1. Informed Decisionmaking. What is the appropriate role of local forest planning as required by NFMA in evaluating protection and management of inventoried roadless areas?
NFMA provides that plans may "be amended in any manner whatsoever after final adoption after public notice . . ." Thus, a national rule setting forth standards for the protection of roadless areas that has the effect of amending local forest plans is fully consistent with NFMA’s procedures. Just as local forest planning must incorporate the effect of other national-level decisions, e.g., congressional wilderness designation, Forest Service Manual and Handbook directives, and national monument designation, so, too, local planning has to accommodate national level policy decisions regarding road building and protection of roadless areas. Unless national circumstances change, e.g., road maintenance backlog is eliminated and social preferences for protecting backcounty wildlands are reversed, local forest planning is not the appropriate venue to revisit national roadless policies.
On the other hand, local forest planning can more precisely determine roadless area boundaries and develop site-specific resource prescriptions within the constraints of national roadless area policy.
2. Working Together. What is the best way for the Forest Service to work with the variety of States, tribes, local communities, other organizations, and individuals in a collaborative manner to ensure that concerns about roadless values are heard and addressed through a fair and open process?
It is incumbent upon the Forest Service to match the public involvement process to the scope of the issues. Where issues of national import, such as the conservation of wild areas, are on the table, the public involvement process must be national and open to all citizens. Where the issues are primarily of local concern, such as the availability of firewood, then the public involvement process is best targeted to local interests.
The roadless rule’s promulgation clearly satisfied any rational test for sufficient opportunity for public involvement. The roadless rule garnered more comment than any other Forest Service decision in history. The combination of over 600 local public meetings combined with national media exposure ensured that anyone with an interest in roadless area protection would have an opportunity to learn about the Forest Service’s proposal and comment upon it. That over one million people chose to do so is testimony to the outreach effort.
The interest groups that now object to the adequacy of the public comment process share one thing in common — they don’t like the outcome so they are crying foul about the process. However, if the situation were reversed (as it soon may be!), those same interests won’t be heard objecting to the inadequacy of a much less involved public process so long as they get the results they want.
3. Protecting Forests. How should inventoried roadless areas be managed to provide for healthy forests, including protection from severe wildfires and the buildup of hazardous fuels as well as to provide for the detection and prevention of insect and disease outbreaks?
Roadless areas have prospered without roads for millennia. There is no evidence that roads are necessary to ensure their continued health. The Forest Service does almost all of its insect and disease surveys aerially; thus roads are quite unnecessary for that purpose. So-called "severe" wildfires are generally quite natural stand-replacing fire events that have been occurring in our forests for thousands of years. Forest types in most roadless areas have not been adversely affected by fire suppression during the last fifty years. These forests do not burn frequently and when they do burn usually do so in stand-replacing fires. Thus there is no ecological justification for road construction or silvicultural activities in these forest types.
4. Protecting Communities, Homes, and Property. How should communities and private property near inventoried roadless areas be protected from the risks associated with natural events, such as major wildfires that may occur on adjacent federal lands?
The Forest Service, working in concert with other fire fighting organizations, should first determine where such communities and property exist. Without such an inventory it is difficult to determine appropriate strategies and attendant costs. However, as a general rule, Forest Service research has shown that private residences and communities only gain protection from wildfires (whether emanating from roadless areas or otherwise) by managing the immediate vegetation within several hundred feet of structures. Community-threatening fires can occur regardless of the silvicultural practices employed. In other words, thinning and brush removal does nothing to stop a stand-replacing fire once it gets going. Whether that fire ends up burning private structures depends upon the fuels management immediately adjacent to the structure. The Forest Service and others also need to sort out questions of who ought to be protecting structures and areas immediately adjacent to them, and who ought to pay for such protection.
5. Protecting Access to Property. What is the best way to implement the laws that ensure States, tribes, organizations, and private citizens have reasonable access to property they own within inventoried roadless areas?
The roadless rule guarantees the right of access under existing law. Just follow it.
6. Describing Values. What are the characteristics, environmental values, social and economic considerations, and other factors the Forest Service should consider as it evaluates inventoried roadless areas?
The Forest Service should not evaluate roadless areas separate from its regular, on-going natural resource inventories and assessments. The time to consider the unique characteristics of a roadless area in decisionmaking is when the Forest Service proposes an action that may affect a roadless area. Until that time, any evaluation of roadless areas is purely academic and of no utility to land managers or the public.
7. Describing Activities. Are there specific activities that should be expressly prohibited or expressly allowed for inventoried roadless areas through Forest Plan revisions or amendments?
Forest plans should address those activities not already regulated by the existing roadless rule. These include off-road vehicle and other recreational uses, wildfire for resource benefits, prescribed burning, wildlife habitat improvement, noxious weed control, and the like. Roadbuilding and timber harvesting are sufficiently addressed by the existing rule.
8. Designating Areas. Should inventoried roadless areas selected for future roadless protection through the local forest plan revision process be proposed to Congress for wilderness designation, or should they be maintained under a specific designation for roadless area management under the forest plan?
The plan revision process is not the appropriate venue to decide issues of national policy, such as the disposition of America’s last unprotected wilderness frontier. Forest planning has failed miserably in every effort to resolve issues of regional or national significance; it is even questionable whether forest planning could be called a success for issues of only local interest.
9. Competing Values and Limited Resources. How can the Forest Service work effectively with individuals and groups with strongly competing views, values, and beliefs in evaluating and managing public lands and resources, recognizing that the agency can not meet all of the desires of all of the parties?
The Forest Service must better understand political, management, and leadership issues of working "effectively with individuals and groups with strongly competing views, values and beliefs." There is little evidence that that agency has given much thought to these complexities, hence most agency engagement tends away from collaboration and engagement and toward older forms of command and control behavior — often thinly camouflaged with language hinting at collaboration and positive interaction in search of public interest. The Forest Service must also put aside its own vested self-interest if it is to have any chance at working effectively with all parties.
