Link

I stopped by this wooded land on the way to the Gallatin National Forest in Montana last fall. The plan was to crash out at a national forest campsite instead of the rest stop on 94, only driving about 100 miles to see some potentially good country and have a quiet night of rest. Due to intense fog on the roads heading north, I was limited to very slow speeds and did not arrive to the forest boundary until 3:30 in the morning. I crashed in the car and woke to a bright sunny day in a nice little section of the national forest.  I walked a short trail, enjoying the clean, fresh air and the warm sun. The rest of the day was spent walking around some of the lakes, and even having lunch at a shoreline picnic table over at Walker Bay on Leech Lake.

I was looking for a bit of that Minnesota wild, but it wasn’t what I expected.  Mostly what I found was second homes smashed onto lake shore, and very thin strips of actual national forest surrounded by cabins.  Less than 2 percent of Minnesota’s forested land is old growth. That said, I was still able to get a feel for what this national forest has to offer.  The  strips or chunks of undeveloped land still had something to them, something important. Furthermore, the Chippewa National Forest has one of the highest bald eagle nesting densities in the nation, and was a very important stronghold in the comeback of the bird.

There was still something vital here, even amongst all those boats, cars and second homes – even crunched between the kind of lake land development that plagues the upper midwest.  That spirit was still alive, the scent of the red pine, the eagles and osprey, the wolves, the beautiful lakes and the recovering forest.  The air was still permeated by it.

As I headed west towards Montana, I passed the Chippewa National Forest  sign. I pulled the car over, hopped across the road and took the picture, not entirely sure as to why. As I reached Detroit Lakes, I figured it out:

Any public land is better than no public land.

Long live the Chippewa National Forest.

Hawks for the Killing

Federal wildlife officers are cracking down on people who kill raptors. But criminals rarely get more than a slap on the wrist because the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, an effective and versatile tool for 90 years, has lost its edge and needs sharpening.

Fowl Play

By Ted Williams

Raptors are being slaughtered by the thousands all across our nation by people who, for one reason or another, don’t like them. This is, of course, criminal activity—specifically a Class B misdemeanor under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 (MBTA).

The maximum fine, rarely levied, for dispatching a raptor that isn’t a bald or golden eagle or listed under the Endangered Species Act is a mere $15,000. And though such a crime technically can land you in the slammer for six months, jail sentences are invariably suspended. The MBTA does have felony provisions if the United States can prove intent to sell, but the only intent of almost all raptor killers is to ditch the carcasses without being seen.

Another Class B misdemeanor—according to our legal system, just as egregious as knocking off a peregrine falcon—is using a rendering of Smokey the Bear sans permission from the U.S. Forest Service. Every state and federal wildlife-law-enforcement official you engage on the subject will tell you this: The courts routinely deal with rapes, murders, smuggling, drug trafficking, and the like. No way are they going to take Class B misdemeanors seriously.

So unless the law is amended to allow U.S. attorneys to seek felony charges where appropriate, raptors are going to keep dying at rates unimaginable to most of the public.

********

If you doubt this, consider Operation High Roller, at this writing still being conducted across the country by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s law-enforcement division. For once the “high rollers” aren’t rich trophy hunters. In fact, they’re not even people; they’re birds.

“Roller pigeons,” popularized in Birmingham, England, are bred for a genetic, seizure-like disorder that, in flight, causes them to simultaneously and uncontrollably throw up their wings, cock back their heads, and flip backward, somersaulting repeatedly for hundreds of feet, not always recovering before union with terra firma converts them to carrion. Regulated by the National Birmingham Roller Club (NBRC), the oldest and largest organization promoting the hobby, local clubs throughout the United States compete to see whose birds tumble best.

The hobby has attracted such high-profile participants as boxer Mike Tyson, whose sex therapist is quoted by USA Today as explaining that Iron Mike has a special connection with his rollers because he “doesn’t take the normal tumbles like the average person [but] gets real high, then crashes.”

Despite such emotional benefits, roller flyers face a major frustration: When their pigeons start doing their thing, birds of prey see them for exactly what they are—genetic invalids ripe for plucking. As Tony Chavarria, owner and publisher of the Birmingham Roller Pigeon Discussion Board (roller-pigeon.com), perceptively notes, “Many fanciers have been forced to leave the hobby/sport due to incessant attacks by these birds of prey which seem to focus on these roller pigeons as a primary food source (especially in the cities).”

Solution: Make the world safer for rollers by continuously killing raptors as they gravitate to roller lofts from all compass points, like stars to black holes.

Operation High Roller has been rendering this practice increasingly difficult and costly. Handling the case in California is Special Agent Ed Newcomer. Like all the special agents I’ve worked with over the years, Newcomer is highly educated, highly motivated, and horribly overextended. Before signing on with the service five years ago he had worked as a private attorney, assistant attorney general for Colorado, and assistant attorney general for Washington. He’s one of only 191 federal wildlife officers responsible for all states and territories, the lowest number since the mid-1980s. Such is the priority our society places on wildlife crime.

So “the thin green line,” as wildlife advocates call this small but ultra-elite force, employs resourceful strategies to make its presence known. In particular it depends on the media to high-profile the tiny percentage of criminal cases it can bring to the Justice Department. Good press discourages wildlife crime, though always temporarily.

In 2003 Newcomer investigated a complaint from a man who had found a dead Cooper’s hawk and a wounded redtail in his yard in North Hills (just north of Los Angeles). When Newcomer arrived on the scene he learned that one of the neighbors was a “bird lover,” too. How so? Well, because he “raised racing pigeons.” Newcomer had a suspect, and he collected enough evidence to get the pigeon racer convicted on two MBTA violations.

It occurred to Newcomer that this behavior was probably widespread, but racing-pigeon clubs are tough to work undercover because there’s little interaction between members; the birds are just released at some distant location and their return times punched in. Rollers, on the other hand, orbit the member’s property, and competitions progress from house to house, with much socializing at each.

