Wild Sky: new Washington wilderness area

[Chriznitch]

The one consistent refrain is that the FS can’t be trusted

the brutal truth is that the fs is our own child and our own fault...

and it's not like we can trust the Sierra Club either

[ScottP]

The one consistent refrain is that the FS can’t be trusted

the brutal truth is that the fs is our own child and our own fault...

(SNIP)

 

Total BS.

I exert NO control over the machinations of the USFS.

What they do is not my fault.

[Winter]

well, it's encouraging to see that you guys have an interest in this.

I've spent the last 6 years with the "big green machine" and do realize that with our current policy process setting aside land as wilderness probably saves the taxpayers in the long run. The struggles to manage non-wilderness public lands are now continuous and indirect--so much time and money is spent going through appeals that there is a huge backlog for maintaining healthy forests. Although the national forests were set aside to conserve (not PRESERVE) and provide for long-term timber resources, water, and other uses, we're practically ignoring that intent now.

Pulling a Redford and setting it aside allows nature to clean it up for us with catastrophic wildfires--not as user friendly for weekend warriors but likely easier on the taxpayers in the long run

 

Hey Chiznitch, I can't really tell where you fall in this debate based on your post, but blaming appeals for the delays in treating our national forests is COMPLETE BS. The data below is from a presentation we give to folks to dispell these myths put out by the FS and industry.

 

The General Accounting Office found that 95% of all fuels reduction projects it reviewed, 762 projects - covering 4.7 million acres of federal forest lands - were available for implementation within the standard 90 day review period. (GAO May 14, 2003.)The GAO also determined that over 99% of fuel reduction projects proposed by the USFS in 2000 and 2001 were approved without appeal and zero were litigated. (GAO, August 31, 2001. GAO-01-114R).

 

Also, we advocate for a LARGER agency budget so long as they are actually focused on improving forest health instead of subsidizing the timber industry. Where does taxpayer money go? I doubt any of you would want to knnow.

[mattp]

Chriznitch

 

You seem to be suggesting that from the Forest Service perspective Wilderness areas are a good tool to deal with budget contraints. I would agree that that might be the case. I have argued something similar in the past. This is perhaps another reason why budgets for land managers seem to get the short shrift. The powerful conservation lobby directly benefits!

 

Budget constraints do appear to contribute to some apparently "conservation" minded management policies with respect to such matters as adopting no-trail policies or letting old roads fade away into the bush, and may even weigh in favor of the Wild Sky Wilderness, but I don't think an underfunded Forest Service benefits any long-term preservation or conservation interest.

 

A lack of money also means that they have less of a budget for overall resource management and fewer resources to employ in the oversight of ongoing permitted uses. It is also being used as an excuse to promote privatization which will almost certainly tend to benefit industry groups and private business over any public-interest conservation or stewardship agenda. The vendors or contractors or leaseholders are in it to maximize profits, and apart from any requirements imposed on them by the Forest Service, and enforced through active scrutiny and policing, there is little incentive to look ahead toward any long-term conservation agenda.

[marylou]

The FS gets its budget from Congress.

 

The FS does not keep the proceeds from timber sales, they go back into the General Fund.

 

Once upon a time, the FS generated a fair amount of revenue from timber sales, and was pretty well-funded by Congress. Nowadays, for a number of reasons, the FS is not generating much revenue from timber sales, and coincidentally (?!?) is not very well-funded.

 

Additionally, the national priorities do not lie in conservation or in the environment. In six hours of presidential and vice presidential debates last fall, there was exactly ONE question about the environment. It is just not what people care about.

 

I do not much care for having to designate in order to avoid lawsuits and deal with budget constraints, but if that is what it takes, then so be it. Criz, thanks a lot for weighing in. Keep talking.

[Chriznitch]

well Winter, if you think a 90 day time period to simply get approval for a project that will cost the government $500/acre in implementation is efficient, you are part of the problem

[Winter]

Funny haha aside, forcing the Forest Service to provide a public comment period is hardly the problem we're dealing with on our National Forests. Unless, of course, you work for the timber industry (like Bush does). Bad humor is a poor way to get around real numbers.

 

Mary Lou, a portion of the timber sale proceeds go to the general fund, as long as its a green timber sale. A portion also goes to the "KV" fund for restoration work. But, the proceeds from post-fire salvage sales never make it back to the taxpayers and the general fund. They go into a little black box FS account that has generated a stash of somewhere between $60-100 million. The FS uses this black box fund to pay for budget holes and to plan more money losing post-fire salvage sales. Almost ALL post-fire salvage sales cost the FS more than they receive in revenue from the timber industry.

