Only 2 percent of the United States has protected wilderness status. Photo © George Wuerthner
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN LEERY OF THE WORLD-IN-A-GRAIN-OF-SAND CONCEPT—the idea that by understanding, say, the Yaak Valley in extreme northwestern Montana, you can understand national or international issues. And yet, in these days of increasing anti-wilderness policies cascading out of Washington, D.C., you’ll have to forgive me, if only to make the entire subject more manageable, for believing that my own tiny square of the world contains nearly every contemporary environmental woe that might somehow conspire against wilderness.
My postage stamp of a valley is unique. Though it’s wild and vibrant, the Yaak doesn’t have a single acre of protected wilderness, and like other wild places around the country, its wildness is under attack. Both the Yaak, and the American wilderness eons in the making, are being disassembled, piece by piece, by the people who should be protecting them.
In many ways, our country faces the worst of both worlds. The vitality is being drained from our remaining wilderness: we don’t have enough wild lands left untouched and yet we haven’t adequately protected that which most needs preserving.
Scientists around the world largely agree that in order to maintain the character and content of wild and native landscapes in viable, sustaining fashion, a well-planned minimum of 12 percent of that landscape needs protection. Excluding Alaska, only 2 percent of the United States, in theory the world leader in such matters, is protected under the gold standard of federal land management classifications: wilderness.
AT THE LOWEST ELEVATION IN MONTANA, the million-acre island of the Yaak, with its soft verdant hills, represents the kinds of land that the Wilderness Act forgot, or overlooked, forty-plus years ago.
The Yaak Valley is 97 percent public land, a beguiling mix of richness and diversity. Along with Montana’s only rainforest, it is home to giant Ponderosa and other pines, cedar, hemlock, spruce, aspen, cottonwood and other tree species. It was logged in the past, though roughly one-third of the landscape remains pristine. It’s believed that nothing’s gone extinct here since the Pleistocene and that we still have a full array of predators and prey, from grizzly and black bears, lynx, wolverine and marten to bald and golden eagles, bull and westslope cutthroat trout, bighorn sheep and gray wolves.
However, many of these populations have dipped to double- or even single-digit numbers, and it’s been more than fifteen years since there was a verified sighting of a woodland caribou. Once-abundant porcupines are apparently absent. Only one has been seen in many years; some American Indian tribes describe their absence as a harbinger of ecological ill health. No amount of money can completely restore these intricate and interlocked species once they are gone from so complex and rich an ecosystem.
Still, it is all here, even if in bits and pieces, like a reverse kind of Noah’s Ark; the tail end of a miracle.
PERHAPS THE GREATEST CHANCE THE YAAK HAD OF SECURING A PROTECTED WILD CORE, a wild heart, existed in the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, developed over three years by the Clinton administration with public comments from almost two million respondents. Over 95 percent of them favored permanent protection for the last remaining roadless areas in unbroken wildlands 1,000 acres or larger on national forest lands administered by the U.S. Forest Service. The Roadless Rule, which protected 58.5 million acres of such lands, is now being disassembled by the Bush administration. Ê
In his confirmation hearings, former Attorney General John Ashcroft vowed to uphold the rule, then failed to defend it against various lawsuits brought by extractive-industry companies such as Boise-Cascade Timber, which claimed, among other things, that there had been no public participation in the rule-making process. The administration then turned the decision-making process for these lands over to individual governors, making them vulnerable to the volatilities of local politics. As a result, the nation runs the risk of losing its most forward-looking and common-sense conservation measure.
Research has shown that roadless areas possess great biological diversity and ecological function, and that these areas are of particular importance to grizzlies, mature bull elk, and westslope cutthroat and bull trout. In addition, many biologists are convinced that the seemingly limited act of cutting a narrow swath through a large, forested region is one of the most degrading things that humans can do to the wilderness—worse even than logging or running heavy, smog-belching machinery up and down those roads. The Forest Service maintains more than 400,000 miles of roads, almost ten times the length of the interstate highway system.
Nearly 10,000 miles of road cut through the Kootenai National Forest, where the Yaak resides. As elsewhere, many of these roads act as both source and conduit for sediment that flows into nearby waterways, raising the temperature of creeks and rivers, reducing fish spawning success and killing native cold-water fish, like trout. These forest roads act as vectors for human-caused fires and noxious weeds, and channel water out of and away from forests, which is particularly damaging during drought years in the arid West.
How much water can the system lose before amphibians, vegetation and the whole house-of-cards system begin to falter and fall? No one knows for sure, but a group of distinguished independent scientists sent a letter in 2004 to the White House, calling on the government to reinstate the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. They expressed the generally accepted position within the scientific community that “a strong roadless conservation rule is one of the cornerstones to sustainable public lands management, biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem health of the national forests.”
IF THE YAAK IS THE LAND THE WILDERNESS ACT FORGOT, then Alaska is the land the Wilderness Act was dreaming of when it was enacted. Yet here too, robust wild lands are under attack. The centerpiece of the nation’s energy policy for the next century involves securing another six months’ supply of oil by drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, despite the fact that 95 percent of the Alaskan coastal plain is already open to oil and gas development.
The government has trumpeted its Arctic plan as imposing minimal impact on the sprawling 19-million-acre refuge, with only 2,000 acres slated for development under current drilling plans. That is, say some, like claiming land the size of the Charlotte airport from an area the size of South Carolina. The only trouble with that analogy is that the 2,000 acres is scattered throughout the refuge and only counts things like the concrete pads beneath pipeline supports—not the pipelines themselves, nor the gravel pits or roads that will crisscross the entire reserve.
