Judge reinstates ‘Roadless Rule’

This is from USA Today, but I have been getting email too about this great, if tentative, victory over Bush and his band of wild country pillagers.

Reinstatement of Clinton’s rule protecting the remaining unroaded areas (5000 acres or larger) on Forest Service managed public lands will protect the environment, protect wildlife habitat, scenery, and the taxpaying citizens of America.

Idaho’s Governor Jim Risch plans to go ahead anyway despite court ruling on roadless. This is a late Sept. 20 story from the AP in the Idaho Statesman.

In the short run this makes little difference because areas are roadless because they are steep, rocky, high, cold, and maybe arid. Cutting trees and building roads are uneconomic unless an enormous subsidy is given by the federal government. Of course there are interests in Idaho who would love the handout to log areas miles from towns in the name of forest fire prevention.

It is true that the issue might end up before the Supreme Court.

Sept. 21. Risch’s proposal was announced today. Article by Rocky Barker in the Idaho Statesman.

The governor’s argument used to justify possible logging in about 7 million acres out of the 9 million roadless acres on Idaho’s national forests is fire prevention. Idaho politicians used say “timber jobs,” but in recent years fire prevention has become a politically more popular justification for not conserving roadless areas.

Fire prevention is a bad argument because roadless areas are not where fires disproportionately start, nor do the most damage. The places where the trees need to be thinned is around the mountain sub-divisions.

It is true that conifer killing insects are heavy in many places in Idaho, but they are in the increase all over the West, including especially Canada. Why is this? Much of it is caused by recent warm winters. Cold winters used to bring the insect populations down. No amount of feasible forest thinning is going to alter this scary fact. Winters now are warmer. Insects will kill more trees.
Fires kills the insects better than logging does, not to mention uneconomic logging. I think we are witnessing what one would expect in a warming climate, gradually the forests are replaced by grasslands. Insects and fires (or logging) is the first step.

Sinapu has a much more detailed story on the reaction to the new roadless decision.

Sept. 29. “Wild Bill” (Bill Schneider) has a good analysis in New West.

Exasperation builds over escaped elk

Exasperation builds over escaped elk. Owner clashes with hunter, landowner as neighbors criticize condition of herd and delays in rounding up escapees. By Rocky Barker, Idaho Statesman.

Wildlife on highway warning system finally gets going in Yellowstone Park

U.S. 191 that cuts through a piece of Yellowstone near its NW boundary has long been a wildlife slaughter alley (elk, moose, deer, bears, wolves, and human slaughter too). A high tech warning system was installed in 2002, but glitches kept it inoperative, and there was consideration of dismantling it. Now it has got the go ahead.

Of course it is still inoperative.

Story in the Billings Gazette by Mike Stark.