Editorial: Forests aided by this plan

Thursday, May 11, 2000 | 9:22 a.m.

President Clinton's plan to curtail the building of roads on national forest lands is meeting criticism from both environmentalists and timber industry officials. Despite the darts directed at Clinton's plan, for the most part it is a well-reasoned response to a difficult situation faced by federal conservation officials.

What the Clinton administration proposed Tuesday was a ban on road building in federal forests, which should account for about 43 million acres. While environmentalists were pleased with that part of the equation, which the timber industry officials denounced, they were unhappy the ban won't apply to existing roads. But exempting current roads, and leaving the decision to local foresters to determine uses, such as whether off-road vehicles can access these paths, is sensible. A sweeping prohibition on some existing roads would have set off a firestorm of controversy, especially if it would have precluded access to roads that have no destructive impact on the environment. Closer to home, no new roads would be built on about half of the 6.4 million acres of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, which is located in Nevada and California. One reason for Clinto n's plan is to help preserve some of the most pristine areas of our national forests. Also, importantly, Clinton's proposal! strikes at another issue: protecting the taxpayer from having to subsidize the maintenance of these roads, which often only are built for the benefit of logging companies. As administration officials told Gannett News Service, it is impractical to build new roads when the federal government already has a backlog of $8.4 billion in maintenance projects for the current 380,000-mile road network.

The disheartening aspect of the president's ban on new roads was his exemption of the 16 million-acre Tongass National Forest, a rain forest located in Alaska. This was a concession to the Alaska congressional delegation, whose environmentally hostile members control important environmental committees in Congress. Clinton's plan certainly is an improvement upon the status quo, but he had said earlier that he wanted to propose an initiative worthy of Theodore Roosevelt's environmental legacy. It's hard to imagine, though, that Roosevelt would have so easily caved in to the Alaska congressional delegation and left out the Tongass.