 

This structure acutally provides the FS an economic incentive to call live trees dead tress. The taxpayers get screwed twice - or three times depending on how you look at it.

[marylou]

Hey Winter, that's very interesting. I did not know about that! The FS people I have spoken with never mention that.

 

Can you direct me to more information like that? I'm always interested in reading up on issues like this.

[Winter]

They don't want you to know.

[Peter_Puget]

Winter -

 

$60-100 million doesn't seem like very much to me.

 

 

A lack of money also means that they have less of a budget for overall resource management and fewer resources to employ in the oversight of ongoing permitted uses. It is also being used as an excuse to promote privatization which will almost certainly tend to benefit industry groups and private business over any public-interest conservation or stewardship agenda. The vendors or contractors or leaseholders are in it to maximize profits, and apart from any requirements imposed on them by the Forest Service, and enforced through active scrutiny and policing, there is little incentive to look ahead toward any long-term conservation agenda.

 

I think a good argument can be made against every assertion youmake here. The most obvious rejoinder is the cancer like spread of Wilderness Areas in Washington. I doubt very much that these areas will be privatized any time soon.

 

An intersting excercise would be to take outline maps showing Wilderness Areas (and proposed wilderness areas) and see if a person could place the shapes in a line in order of earliest designation to latest. The participant wouldbe told that the shapes represent Congresssional Districts. The first thing I thought of when I saw the Wild Sky map was a gerrymandered district.

[mattp]

A "good argument" can be made about all kinds of things, Peter.

 

But I am not following you here: are you suggesting that I think wilderness areas might be privatized? What aspect of wilderness areas would that be?

 

I agree with you that there is a lot of formally designated Wilderness in Washington - and in fact I think in this very thread I've referred to a vast stretch of wild lands, much of it either Wilderness or National Park, which stretches form I-90 to the Canadian border and I impliedly if not directly asked what this additional one would add to any important preservation or conservation goal and how such an addition would compare to the recreational or other values that might be lost as a result of such designation.

[Peter_Puget]

To the extent that underfundng encourages the establishment of Wilderness Areas, underfunding is an excellent long term strategy to limit use of public resources. The fact that Wilderness Areas are very resistant to privatization is but one factor supporting this position.

 

The drive to privatize is not dependent in any way on the urge to preserve. It is a natural outcome of our budgeting process. One only has to look at WA State Parks to see how use fees have been used to underfund the parks. My personal feeling is that as we move towards a use fee model we loose the underlying rational for state ownership/management of lands in the first place.

[Winter]

The most obvious rejoinder is the cancer like spread of Wilderness Areas in Washington.

 

You are so full of BS. Apart from including the National Park Lands within the wilderness system (1988), the last time Congess added any wilderness in Washington was in 1984. That's at least 16 years since we had any new designation and 20 years since the last substantive additions.

 

An interesting exercise would be to see if you would check any of your facts before making baseless ideological assertions. My guess is we would see facts manipulated to look like gerrymandered congressional districts.

[marylou]

Here is a website with some information about the proposed Wilderness.

 

Peter, I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish with your theoretical Rorsach Test of Washington's Wildernesses. Very few people would be able to call out the chronology of their creation, let alone even name them all.

[Winter]

Chronology of creation.

 

Read and learn. Wilderness Gone Crazy in Washington!! I think Murry and Cantwell might propose wilderness in downtown Seattle the WA delegation has been so Wilderness crazy the last 20 years. Peter's rigth to be so paranoid. The government may come and lock up his house and designate it a wilderness area if he's not careful. Good reason to hold onto some assault rifles and lots of bottled water.

[Peter_Puget]

The most obvious rejoinder is the cancer like spread of Wilderness Areas in Washington.

 

You are so full of BS. Apart from including the National Park Lands within the wilderness system (1988), the last time Congess added any wilderness in Washington was in 1984. That's at least 16 years since we had any new designation and 20 years since the last substantive additions.

 

An interesting exercise would be to see if you would check any of your facts before making baseless ideological assertions. My guess is we would see facts manipulated to look like gerrymandered congressional districts.

 

And just last year a friend of mine confided to me how much he regrets working for the Boulder Wilderness when he was a young lad.

