News - End of the road

North Georgia wilderness a vanishing luxury

Except for the buttons people were wearing at the public hearing last Wednesday night in Gainesville, you wouldn’t know who stood for wilderness and who didn’t. “Protect our wild forests,” a man’s cap said.

“Mindless Roadless Clueless,” said a woman’s button.

Otherwise the speakers seemed undivided by class or education or age, nor were they rude to each other. They simply wanted to speak their mind about Bill Clinton’s Roadless Initiative.

The meeting was one of 330 nationwide — one of two in Georgia - scheduled by the U.S. Forest Service to receive public input on the initiative proposed by U.S. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck and Clinton in October, when the president called for a moratorium on road-building that would protect the last roadless areas in national forests. At stake are 54 million acres where roads have not yet been built. The wildlands in question account for a mere 2 percent of our land base (1 percent east of the Mississippi) — in other words, the last of the last. We have compromised with the first 98 percent but not any more.

My son and I spent two months in Montana last winter. In late January, with the thermometer below freezing and snow hurling against the windshield, we drove slowly north to visit friends in the Kootenai National Forest.

We had driven the road to Yaak many times, stopping for moose and elk, and today the deer were standing in knee-deep snow, searching for green shoots. Along the slow road the rocks were hung with icicles and the Douglas fir were shaggy and surreal with snow.

“I think Yaak has the right slogan,” said Silas. “‘The last best place.’”

I remembered his remark as I listened at the meeting. Out of 80-something people testifying, about 15 opposed the plan. Most of the opponents were local people — national forest neighbors — and they didn’t want outsiders telling them what they could or couldn’t do in their back yards.

“I don’t have to go to the wilderness to talk to God,” said one woman.

I was trying to figure out how anyone — in light of the environmental degradation we see around us every day, when figures tell us plainly that the loss of wild lands (the rate has doubled in the past decade) is staggering — could still be in favor of opening up the last wild places. It is painfully obvious that no longer is wilderness an issue of recreation for the wealthy, but a matter of survival. Trees stem the tide of global warming, filter the air, protect the watershed.

In a poll reported in the Wall Street Journal in January 2000, the polling firm American Viewpoint found that 76 percent of Americans favor protecting roadless areas. Other polls nationwide and in Georgia confirmed these findings: three out of four Americans want road-building in national forests to end.

Yet, when the Forest Service released its Environmental Impact Statement in May, its “proposed alternative” was a diluted version of the original far-reaching vision. There would be no more road construction or reconstruction, especially important since the Forest Service can afford to maintain only 20 percent of the 380,000 roads already in place. However, the EIS did not prohibit logging (helicopter logging requires large-diameter, high-volume cuts to pay for itself), mining, gas and oil development, grazing, or the use of off-road vehicles.

I listened at the public hearing as a parade of speakers made it abundantly clear that they wanted roadless areas protected. I was thinking of hiking in the Cohutta Wilderness as a young woman, how I had never seen such wildflowers and such crashing rivers. I was thinking of my home in south Georgia, how the dirt road past the farm runs to a paved road within a third-mile, and to more roads and to highways and to interstates. There are roads leading everywhere.

No more. We are making sure the roads end, and that they end in places where you get out of your car and walk off into the magnificent woods. Where six or seven animals live. My son will be happy to hear this.

Janisse Ray is an environmental activist in south Georgia and the author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.






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