Alaska’s majestic old-growth Tongass National Forest is also suffering from the loss of the Roadless Rule, with six logging projects approved for roadless lands, and more than forty on the drawing boards. In Oregon, the proposed Biscuit sale—a post-wildfire “salvage” timber sale—calls for logging thirty square miles in roadless forests that are already rebounding naturally from the 2002 fire season.
The new so-called Healthy Forests Restoration Act represents a truly Orwellian strike against viable American wilderness. Healthy Forests calls for an aggressive logging program to reduce a build-up of fuels—trees—in our national forests after decades of unnatural fire suppression. This sounds fine in theory, but the models for “healthy forests” are based largely on dry Ponderosa pine sites, not moist forest types like those in the Yaak and the Pacific Northwest. Further, much of the logging industry prefers the larger-diameter trees that typically survive fire rather than the small-diameter “fuels” that feed fires in the first place. Only with last-minute lobbying were provisions for citizen participation and protection of old-growth trees tacked onto the bill.
Other legislation may put human and wildlife health at risk. The new Clear Skies initiative raises allowable limits of mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants, from five tons per year by 2008 as proscribed under the Clean Air Act, to 26 tons per year by 2010. Mercury is a toxin that impairs the health of people and animals, and has been shown to effect behavioral changes in waterfowl such as loons.
Even places that would seem safe from smog are not. Yellowstone National Park is overrun by snowmobiles in winter, bringing air pollution and noise, forcing the park’s bison, elk and other wildlife to flee the machines, wheezing their way through winters that were once pristine reminders of a time before internal combustion. The Clinton administration banned snowmobiles from the park; the Bush administration overturned the ban and appealed a court ruling reinstating the ban. In the end, 720 snowmobiles per day will be allowed in the park.
Back east, the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Protection Act, those hallmarks of the early 1970s, are in question. Across the Appalachians, whole mountain ranges are at risk of being blasted away by coal mining operations that the Bush administration seems content to let police themselves. The rubble from these so-called mountaintop removal mines is dumped into surrounding ravines, turning rivers into poisoned, mud-choked trickles. By the government’s own reckoning, over 1,200 miles of free-running Appalachian streams were buried between 1985 and 2001, and current plans for mountaintop removals would destroy an area the size of Delaware over the next decade.
Our nation’s on-the-ground management of wilderness is failing us. We are losing the nuts-and-bolts vital components of the American wilderness: clean air and water; wild, self-regulating forests that are free to grow old, rot or burn, begin anew, and grow old again at their own pace; grizzlies, lynx, trout, wolverine; and solitude. Ten thousand elements of the wilderness, or ten million, are being bartered away under our watch, with future generations paying the price, mourning the loss, the absence.
Other, stealthier wilderness changes are accelerating. Executive orders have directed government agencies to expedite energy projects, requiring a written explanation of any decision that hinders energy production, such as protecting wildlife. The Washington Post reported that Bureau of Land Management and Department of the Interior officials began rewarding employees who rushed through drilling permits on public lands. In January 2004, Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton challenged Wyoming BLM workers to triple the number of drilling permit approvals in the state’s natural gas fields from 1,000 to 3,000 a year.
In the Utah redrock desert, Norton ruled that BLM no longer had the authority to describe public lands as having wilderness characteristics, nor to manage them in such a way as to preserve and protect those qualities. Norton and the Department of the Interior did not, however, impugn the agency’s ability to identify, describe and manage public lands for oil and gas production; cattle and sheep grazing; hydroelectric production; timber; coal; gold, silver, copper and uranium mining; nor even, it would seem, the storage and retention of spent nuclear fuel rods.
The government also sought to define old wagon trails—and it seemed, any bent blade of grass or wheel-rut (the markings of which can assume a near-geological permanence in the desert) of an illegal motorcycle or all-terrain vehicle incursion—as a “road,” and to take jurisdiction of that “road” away from the federal government and to transfer it to local counties.
“We need as much wilderness as can be saved,” Wallace Stegner once said, arguing also for as many types as possible, not just rock- and ice-spine “recreational wildernesses” but deep-woods, low-elevation “biological wildernesses” such as the Yaak. And we need them connected in a planned and functional manner that is dedicated to their ongoing survival and health. If we take care of the wilderness, the wilderness will take care of us, serving as a reservoir for the cherished species our continent has sculpted over the past 100 millennia.
We need wilderness to continue serving as the great and irreplaceable filtration system for what little clean air and clean water we still possess in the continental United States. We need wilderness areas as wellsprings for spiritual renewal, and for artistic inspiration, and as the echo of the original (and ongoing) creation, against which to measure much scientific inquiry.
The wilderness is, and always has been, larger and more powerful than we are. We can harm it, certainly, and we can dishonor it, diminish it, even destroy and eradicate it. But what a wonderful, rare idea to pay homage and respect, and to treat with reverence, something so vastly more powerful than we are, and to allow it to continue to exist untouched for the sake of its own identity, and under its own dignity. This, I believe, is nothing less than an opportunity for us to participate in the divine, and to grow beyond ourselves.
Whether operating by instinct or reason, by science or religion, we must change our legislative direction, while we still can. We must stop ravaging the last of the wild with mines and roads cutting into the wilderness, must stop pushing to drill the last five percent of the Arctic coastal plain, must not roll back air and water protections in which we have already invested decades of commitment and in which the earth itself has already invested an eternity, creating the American wilderness before which, by grace, we still stand, awed and amazed.