Newcomer’s workload prevented him from infiltrating the roller community until 2006, but when he did he went full throttle, surfing the Web, contacting club members, seeking advice, attending roller shows. Everyone wanted to be his mentor (and sell him birds at prices a beginner was unlikely to recognize as inflated).

“Within five minutes I heard people talking about killing hawks,” he told me. “One of the first things every person I spoke with said was how much he hated hawks and falcons and all the ways he killed them. In half an hour I realized this was going to be a huge case. There are about 250 roller club members in Los Angeles alone. It’s a worldwide hobby. I realized that if everyone I talked to is killing hawks, then the majority of roller pigeon club members in the U.S. are killing hawks.”

In the next 14 months Newcomer infiltrated three clubs in the Los Angeles area and made contact with about 60 members, all of whom also belonged to the NBRC. In all that time he encountered only one member who said he didn’t kill raptors. The lowest claim was 10 kills a year; the highest, 52—this by the NBRC’s national president, Juan Navarro of Los Angeles.

“If we conservatively say that 50 percent of the 250 roller members in L.A. are killing 10 hawks a year, you’re talking 1,250 hawks in L.A. alone,” declares Newcomer. “That’s a huge impact as they migrate along the Pacific Flyway.”

Independently, Special Agent Dirk Hoy had started working roller clubs in Oregon, and the two coordinated their investigations. Quickly they learned that mass raptor executions by roller flyers weren’t confined to their states but were going down everywhere they looked—Washington, Texas, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Montana, and New York, for example. “One guy was bragging to me that a partner of his had killed 30 hawks in 45 days,” says Hoy. “When you start doing the math on that, the numbers are just enormous.”

So far five club members have been charged in Oregon, seven in California, and two in Texas. At this writing only two have not pled guilty. Other investigations are ongoing.

Some of the fines will go to raptor restitution. For example, of those collected so far in California, $29,500 will be deposited in an account set up by the Los Angeles Audubon Society to protect, restore, and rehabilitate raptors. “We’ll distribute the money in consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service,” says the group’s director, Garry George, who is still steaming about the violations and methods of execution. “These criminals killed peregrines, redtails, Cooper’s hawks, even kestrels. Kestrels don’t eat pigeons, but they didn’t know that.”

Another way the thin green line compensates for its size is by winning convictions on nearly 100 percent of its cases, a record maintained by, among other strategies, keeping tight-lipped about evidence. For example, until the law-enforcement division charged roller flyers, it didn’t tell anyone there had been undercover work or that agents had audio and video evidence that plainly showed that the defendants had been killing raptors. Agents the defendants hadn’t seen (or, in at least one case, didn’t recognize because the formerly bearded agent was clean shaven and wearing federal raid gear) merely asked if they had killed any raptors. In virtually every case the defendants said they had not. So during plea bargaining, U.S. attorneys informed them that if they fought the MBTA Class B misdemeanor charges, the prosecution would add the felony charge of lying to federal officers.

While the MBTA has weak penalties, agents file collateral charges when they discover unrelated crimes. For instance, Newcomer has referred several roller club members to district attorneys for such state felonies as negligent discharge of a firearm and animal cruelty.

One of the defendants facing animal-cruelty charges is the NBRC’s president, Juan Navarro. In the same document, it says that Rayvon Hall of Rialto, California, told Newcomer that after he catches hawks at the rate of about one per week (in traps baited with live pigeons and, at the time, openly sold at roller shows), he “pummels them with a stick” and that it is a “great thing . . . you’ll see, you get a lot of frustration out.”

“We just didn’t have the manpower or time to go after everybody,” says Newcomer. “And at some point you’ve got to ask, ‘Gee, how long am I going to let hawks get killed?’ So I decided to target the club president and the people who were most brazen about this. It was sickening to have to hang out with these guys and listen to them.”

I saw what Newcomer meant from the court documents and the Internet roller chatter I’d collected (now mostly deleted online). For example, according to the search-warrant affidavit, Darik McGhee of San Bernardino, California, proudly informed Newcomer that he had filled a five-gallon bucket with talons from hawks he’d killed.

According to the same document, Rayvon Hall presented Newcomer with severed Cooper’s hawk talons and explained that he made chlorine gas with bleach and ammonia and used it to kill trapped hawks by spraying it in their mouths and eyes.

But the preferred method of execution, on which Newcomer, Hoy, and their fellow agents were carefully instructed by their eager tutors, was to discreetly and silently pump air-rifle rounds into the trapped hawks’ heads and chests.

In April 2003 Bob Sallinger, conservation director for the Audubon Society of Portland, rescued four peregrine falcon eggs from a bridge under construction, rappelling down to the nest. The society hatched the eggs and raised the chicks. Clark Public Utilities donated a crew and supplies to build a release tower on Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, and a volunteer, Ken Barron, lived on the refuge with the young falcons for six weeks as they acclimated to the wild. The four fledglings—much in evidence in and around the refuge—won the hearts of the public and the press. But one day they disappeared, never to be seen again.

According to Ivan Hanchett of Hillsboro, Oregon, a fellow roller pigeon defender shot them. Herewith, from the Birmingham Roller Pigeon Discussion Board, Hanchett’s take on the incident, posted shortly before he was convicted for hawk killing and meriting the additional charge of cruelty to language: “Well low and behold just across the street from the wildlife refuge lives a roller flyer and when the young became airbourne they found alot of led in the air space across the street where the rollers were flying LOL!! I laughed and laughed when I heard this story because of all the pain staking measures they took to get these birds to adolescence and than to have somone take them out simply was bliss!!” (Special Agent Hoy reports that when he was working undercover, Hanchett bragged to him that he shot many hawks but instructed him on quieter, more creative methods: “angling” for them with live feeder mice rigged with fish hooks, and catching them in live traps, then suffocating them in plastic bags.)

Other commentary cut and pasted from the Birmingham Roller Pigeon Discussion Board:

Centralvalleylofts: “Just put some draino liquid on some of your weaker birds and let them take them and bye bye baby. Make sure you rub it on the back of their necks.”

Steve uk: “Shaun u need a larson trap [for raptors].”

