quickly that it will fuel the engines of its own destruction. How many corners will they cut to get this done before the end of the administration?” Enough, Rey believes, that even if the proposal is brought to a timely conclusion, it will be vulnerable to court challenges from resource industry groups and others in the West who don’t want to see road building on federal lands shut down. “I haven’t seen the courts be very deferential to sloppy work,” Rey said.

Environmentalists have their own concerns. One is whether the Forest Service—a notoriously intransigent bureaucracy with a pro-logging tradition—will try to derail the proposal from within. Signs of resistance cropped up after Dombeck’s moratorium went into effect. The Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming, for example, continued to explore the possibility of putting more than 200,000 acres of roadless areas up for lease to oil and gas companies as soon as the road-building moratorium expires in 2001. Meanwhile, the Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota chose to go forward with a timber sale in one of that forest’s last remaining roadless areas while the moratorium is in effect (the logging project does not require new road construction).

Given the possibility, even likelihood, that at least some of his own troops will work against him, Dombeck needs to do a good deal of bird-dogging, Rait said. “This is Mike Dombeck’s litmus test. He needs to deliver the Forest Service to make this happen.” Rait believes Clinton must do some of the same. “The president will need to reengage at various times in this process to make sure the Forest Service is meeting his commitment,” Rait said.

Rait and Francis said the best way to avoid a watered-down proposal is to push the agency to be as specific as possible. Activities such as logging and oil and gas drilling should be clearly prohibited, and the size of the roadless areas eligible for protection should extend down to 1,000 acres (so far, the Forest Service is only talking about preserving chunks 5,000 acres or larger). Also, Alaska’s 17-million-acre Tongass National Forest, home to the largest intact, temperate rain forest on Earth, should be included in the proposal (there has been much speculation that the administration will bow to Alaska’s congressional delegation, which holds several key committee posts, and exempt the Tongass).

Regardless of what happens, one thing is clear: an environmental battle royal is on. “This issue is going to dominate the debate for the remainder of this administration’s tenure,” said Rey. “They’ve created a firestorm.”