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[pct-l] From today's LA Times
- Subject: [pct-l] From today's LA Times
- From: Kevin Corcoran <kevin@hughes.net>
- Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 20:06:56 -0700
From today's LA Times---
Although the headline is not technically accurate in using the term
'Wilderness' in the sense of official designation as we know it, the article
describes what some on this List contend: in the big picture, our wild
lands are not so much imperiled by impacts like toilet paper, horses or even
by campfire rings.....
Please review to bottom:
Thursday, October 15, 1998
California Is Losing 100 Acres of Wilderness a Day, Study Says
Environment: Report warns of human encroachment in national
forests.
U.S. agency says group is not telling 'whole story.'
By GARY POLAKOVIC, Times Staff Writer
A study by an environmental group released Wednesday
concludes that California national forests are
losing their last
stretches of wild lands at the rate of nearly 100
acres a day.
Logging roads, motorcycles and other human
encroachment
threaten remaining wilderness-caliber lands that
shelter wildlife and
provide refuge for an increasingly urban populace,
according to a
report by the California Wilderness Coalition.
In the last 19 years, development has touched
675,449 acres
that the U.S. Forest Service had identified as
roadless and
wilderness-caliber in 1979--a loss of 11%, the study
concluded.
The figures do not include land formally designated as
protected
wilderness.
At that rate, all the state's remaining forest
wild lands will be
degraded or gone by the end of the 21st century,
members of the
group contend.
But Janice Gauthier, spokeswoman for the Forest
Service's
Pacific Southwest region, said many of the areas that
the report
counted as lost are within the 1.8 million acres that
Congress has
allowed to be designated for uses ranging from logging
to mining to
road-building. She ascribed the agency's differences
with the
wilderness coalition as "philosophical disagreement."
"There's nothing illegal and there's no scandal.
I'm not sure they
told the whole story," Gauthier said.
The study shows that getting away from it all is
becoming
increasingly difficult in the nation's most populous
state. The portrait
contained in the report by the Davis-based Wilderness
Coalition
shows that as California's population surges, more
people will be
forced to share a shrinking amount of open,
untrammeled mountain
country.
"These are California's last wild places," said
Paul Spitler,
executive director of the coalition, which represents
California's
leading environmental groups. "We can't bring back the
wilderness
we've already lost, but by acting now, we can save
what little
remains."
Human impact on wild lands in the 18 national
forests within
California's borders are distributed unevenly, with
development
pressing hard into Southern California's mountains
while largely
skirting remote forests such as the Siskiyou in the
north. The
landscapes at risk include chaparral slopes in
Ventura, timbered
peaks near Lake Tahoe and the rain forests east of
Eureka.
No forest has lost more roadless acreage than the
Los Padres
National Forest, a sprawling 1.8-million-acre expanse
of public land
stretching from Carmel to Gorman. Development and off-road
vehicle use has reached about 130,000 acres that were once
roadless, according to the report.
Ojai resident Alisdair Coyne, conservation
director of Keep the
Sespe Wild Committee, says he has long enjoyed
relaxing hikes
deep in Los Padres. Yet in recent years, he has
encountered more
off-road vehicles. Lockwood Valley west of Frazier
Park has been
particularly hard hit, he said, as have areas around
San Luis Obispo
and Santa Maria.
"They're letting off-roaders go wherever they
want, and that's a
shame," Coyne said.
But California's heavily forested northwest has
seen more
encroachment than any other region, principally from
logging roads,
which have been built on nearly 248,921 acres of
national forest
land. That development accounts for more than a third
of all the
wild land losses identified in the study.
The 340-page report, titled "California's
Vanishing Forests: Two
Decades of Destruction," is the first comprehensive
inventory of
California's national forest wild lands in nearly 20
years.
Release of the document could increase pressure
on the Clinton
administration to impose a moratorium on road building in
California's national forests. Environmentalists seek
a total ban on
new road construction, although the Forest Service's
current
proposal would exempt much of northwest California. A
decision
on whether to impose an interim moratorium is expected in
November.
* * *
Taming Forests
More than 675,000 acres of the state's national
forests have
been significantly touched by development since 1979,
according to
the California Wilderness Coalition. Following are the
forests in
Southern California and acreage affected in each.
Angeles: 9,818
Cleveland: 750
Los Padres: 130,067
San Bernardino: 22,000
Copyright 1998 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved
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Of particular note to me is the attitude expressed in a similar AP article
today:
<SNIP>
The yearlong study recommends making the rest of California's roadless lands
off-limits to logging,
road construction, mining and other development. Spitler and co-author Ryan
Henson called on the
Clinton administration to revise its proposed ban on road construction,
which exempts more than
1.25 million acres in California.
Not everyone shares that view. Take retiree Harry Johnson, who has lived
almost all his life in Lake
Shasta in Northern California. That's not far from the 9,300-acre Kettle
Mountain area in
Shasta-Trinity Forest, which the report says has been devastated by logging
and road construction.
Johnson said logging is necessary to clear brush and provide grazing land
for the deer, elk and
turkeys that used to be more prevalent in the area.
``All this wilderness area is protected by state and federal lands,'' he
said. ``We don't need any more
locked up so that you can't use it for anything.''
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So what are we going to do about attitudes like THAT.......?
Kevin Corcoran
Palmdale CA
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