Shaun: “Steve, I very recently acquired one and it ain’t working! Any hints?”

Steve uk: “It will work just keep tryin, the hen will start takin greater risks soon as she will be desperate to put weight on before laying.”

Shaun: “Put weight on? The fat, ugly, brown bastard is still probably digesting a dozen of my rollers! Can’t I just let off a homemade bomb at the bottom of my garden.”

J. Star: “I sit and wait for him behind a big bush and within a half hour he in on top of the Avery thinking he is going to catch a bird and soon he is picked off. . . .You will not see him again until another one comes to take his territory, then you repeat the process.”

Spider: “I use a 12 ga shotgun with led #5 shot. . . . Sometimes I get 2-3 friends with 12 gages and we have a ball seeing who can get led in these loft destroyers. . . . Good luck and good hunting.”

Rollerman 132: “What we need to do is hire a lawyer, and bring a class auction law suit against the department of U.S Fish and wild life for contributing to the destruction of personal property. . . . My birds are worth at lest a hundred each, I want compensation for each bird those hawks eat.”

The NBRC has responded to Operation High Roller with an official press release alleging that Cooper’s hawks have proliferated to the point of pestilence, and castigating the Fish and Wildlife Service for 1) stubbornly refusing to “relocate” them to areas where they won’t eat roller pigeons, and 2) making “inappropriate and grossly exaggerated comments . . . which sought to tar thousands of roller fanciers by reason of the unfortunate allegations against less than a dozen individuals.”

But it’s clear that raptor killing in the roller-flyer community isn’t just the work of a few bad apples. Most of the barrel is fermented mash. After all, of the roughly 60 NBRC members Newcomer worked while undercover, 59 said they killed hawks. It’s part of the culture.

Still, as NBRC members tirelessly point out, there are ethical roller flyers. After searching for a month I was able to find one (at least a former one)—Will Brown of Stanardsville, Virginia. He offers this: “One of the reasons I stopped flying rollers is that they’re hawk food. They mimic sick or injured birds, the kind hawks are supposed to eat. I’m not going to fight nature. So I switched to different pigeons—thief powders. They don’t flop around in the sky and attract hawks. . . . I was pleased to hear about this sting. Roller flyers are quite belligerent. If you mention that hawks are part of nature and maybe we should work with nature, you’re quickly ostracized. . . . I still lose a few birds, and I accept it as part of what happens when you let birds fly in the real world. The real world has raptors.”

********

Unfortunately, there is nothing aberrant about roller flyers. Similar jihads are being waged by other groups that find themselves inconvenienced by migratory birds.

In fact, MBTA flouting is an American tradition. Back in 1991, on a stakeout with Special Agent Roger Gephart in California’s San Joaquin Valley, I watched a fish farmer shoot great egrets. Several days later I interviewed another fish farmer, Marvin Carpenter, at his Merced, California, goldfish farm. He claimed to have been ruined by birds and feds. “All fish farmers shoot birds,” he explained, without much exaggeration from what I’ve been able to learn. “Fish farmers are producers, and the government is knocking us out. The environmentalists have [the government] right by the nose.”

Carpenter was especially bitter about the way special agents showed up uninvited and started digging up his property with a backhoe, thereby unearthing some 700 migratory bird carcasses. The total kill was estimated at 20,000. “If it flies it dies,” was the battle cry at Carpenter’s Goldfish Farm. All large birds, even non-fish eaters such as avocets, gallinules, willets, stilts, and hawks, were splashed as soon as they violated company air space. Cyanide-coated goldfish accounted for as many as 200 herons per day. Three hundred beaver traps constantly splintered the legs of wading birds. Carpenter got a 13-month jail sentence and a $34,000 fine, but this was mostly for the felony conviction of lying to federal agents.

Because the MBTA carries such weak penalties, nothing much has changed since Carpenter was making the world safer for goldfish, except that for a while fish farmers shot fewer birds (see “Killer Fish Farms,” Audubon, March-April 1992). Now roller flyers will be careful to obey the MBTA, or at least not get caught violating it, for maybe another year. “These things are always cyclic,” says Special Agent Hoy. “They’ll get comfortable again; some will start violating again; and we’ll be there.” Even so, the violators won’t have a whole lot to worry about unless the law is amended to provide for felony charges at the discretion of the U.S. attorney.

********

When Bob Sallinger started work at the Audubon Society of Portland’s rehabilitation center in 1992, he was astonished at how many raptors were coming in with gunshot wounds. The carnage hasn’t diminished. He still gets a steady stream of shot-up owls, ospreys, harriers, buteos, accipiters, falcons, and eagles.

One of the first birds Sallinger treated was a peregrine that had been shot off a telephone pole in Portland, when the species was listed as endangered and just re-establishing itself in the state. “We were frustrated by the low priority these crimes were given,” he remarks. “So in 1996 we created a migratory bird protection fund. We wanted to draw attention to the fact that lots of birds, mostly raptors, were being shot.”

When the thin green line took down the roller flyers, the Audubon Society of Portland initiated an aggressive campaign for stiff penalties. It lobbied the prosecutors, engaged the press, whipped up the membership, and got the mayor of Portland and the president of the Metro Region to write blistering letters prominently displayed on the Internet and quoted in newspapers. All this helped inspire prosecutors to seek the almost unheard-of fine of $10,000.

In Oregon one defense attorney told the judge that $10,000 was too much and that $7,500 would be fair for his client—Ivan Hanchett, the creative hawk killer who had “laughed and laughed” when he heard about the executions of the four peregrine fledglings. U.S. District Judge Ancer Hagerty didn’t agree; he dropped Hanchett’s fine to $4,000. One of the other two Oregon roller flyers convicted at this writing—Peter Kaufman of Portland—was also assessed $4,000. Mitch Reed of Mount Angel paid $5,000.

These and defendants from other states who pled out were placed on probation and some were required to do community service. But there was no jail time. So with the possible exception of the NBRC’s Navarro, who was convicted on 16 MBTA counts and fined $25,000, the raptor killers were bothered only by a business-as-usual expense that wasn’t much more painful than purchasing a shotgun, a pellet gun, ammo, and a few live traps.

