Three Southern states - Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina - asked the federal government Monday to protect hundreds of thousands of acres in national forests from road construction.
The three states were the first in the nation to ask the Agriculture Department to use a new federal rule that governs whether roads can be built in pristine areas of national forests.
Protection is essential to defend wildlife habitat, scenery and water quality, the states argued.
Virginia is seeking protection for 374,000 acres in the George Washington and Jefferson national forests. That's 21 percent of the land in George Washington and 9 percent in Jefferson.
"We need to have land available for backcountry recreation, wildlife protection and to protect our water quality," said Nikki Rovner, Virginia's deputy secretary for natural resources. "The only place in Virginia where those characteristics exist is on public land. We are not going to find them on private land."
"North Carolina faces phenomenal growth pressures, and our opportunity to protect these areas may be limited," Jennifer Bumgarner, an advisor to Gov. Michael Easley, a Democrat, told the Agriculture Department's advisory committee on roadless areas.
North Carolina is asking that nearly 174,000 acres in the Pisgah, Nantahala and Croatan National Forests be kept without roads. That amounts to 15 percent of the national forest land in the state.
South Carolina is asking to save the remaining 7,581 acres without roads in Sumter and Francis Marion National Forests.
"This is all the roadless national forest we have in South Carolina," said South Carolina forest supervisor Jerome Thomas. Forests must have less than a half mile of road for each 1,000 acres to be considered roadless. The rest of the 624,000 acres in the Sumter and Francis Marion forests already have roads.
The Agriculture Department approved a rule to preserve roadless areas in national forests in 2001, weeks before the end of the Clinton administration. But the rule became tied up in federal litigation, and the Bush administration scrapped it. In its place is a new process that requires each state that wants roadless areas preserved to ask the federal government.
Nationwide, about 58.5 million acres of national forests are currently roadless and could be protected under the new rule. Environmentalists have charged that the Bush administration has allowed destructive logging, mining and gas exploration to proceed in the national forests.
The Bush administration created the Roadless Area Conservation National Advisory Committee, made up of representatives of environmental and industry groups, to provide recommendations to the Agriculture Secretary about whether to grant each state's petition.
While most of the controversy over the Clinton administration rule was in the West, the committee's first test is with these Eastern forests.
"Right now the difficult part is figuring out the rules," said Ray Vaughan, a committee member who represents WildLaw, a non-profit environmental law firm in Montgomery, Ala. "We have to handle these petitions with an eye toward what happens when petitions come from Western states with millions of acres."
The committee will make its recommendation today and send it to Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, who will make a final decision within three months.Media General News Service via Potomac News