 

Clearly your link shows the increasing range of "Wild Lands" For grins look at the shape of Mt Rainier National Park. Now check out this link showing the proposed "Wild Sky." The Wild Sky most certainly looks like a gerrymandered district. Why the personal attack? In what ways were my claims baseless..your link clearly agreed with what I was saying.

[Winter]

Ok so you've got a story from a friend that "worked for the wilderness" and a bunch of curvy lines. What's the point? Do you still stick to your argument that wilderness is growing like a cancer in Washington?

[marylou]

Widernesses are not "gerrymandered," silly. They have wavy lines because they follow natural geography (much more so now than in 1899 when MRNP was formed) and have to be drawn to the exclusion of roads, and in some cases, inholdings.

 

This is not some vast left-wing conspiracy!

[Peter_Puget]

Ok so you've got a story from a friend that "worked for the wilderness" and a bunch of curvy lines. What's the point? Do you still stick to your argument that wilderness is growing like a cancer in Washington?

 

Well you seem to be agreeing that the Wild Sky does look like a gerrymandered district!

 

I still make the claim - I don't think I have made an argument - that wilderness areas are spreading like a cancer.

 

As far as honestly in presenting facts regarding the Wild Sky check out how Patty Murray explains the situation: link

 

Less than 10 percent of the entire land base of Washington state is protected as Wilderness.

 

There are 30 wilderness areas in Washington State, covering 4,324,182 acres. These wilderness areas are managed by the US Forest Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Land Management.

 

Why didn't she compare to the land owned by the federal government?

 

 

By the way you argued that Wild areas were not spreading. They clearly are - and not just in Washington. Does this mean you agree they are cancers? Just contained and not spreading?

[Peter_Puget]

Are these next on the Wilderness list: link

 

I am not against some are designated as wild but at some point enough is enough

[marylou]

Dark Divide is kind of a rarity in SW Wa in that it has not been completely crisscrossed with roads. It's been a favorite of conservation groups for years, but I don't think I've ever heard of any talk of making it a Wilderness, nor do I think it would ever become one.

 

There has been a push to leave it roadless, which is obviously not the same thing.

[Peter_Puget]

Maylou –

 

Throughout the US the acreage designated as wilderness has growth I would say more years than not since 1964. The political machinery is firmly in place do you really think that you can predict that in 20 years no one will propose it become a Wilderness area? It seems more likely than unlikely.

[Fairweather]

I love existing wilderness areas and want them to remain as they are, but with recreational use rules relaxed just a bit.

 

For those here who frequent the Olympic Mountains, you certainly can appreciate how the "buffer wilderness" areas along the eastern border of ONP (Buckhorn, Brothers, Mount Skokomish Wilderness Areas) afford justifiable protection that does not exist on the west side of the park, where clearcutting and logging roads come right up to the boundary. Ditto, the Clearwater and Norse Peak at MRNP. Can you imagine Mount Adams or Glacier Peak without their designated Wilderness protections? Goat Rocks? I shudder to think.

 

Where many proponents of designated wilderness cross the line involves the social arena. And this is where I jump ship. Once an area has been protected from the chainsaw, the shovel, and the drill, why do so many self-proclaimed purists insist on imposing their religion upon the newly saved acerage? Solitude. Mechanization prohibition. And the famous let nature take over lawsuits to prevent trail and road (read: access) repair.

 

The only tool I have as a citizen to promote my moderate agenda vis a vis wilderness recreational use, is my witheld support of expanding the lands designated as such, writing my representatives, and promoting my beliefs in forums like this. Unfortunately, many, if not most self-described environmentalists hold the position if you're not with us, you're against us, and the insults fly as evidenced here, in this very thread.

[Fairweather]

Dark Divide is kind of a rarity in SW Wa in that it has not been completely crisscrossed with roads. It's been a favorite of conservation groups for years, but I don't think I've ever heard of any talk of making it a Wilderness, nor do I think it would ever become one.

 

There has been a push to leave it roadless, which is obviously not the same thing.

 

Dark divide protection is the darling of Harvey Manning, who has been trying to rid the area of motorcycles for decades by promoting wilderness designation.

 

This is the same Harvey Manning who wants Cascade River Road closed.

 

Harvey writes books and makes $$$$. Harvey tells everyone how to get to the trailhead in his books, then complains that there are too many people infesting his mountains and loving them to death.

[lancegranite]

Fairweather, your views are not crazy, and your arguements interesting.

Don't mistake my stance, I just tend to believe that green policys do not pull much weight around Washington DC right now.