After the arrests, Sallinger contacted the office of U.S. Representative Peter DeFazio (D-OR) but failed to stir up much interest. Then, when the press reported and editorialized about the ridiculous sentences, DeFazio’s office called him. The congressman would be introducing a bill to amend the MBTA so that federal prosecutors would have the option of seeking felony convictions for intentional violations. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act Penalty and Enforcement Act, as DeFazio’s legislation is called, is now before the House of Representatives with seven cosponsors.

DeFazio sent me this e-mail: “I was shocked that members of the pigeon clubs openly bragged in meetings and on publicly accessible websites about killing magnificent raptors, and that they killed these birds with brutal methods that included guns, poisons, suffocation in plastic bags, baiting with pigeons covered in fishing hooks, and luring hawks into glass panels. Upon hearing this, I decided that it was time for federal legislation to stop those who abuse migratory birds.”

The Audubon Society of Portland is outraged at the court’s leniency, but it is hardly surprised. In the summer of 2007 Sallinger received a complaint from a woman who had literally been hanging from the arm of a Madres, Oregon, resident (not a roller flyer) as she pleaded with him not to shoot a great-horned owl perched in a tree. She kept telling him that owls are protected by state and federal law, that they’re beautiful, important parts of nature. He extricated himself, explained that he didn’t want owls around his house, and calmly blew it away. When a state trooper appeared, the perpetrator—evincing no hint of remorse—gave him the severed talons, fetched the carcass from the bushes, and allowed that he’d done this before.

The fine was $750, exactly half of the reward Sallinger paid the woman from his organization’s migratory bird protection fund.

- 30 -

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Urge your legislators to support and cosponsor DeFazio’s Migratory Bird Treaty Act Penalty and Enforcement Act—H.R. 4093. And tell them to insist that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service receive funds to fully staff its law-enforcement division. For more information on Operation High Roller, visit Audubon Portland and the Fish and Wildlife Service. To receive e-mail updates from Audubon’s policy office on this and other issues, go to Audubon.org, and click on “Issues & Action” and then “Take Action Now.”

The big beneficiary of these access fees has been the motorized recreation industry to which they’ve provided standing and representation. Sponsoring Fee Demo through a cost-share partnership with the Forest Service was the powerful American Recreation Coalition, whose membership is comprised mainly of manufacturers of all-terrain vehicles, motorized trail bikes, jet skis and recreation vehicles. And joining the coalition in lobbying aggressively for both Fee Demo and RAT have been the National Off Highway Vehicle Coalition, the National Snowmobile Manufacturers Association and consumers of all things motorized who band together as the Blue Ribbon Coalition.

There is of course, another side. And that is rural residents who really don’t have much choice in living in dry semi-forested areas or in a downtown setting because no downtown setting really exists. These people face the possiblity of some very tough losses in terms of full time residence and even pets that may not get out in time. Recent fires like the Pince Crest fire are a good example of that. This is not really the wildland interface, but much closer to town and development, pretty much “on the grid”. Structure protection should be the highest priority here.

You really have to question (At least I have myself) this contradiction conservationists seem to have about buying a cabin in the woods. Why do we champion wild areas, yet continue to do this? I will never understand it, but it’s a weakness that is easily exploited by those who say some conservationists live by a double standard. If every conservationsts moved to their favorite wild area, what would be left? Yeah I guess we could all pat each other on the back as we sipped coffee every morning admiring our views and the rural sprawl we just created by being hypocrites.

Link

A tiny black bear cub, its paws and hindquarters badly burned, was found clinging to a tree in a New Mexico national forest in 1950. The wounded orphan went on to become a fire-prevention promotional tool for the U.S. Forest Service.

Unfortunately, I had to return from the Northern Rockies trip early. The time I was able to spend in the Gallatin National Forest and a couple days in Glacier were amazing, but also very smoky. The smoke got worse, and at that point I decided the resources were better spent on a trip next year in the spring rather than dealing with the poor air quality, poor photographic conditions, and poor video conditions. I picked up an “America The Beautiful Pass” for $80 which will cover my spring trip next year.

Sometimes what you plan for doesn’t always happen. But two weeks is more than most folks get in their favorite spot, so any disappointment is trivial at best.

Secondly, I’m amazed at how the site has grown. We receive over 50,000 unique visitors(with 150,000 hits) a month now at the Wilderness Sportsman. That’s shocking considering there has been zero advertising. What I would like to add(if given time)is more of my own commentary included in the posts.

It’s good to be back. Normal news posting will proceed daily starting today. Some of you might not come back until a couple months due to my previous message. But for those that stuck around, it paid off.

You’re losing more than money when you have to pay to fish public water

Robbed by RAT’s

By Ted Williams

It sounded okay when Congress authorized it in 1996. The few sportsmen and environmentalists who even noticed vacillated between disinterest and mild approval. Starved for funds, as always, the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service would charge the public new or increased fees for accessing its land to fish, hunt, boat, drive, park, camp, walk. . . . It was going to be an “experiment” — a three-year pilot program. That’s why it was called the “Fee Demonstration.”

Americans were used to paying entrance fees at national parks and wildlife refuges. But after Fee Demo was extended through 2001 they expressed outrage about what they came to call the Recreation Access Tax (RAT) on national forests and BLM land. Late in 2004 RAT was extended yet again — this time for 10 years — when Fee Demo was replaced with the Recreation Enhancement Act, a law that empowers the four agencies to charge even more access fees.

Scott Silver, director of the Bend, Oregon-based Wild Wilderness — one of the very few environmental groups that has sounded the alarm — lives two blocks from the Deschutes River, world famous for its steelhead. “At the end of town the Deschutes National Forest begins,” he says. “Upriver for maybe five miles is what the Forest Service now calls a High Impact Recreation Area, and I cannot go anywhere there in a car without having paid. An access road runs parallel to the river, and there are about three perpendicular roads to it. You may be a mile away, but as soon as you enter one of those perpendicular roads you’re confronted by a sign that says ‘Entering Fee Area.’ I use a kayak. You’re not going to carry a kayak a mile.”

