Stop Fighting Roadless Rules, Says Former Forest Service Head

Mike Dombeck, former director of the Bureau of Land Management and head of the U.S. Forest Service, says its time for Washington to stop wasting tens of millions of dollars fighting rules that block new roads in National Forests. The reasons are obvious: less money being spent on forests and parks, the additional maintenance costs of new roads, and our ever-lower standards for what can be called ‘wilderness.’ “The first “roadless” or primitive area inventory on national forests was conducted in the mid-1920s. The Forest Service inventoried 74 tracts larger than 200,300 acres. In the ’70s, areas larger than 5,000 acres were inventoried. By the late ’90s, we were debating 500-acre tracts. What size tracts of land we will be fighting over 25 years from now?” In the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.