Nature Overrun
There are now nine million off-road vehicles, meaning all-terrain vehicles and dirt bikes (snowmobiles are a separate category). And their owners, with little resistance from the authorities that ought to be policing them, are transforming some of America’s most sensitive public lands into their personal playgrounds.
As Felicity Barringer and William Yardley wrote in The Times recently, there are responsible owners who stick to designated trails as well as renegades who go “off trail” with grave consequences for animal habitat, fragile desert soils and historical artifacts. The real problem, however, is that the important decisions about where off-road vehicles can go are not being made by the federal Bureau of Land Management, which is supposed to protect these lands and regulate these vehicles, but by the owners, user associations and rural county officials who are under their thumb.
Utah is an alarming case in point. The bureau is presently drafting six new land-use plans for Utah that would allow about 15,000 miles of designated trails. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, an environmental group, points out that many of these routes have been lifted straight from maps provided by the off-road vehicle associations and have not been independently surveyed to assess their potential damage to the soil, animal habitat and archaeological sites.
Worse, some of the trails would crisscross about 2.5 million acres of breathtakingly beautiful country that the Clinton administration thought worthy of permanent wilderness protection. Once these trails are in regular use, and enshrined on federal maps, the land would almost surely be ineligible for wilderness designation, which is typically reserved for roadless areas.
The threat to these lands stems partly from the Bush administration’s philosophical inclinations: its aversion to federal stewardship and its relentless drive to open public lands to commercial and recreational use even when nature is the clear loser. It also stems from an insidious belief inside the federal bureaucracy that the problem is insoluble — that there are too many off-road vehicles and not enough federal agents to police them.
Washington has a duty to do better, beginning, at a minimum, with protecting those 2.5 million acres that the Bureau of Land Management identified in 1999 as having wilderness characteristics. It should then call a timeout on the whole process until the bureau has done the kind of independent surveys it is capable of doing — and is paid to do.