“These fees have been very controversial to say the least,” comments Rick Swanson, the Forest Service’s respected river and wetlands point person. “Look at the reaction you get when you talk about saltwater licenses. The whole gauntlet of, ‘Hell no I won’t pay,’ to ‘Yeah we really need to kick in more.’ It’s the same thing with fees. Some people realize what’s out there and what’s at stake and how we’re having trouble trying to provide recreation for the American public. The money is getting to the ground.”

Swanson’s saltwater-license analogy is especially apt, but not in the way he imagines. The real benefit of saltwater licenses has not been revenue for management but representation in management decisions for recreational interests (in this case anglers). The same is true of RAT. But what recreational interests are we talking about?

Fee Demonstration and the Recreation Enhancement Act were written by and for the motorized-recreation industry. There was no Congressional or public involvement. Both RAT laws were slipped through as midnight riders tacked to appropriation bills because the industry knew they couldn’t survive open debate.

Sponsoring Fee Demo via a cost-share partnership with the Forest Service was the powerful American Recreation Coalition (ARC) whose membership is comprised mainly of manufacturers of ATV’s, motorized trailbikes, jetskis and RV’s. And joining ARC in lobbying aggressively for both RAT laws have been the National Off Highway Vehicle Coalition, the National Snowmobile Manufacturers Association and such odious “wise-use” fronts for the motorized recreational industry as the Blue Ribbon Coalition.

As a result, anglers now have fewer places to find quietude and wildness or listen to birdsong or the music of rushing water or wind through forest canopies. Hike into any remote stream or pond in non-wilderness and you’re likely to be assaulted by the screech and whine of internal-combustion engines. Pretty discouraging when you’ve invested two or three hours, and the guys on the machines have invested 10 minutes.

Today ATV’s account for five percent of all visits to national forests and grasslands. Ninety percent of BLM lands are now open to motorized recreation; the agency even sponsors races. And the machines themselves have grown from little farmyard putt-putts to monsters with double seats, megashocks, and 700-cubic-centimeter engines.

Recreational vehicles need to be regulated, not banned. “You’re not going to get rid of them,” says Scott Silver. “But you can’t let these agencies look at motorized recreational industries and call them ‘partners’ and ‘stakeholders.’ That’s nonsense. The environmental community is under the delusion that motorized recreation is somehow going to be managed with these user fees. No. It’s going to be used and abused to give the industries the best advantage they can negotiate. Because we don’t understand reality, they’re negotiating better then we are.”

But the recreational-vehicle issue is just a sidebar. Although Rick Swanson has it right about RAT funds getting to the ground (at least in most cases), appropriations from Congress keep disappearing into bureaucratic black holes. So RAT money — virtually none of which goes to fisheries research or enhancement — has become both a replacement for squandered wealth and an incentive for continued profligacy.

Instead of shaking down visitors for a few extra bucks on top of what the IRS has taxed them to buy and maintain the property, on top of what state game and fish departments and the Park Service have charged them for fishing licenses, on top of what the Fish and Wildlife Service has charged them to buy and maintain refuges, and on top of what campgrounds charge them to spend the night, the agencies might try not wasting the money they already have. For instance, the BLM and Forest Service could save $2 billion a year and dramatically improve fishing and hunting by desisting from below-cost timber sales and unnecessary road building. The maintenance backlog for Forest Service roads (which could circle the globe 19 times) is $10 billion. It can’t even take care of the roads it has, and yet it’s building new ones.

What’s more, the non-motorized people paying RAT fees are the very ones most invested in public lands and who, in many instances, have volunteered to staff visitor centers, maintain trails, pick up litter, find lost hikers, remove invasive exotic plants, restore stream habitat, and backpack trout fry to high-country lakes. The best analogy I’ve seen is the Park Service sending France a bill for refurbishment and maintenance of the Statue of Liberty.

“I fish,” wrote John Voelker in probably the most quoted statement on angling since Walton, “because I love to, because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly.” But RAT puts federal resource agencies in the business of attracting crowds of people, thereby disfiguring the environs of trout. It motivates managers to ignore sportsmen and promote instead activities that damage fish and wildlife and conflict with fishing and hunting. Recreation becomes a business. Our rivers, lakes, grasslands and forests become Disneyfied amusement parks.

Noted outdoor writer and Field & Stream’s erstwhile conservation editor Michael Frome offers this: “Stewardship of public lands — especially wilderness — often requires limitation of use, but [RAT] provides a powerful incentive for managers to avoid anything that will limit use — the more use they can generate, the greater their budgets. Money is not the simple answer, but Congress must provide the funding to do the necessary administration to maintain these national treasures for future generations. It should not order administrators to merchandise the resource in order to pay their salaries.”

We’re seeing the results of this incentive in a new Forest Service program under way (sans public participation or Congressional oversight) called “Recreation Site Facility Master Planning.” The agency evaluates recreation facilities in each forest, then assesses them for profitability. In some forests this means closing almost half the recreational sites — the ones that generate the least revenue. The remote campgrounds and trailheads — places to which an angler seeking a quality fishing experience would naturally gravitate — are first to get disappeared. Bulldozers are knocking down campgrounds, dismantling latrines, even removing fire pits. You won’t be able to even park.

For instance, the new master plan for the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri calls for reducing “Recreation Areas” (containing one or more campgrounds, picnic areas, boat accesses or trailheads) from 53 to 30, campgrounds from 36 to 22, picnic areas from 41 to 25, and trailheads from 51 to 38. In Colorado about half the 140 campgrounds and other recreational facilities on the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison national forests face closure. The BLM has just announced a similar plan.

