|
"We have more people going more places on public land more often, with more kinds of all-terrain vehicles than ever before. Many people want to go anywhere anytime with anything regardless of the impact on the land, water, vegetation or wildlife."
Dombeck predicted that bringing "support, order and agreement" to the use of such all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and off-road vehicles (ORVs) on public land will be tough -- tough enough to make the "spotted owl issue look easy."
Reading Dombeck's comments, it is difficult not to conclude that ATV-related problems will be coming soon to a national forest near you. Indeed, it has already happened. Our colleagues with Georgia Forest Watch are waging a battle against an all-terrain-vehicle takeover of the forest. In the summer of 2007, USA Today reported on group's efforts to control ATV abuses in the Mountaintown Roadless Area.
There, as elsewhere on America's public lands, ATV operators routinely remove or ignore barriers meant to prevent their entrance to areas declared off limits.
At around the same time, the Southern Environmental Law Center announced its intent to sue the Forest Service on behalf of a number of conservation organizations, including the Tennessee and North Carolina Chapters of Trout Unlimited, over the agency's violation of the Clean Water Act. The issue is the agency's failure to prevent mud from eroded off-road vehicle trails from polluting streams in the watershed of the Tellico River. Most of the trails at issue are in North Carolina. And it is happening closer to home on the Nantahala-Pisgah National Forests.
Numbers of off-road-vehicle (ORV) users have multiplied, rising to 36 million in 2000 compared to 5 million 30 years earlier. Some sources put the number of ATVs in use in the U.S. at as high as 7 million. High gasoline prices seem to have made little difference in sales numbers.
ATV model names -- Brute Force and Outlaw -- seem chosen to invite bad behavior and the television ads for them reinforce the idea. : Some ATV riders seem intent on riding the machines as they see them advertised on television: without limit. Off-road vehicle groups argue that a small percentage of "bad apples" is the source of most of the abuse. That may well be true. But, as another former Forest Service Chief notes, "the cumulative impact is tremendous" if even a percent or two of ATVers go off the trail. In any case, enough have done just that that there are an estimated 14,000 miles of so-called "user-created" trails on our national forests.
Predictably, conflicts between human powered recreationists and ORV have soared. A family walking in the quiet woods disrupts no one else's outdoor experience; a churning ORV is another matter. That loss of a quiet recreational experience is important. But the greater concern is the environmental damage from unmanaged motorized recreation. The machines are bigger, more reliable, more powerful. Damage from them has increased in proportion to numbers. The costs include ruined wetlands, beaten-down stream banks, gashed meadows, disrupted wildlife habits and habitat.
The Wilderness Society says, "Dirt bikes, all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles and other off road vehicles are major sources of air, water and noise pollution nationwide. Most already in use are powered by two-stroke engines which antiquated, highly polluting and inefficient. Off-road vehicles are a major source of pollution on America's national parks, monuments, forests and other public lands.
In addition to the site-specific damage from ORV use, there are questions, too, about ORVs' contributions to air pollution with the attendant questions about human health. An American Lung Association report from 1999 found that the southeast produces more volatile organic compounds or VOC than any region of the country. (These compounds react with heat and sunlight to form ground-level ozone, smog's primary component. Across the region, pollution from off-highway vehicles accounts for 14 percent of VOC emissions, third behind highway vehicles (32 percent) and industrial solvent use (24 percent).
The region also led in the nation in production of particle pollution and the contribution of off-highway vehicles topped that of highway vehicles, 6 percent compared to 5.
None of this is to say that there isn't a place for responsible motorized use on our national forests. But that place isn't everywhere. Each must be carefully chosen, then managed just as carefully. As Chief Dombeck said n his warning about the challenge of ORV management, "..all our activities must take place within the ecological limits of the land."
There is some evidence that the Forest Service is beginning to head the warning of its former chief. In 2007, the agency announced that it would begin imposing limits on ATVs and other off-road vehicles across the forest system's 193 million acres.
In effect, that action should mean, pursuant to a rule the agency imposed in 2005, that national forest trails will be closed to ATVs unless specifically posted open, a rule that has been effect on some forests already. And it should mean an end to the "open unless posted closed" go-almost-anywhere non-rule that has been in effect. Trail maps, expected to be available for all national forests by 2010, will document the changes. While the new attention to ATV and ORV abuse is welcome, it faces two obvious limits. The first has to do with how the agency chooses the trails it will leave open to motors. Simply changing signs from "closed" to "open" will mean little. Each trail or trail segment proposed for motorized use must be analyzed to ensure that motorized use is appropriate in that place and that it can occur with damage to soil, water, wildlife and other recreational activities. Perhaps more significant is whether and how the agency plans to enforce closures. It lacks the resources -- human and fiscal -- to manage rules now in effect. |
