The Obama administration on Thursday issued a directive that effectively halts logging, mining and road building in roadless areas of national forests for at least one year.
The directive says any proposals to log or build roads in about 50 million acres of wild national forest land must be approved by the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.
The land in question, across 38 states, is outside official wilderness areas but remains undeveloped and mostly uncut.
The directive potentially covers about 62,000 acres of the Superior National Forest in Minnesota, where no useable roads exist. The areas are mostly near but outside the borders of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
But because no timber sales or road projects were planed for that area at this time, no projects would be affected for 2009, said Kris Reichenbach, Superior forest spokeswoman.
ADVERTISEMENT
The directive has little effect on Minnesota's Chippewa or Wisconsin's Chequamegon/Nicolet national forests because those areas are criss-crossed with logging roads and have no large roadless area.
The original plan to permanently stop all logging and road building in 58 million acres of roadless areas was proposed by the Clinton administration in 1999 and was approved days before Clinton left office in 2001. But the plan was scuttled by the Bush administration, which allowed local National Forest officials to decide on logging. The Bush plan also allowed governors of states to petition to stop logging in those areas; only Idaho and Colorado did.
There are now about 380,000 miles of roads on the 191 million acres of national forests. But some areas remain with no maintained roads or roads not used in decades.
Environmentalists say those hard-to-reach areas should be protected for wildlife habitat, water quality and preserving older trees -- along with preserving areas for hunters, anglers and hikers to go without motor vehicles.
Logging interests in the Northland have said the Clinton-era plan locked away too many acres, effectively banning logging of trees that the forest-products industry badly needs. They note hundreds of thousands of acres of northern Minnesota forest already are off-limits to logging in the BWCAW, state parks and Voyageurs National Park.