RAT fees provide an excuse for Congress and the administration to chip away at critically needed programs such as the Land and Water Conservation Fund (derived from oil and gas exploration leases). The four agencies use the fund to purchase fish and wildlife habitat, an activity the president frowns on because the privatizers inside and outside the White House who have his ear contend that the feds shouldn’t be “tying up land.” The Land and Water Conservation Fund is supposed to provide $900 million a year for public-lands projects to offset damage caused by offshore drilling. For 2007 the president has asked for $84 million.

The Western Slope No-Fee Coalition estimates that the Forest Service will decommission about 3,000 campsites, day-use facilities, picnic areas, trailheads and parking places. “Very little budget money from Congress is getting to the ground,” says the group’s president, Robert Funkhouser. “About 80 percent is used for administration.” As for anglers getting any return on their RAT investments, Funkhouser says this: “I stay pretty close to this subject, and I have never heard about fee revenue going toward fish or fish habitat. I would feel pretty comfortable saying it doesn’t.”

The same grim scenario is unfolding on our national wildlife refuges that the Bush administration — again, at the behest of privatizers — has placed on a starvation diet. RAT fees aren’t helping. Last December I visited the Pahranagat Valley National Wildlife Refuge in southern Nevada — a 10-mile ribbon of green in the Mojave Desert and one of the few places in this, our driest state, where the public can fish. The Upper Lake has a good population of largemouth bass, but it’s infested with carp. The carp muddy the water, degrading bass habitat and preventing photosynthesis in plants that sustain waterfowl.

To keep the carp out the refuge installed weirs on the pathetic, irrigation-depleted remains of its water source, the White River. But it has no money to maintain the weirs (which are rotting where they stand) and no money to control the carp. This is a land of imperiled desert fishes — relics from extinct glacial lakes that have miraculously adapted to desert life. The refuge contains many springs that probably sustain federally listed species such as threatened White River springfish and possibly endangered roundtail chubs (clinging to existence in a nearby artificial pond and thought to be extinct in the wild). But the refuge can’t even afford a biologist to inventory the springs. “I need that data to make good decisions,” declares refuge manager, Merry Maxwell.

In January the Fish and Wildlife Service’s eight-state, 54-refuge Midwest Region announced a plan to reduce the workforce by about 20 percent. “Our sense is that about a third of the refuges in that region are going to be in ‘preservation status,’ which means they’ll be unstaffed,” says Jeff Ruch, director of Public Employees for Environmental Ethics.

Summing up the whole sorry mess for all federal resource agencies is district ranger Cid Morgan of the Angeles National Forest in California: “We’re going to have to do more with less until we do everything with nothing.”

As abusive as RAT fees are in their own right, the Forest Service is abusing them further by playing fast and loose with the law. The Recreation Enhancement Act of 2004 was supposed to fix all the problems with Fee Demo. No longer would the public be charged just to, say, go fishing, but only if a site had “significant investment,” which the act defined as six amenities: security services (staffers who check to see if you’ve paid), parking, toilets, picnic tables, permanent trash receptacles and permanent interpretation (signs with such messages as “Don’t feed the animals”).

What happened on the Deschutes National Forest is typical. “One day,” says Scott Silver, “and I mean one day, the Forest Service goes out and buys a bunch of 30-gallon, galvanized trashcans and some chains and padlocks and drops them off at places they’d been charging without being in compliance.”

A site has to have all six amenities. But the Forest Service has dreamed up a way of getting around the law by designating sections of forest as “High Impact Recreation Areas” (HIRA’s). One corner of a HIRA has a sign; another corner, perhaps two miles away, might have a trash can. Three miles from both might be a parking lot. The Recreation Enhancement Act makes no reference, oblique or otherwise, to anything like an HIRA. The concept is simply Forest Service sleight of hand. And HIRA’s are being set up all across the national forest system.

The Forest Service has been flouting even its own bizarre interpretation of the law. Last year it admitted to the Senate Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests that 739 HIRA’s didn’t have the six amenities. Moreover, it had not bothered to report 627 of these HIRA’s to Congress, a violation of the Recreation Enhancement Act, which forbids designation of new fee sites without public participation. And there are at least 3,000 former Fee Demo sites outside HIRA’s that are still charging fees, many of them illegally.

When Scott Silver got a ticket for refusing to pay a RAT fee in a Deschutes HIRA he informed the US attorney that he would be representing himself in court. The feds immediately dropped the charge. But they prosecuted Christine Wallace, a Tucson legal secretary, who wouldn’t pay two tickets for what amounted to hiking without a license on a Coronado National Forest HIRA in Arizona. While the Recreation Enhancement Act allows RAT fees, it specifically prohibits the Forest Service and BLM from charging entrance fees. Accordingly, the court found that by charging a fee for entering the HIRA and for parking, the Forest Service had illegally implemented the law.

But the agency appealed and on January 16, 2007 won a reversal. If the ruling stands, it establishes case law that makes it a crime to fish or even get out of your vehicle on your own land without finding a ranger station (if one is open) and coughing up money that even the motorized-recreation axis that hatched RAT fees never intended for you to pay.

When federal agencies come to depend on funding from special interests the special interests wind up running the show. In the fish-rich Sawtooth National Recreation Area in Idaho, as on so much public land entrusted to the Forest Service, the campgrounds have been taken over by concessionaires. After a public-relations disaster in this land of fed haters, managers here have recently backed away from RAT fees. But the damage has been done.

“Services at the concessionaire-run campgrounds are minimal and charges are high,” says former Idaho conservation officer Gary Gadwa, who now directs the Sawtooth Interpretive and Historical Association and volunteers for the Forest Service. “You might as well be paying to stay in an RV park. That’s how expensive the campgrounds have become. We get 1.5 million visitors a year. This area is very popular for fishing — high-mountain lakes, streams, rivers and steelhead in the Salmon River. But very little of the [RAT] money went to fisheries or fisheries research and with all the fishing opportunities the need is great.”

There’s also a pressing need on the Sawtooth and elsewhere for monitoring species listed under the Endangered Species Act such as Chinook salmon, sockeye salmon, steelhead and bull trout. But the Recreational Enhancement Act explicitly prohibits the agencies from spending RAT fees for this purpose. The law was written by Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA) whose career-long crusade against the Endangered Species Act got him defeated in the last election.

Empowered by RAT fees, concessionaires are taking over our national parks as well as our national forests. So bad has the Disneyfication processes become that in 2005 the Park Service nearly succeeded with a “draft directive” in which it would have raised additional funds through corporate sponsorship. Gale Norton, then secretary of Interior and the Bush administration’s queen privatizer, called the proposal “exciting.” Most any corporate enterprise, even alcohol, tobacco and gambling companies, would have been eligible for sponsorship. Had not the public recoiled in disgust, the promo might have read: “Fish Grand Teton National Park, brought to you by Wonder Bra.”

Still, the Park Service has what it calls “Proud Partners” (American Airlines, Discovery Communications, Inc., Ford Motor Company and Unilever) whose monetary contributions allow them to cash in on the Park Service logo. And another overt effort like the draft directive of 2005 would be anything but a surprise.

Pombo and the motorized recreational industries that brought us RAT fees never intended them to benefit fish, wildlife or any of the other natural attributes that make our public lands so special. A veteran Park Service biologist told me this: “Back in 2000 the Bush campaign talked about the maintenance backlog in the parks. The strategy, as I perceive it, was to redirect fee dollars away from all the important projects that parks were spending them on — planning, resource work, management. The Recreation Enhancement Act has basically taken away the ability to fund those programs. And now the administration can say, ‘Oh look we’re spending millions on maintenance.’”

RAT fees are just part of a decades-old campaign to privatize government and the land it manages. Perhaps that agenda is best articulated by Republican spinmeister Grover Norquist, who runs the anti-tax lobbying outfit Americans for Tax Reform: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

As long as Bush/Reagan-era privatizers wield power in the legislative and executive branches of government the future looks bleak. On February 2, 2007 the Forest Service’s northern regional forester, Abigail Kimbell, took over for retiring chief Dale Bosworth, a decent, competent man who tried and often was not allowed to do the right thing and who pursued the administration’s privatization agenda but without much enthusiasm.

Kimbell, on the other hand, has compiled a long record of brutal timber extraction and punishing her employees for doing their jobs, especially when it comes to defending fish and wildlife.

She says she wants to increase access fees.

The Corps has tried to control nature. Now it’s time to control the Corps

The US Army Corps of Engineers was established in 1779 when nature was seen as the enemy, and–despite the percolation of new ideas through the rest of our society–it has stayed the course in its war against nature ever since. “This nation has a large and powerful adversary,” the Corps explained in one of its early promotional films. “We are fighting Mother Nature. . . . It’s a battle we have to fight day by day, year by year; the health of our economy depends on victory.” As with all wars on nature, this one has gone badly from the start.

More recently–in 1999–the Corps hatched an official prayer in which it thanks the “engineer of all eternity” for “holding the plumb line of the cosmos” and beseeches him to assist it in “making rough places smooth, crooked ways straight and . . . our calculations accurate.” But aquatic life evolved in “rough” and “crooked” places–i.e., rivers–and when you convert them to straight gutters you wipe out fish and the ecosystems in which they function. Indeed, no federal, state or private entity has destroyed more fish habitat than the Corps. With bulldozers, dredges, draglines and more than 500 major dams it has degraded or destroyed 30,000 miles of river. It has hacked 11,000 miles of navigation channels through some of the nation’s most valuable wetlands, and with 8,500 miles of levees and floodwalls it has cut off rivers from their floodplains and fish from their spawning and nursery habitat. When conservationists first asked the Corps to install fish ladders on its newly completed Bonneville Dam, lowermost impediment to salmon and steelhead migration on the Columbia River, its official response was: “We will not play nursemaid to the fish.” That’s one pledge it has kept.

What the Corps prays for and what it really wants are two very different things. At every opportunity it brazenly fudges its benefit-cost calculations, going so far as to enter conversion of flood-absorbing marsh to developable real estate in the benefit column. Upon review of its $286 million proposal to deepen the Delaware River’s main channel, the Government Accountability Office found that the Corps’ benefit-cost analysis “contained or was based on miscalculations, invalid assumptions, and outdated information” and that “the benefits for which there is credible support would be about $13.3 million a year, as compared to the $40.1 million a year claimed [by] the Corps.”

In their review of the Corps’ Upper Mississippi River Navigation Expansion–a monumental boondoggle that would devastate fish and wildlife by messing up flows and floodplain habitat–both the Army Inspector General and the National Academy of Sciences found that senior Corps officials had manipulated the economic model to justify the project. When Donald Sweeney, the Corps’ own Ph.D. economist, demonstrated that his agency’s plan to double the length of seven 600-foot locks on the Upper Mississippi would cost $1 billion but produce only $750 million in benefits he was, according to his sworn affidavit, ordered to “ignore” and “alter” data and “arbitrarily reduce” expenses in order “to produce a seemingly favorable benefit-to-cost ratio for immediately extending the length of existing locks” and “to find a way to justify large-scale measures in the near term for the [study], or the Mississippi Valley District office would find an economist who would, and I would be out of my job as technical manager.” Sweeney refused and, one week later, was dismissed as leader of the economic study team. When the new team leader, economist Richard Manguno, also found that the lock expansion was not economically justified, he too was ordered to fudge his figures, according to his sworn testimony. Eventually, however, he complied. Such is the Corps’ commitment to keeping its “calculations accurate.”

Most Corps projects are aimed at controlling floods, but the only flood control that ever worked is wetlands; and the Corps destroys them. Since World War II it has spent $100 billion attempting to stop US rivers from doing their thing, yet during the same period average annual flood damage has steadily climbed to nearly $8 billion. “We harnessed it, straightened it, regulated it, shackled it,” bragged the Corps after it fitted the Mississippi with a corset of levees longer, higher and thicker than the Great Wall of China. Then in 1993, as it does every few decades, the river flexed into its floodplain, blowing out the levees, topping the dams, destroying $15 billion worth of property, and displacing 74,000 people. It was an act of engineers, but America called it “an act of God.”

America called the destruction of New Orleans “an act of God,” too. But it should have blamed the Corps and Congress (which funds and authorizes its wasteful, destructive and counterproductive projects). For the five millennia before the Army engineers “improved” the Mississippi, as they like to say, the river had built its own flood control–a rich mosaic of forests, ponds, swamps, sloughs, and five million acres of flood-absorbing, fish-and-wildlife-rich delta marsh. But with its levee system the Corps has converted the river into a sluiceway that shunts marsh-building sediments into the Gulf and over the lip of the continental shelf. Corps projects (along with oil-and-gas access canals) have destroyed 1,900 square miles of delta marsh, thereby bringing the sea 30 miles closer to New Orleans.

Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, Corps brass and President Bush expressed astonishment that the levees had failed. But everyone who had been paying attention, including a few rank-and-file Army engineers, had been predicting that failure for years. In 1999 about 50 conservation leaders–later to gel into the “Corps Reform Network”–met in Louisiana to strategize about how best to encourage the Corps to protect instead of destroy natural resources. Their first action was to go to the district engineer and implore him to close the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (aka “Mr. Go”), a dangerous and essentially useless 76-mile navigation channel connecting the Gulf of Mexico to the Port of New Orleans’ Inner Harbor Navigation Canal in eastern New Orleans.

To create Mr. Go the Corps slashed through natural levees and wetlands to a depth of 36 feet and a surface width of 650 feet. But the soft marsh soils kept sloughing off the banks. Today, in its 42nd year, Mr. Go is nearly a half-mile wide, and the Corps spends $22 million a year dredging out the dirt. This equates to $35,000 in maintenance fees for each vessel that passes through (on average only one per day). Basically, warned the conservationists, Mr. Go was good for nothing save delivering storm surges to New Orleans. The district engineer blew them off. Six years later Hurricane Katrina pushed the Gulf up Mr. Go, over the levees and into New Orleans.

The LSU Hurricane Center’s deputy director, Ivor van Heerden, got blown off too when he warned the Corps of the danger in which it had placed New Orleans. “What bothers me the most is all the people who’ve died unnecessarily,” he told NBC’s Lisa Myers. “Those Corps of Engineers people giggled in the back of the room when we tried to present information.” And the New Orleans Times-Picayune did not exaggerate when it blamed the Corps for “the deaths of more than 1,000 residents.”

After I had inspected the damage to Louisiana habitat (both human and nonhuman) and interviewed some of the victims and the conservationists who had forecast their fate, it was time to, well, go fishing. The coastal marshes south of Houma seemed endless and timeless, and save for the smashed and overturned boats there was no sign that anything was wrong. Shorebirds and roseate spoonbills worked the mudflats, sheepsheads swirled, dolphins herded panicked mullet, and flights of waterfowl hung over the horizons like black crepe. What guide Dan Ayo and I focused most on, however, were the “crawlers,” as he and his fellow Cajuns call the redfish that sashay through the shallows with their bodies half out of water. In the deeper sections I had to drop the copper-foil fly within six inches of a redfish’s snout, but crawlers are hunting crabs and will chase down a fly from six feet. When the tide got higher and the redfish vanished, Ayo put me on suitcase-size black drum that churned across the flats like draft horses, towing most of my backing.

These beautiful fish and all the life I was seeing in and around this marsh are vanishing because the marsh is vanishing. Thanks in large measure to the Corps’ levee system, it is racing inland at the appalling rate of one half mile per year. The map on your GPS will tell you you’re about to crash into shore, but local watermen ignore it and keep going because no map is up to date, and with some you don’t have to touch the throttle for five miles after the monitor declares “landfall.” As the water deepens, waves break apart more marsh, further deep-ening the water and allowing still bigger waves. Meanwhile, as the slug of saltwater moves inland, bass, crappies, turtles, alligators, frogs and entire freshwater ecosystems expire. Principally through her marshes, Louisiana produces one quarter of the nation’s seafood. But unless something drastic is done so that the Mississippi can again drop its silt inshore, Louisiana will lose all its coastal marshes and the creatures they sustain. And New Orleans will become a levee-rimmed goldfish bowl submerged in the sea.

I can’t think of a more important sportfishing river in the South than the 107-mile-long Apalachicola that drains 21,794 square miles in Alabama, Georgia and Florida and bisects Florida’s Panhandle from north to south. It has produced the state record redeye bass (7.83 pounds), the state record spotted bass (3.75 pounds), the state record striped bass (42.25 pounds), and the state record white bass (4.69 pounds). Yet to facilitate imaginary barge traffic it has been hacked up and flushed toilet-style by the Corps.

Dredging and spoil dumping have dest-royed wetlands and bottomland forests for a quarter of the river’s length, reducing gamefish populations in these areas by 50 to 75 percent. At 60 feet in elevation, one of the spoil piles, known as “Sand Mountain,” is the highest point in northern Florida. The spoil blocks access to spawning and nursery habitat in a maze of sloughs and side channels. Dredging alone wasn’t sufficient to float barges, so the Corps provided water releases for what it called “navigation windows,” thereby exterminating fry and eggs and triggering spawning behavior at precisely the wrong times. In 2000 a navigation window eliminated the year class of all gamefish in the river and upstream reservoirs. The flushing and dredging has degraded critical habitat of the threatened gulf sturgeon as well as threatened and endangered mussels, and it has damaged an estuarine ecosystem that produces 15 percent of the nation’s oysters.

All this went down despite the fact that barge traffic was essentially non-existent. As early as 2000 Assistant Secretary of the Army Joseph Westphal stated in writing that maintaining navigation on the river at an annual cost of $10 million was “not economically justified or environmentally defensible.” That year a grand total of 33 barges used the river. In 2003 only nine barges used the river, at a cost to US taxpayers of slightly more than $1 million per barge. To borrow the words of Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), it would have been “cheaper to ship cargo by limousine.”

In 2004 the Corps applied for a new dredging permit on the Apalachicola River, then ignored the state’s repeated requests for additional information. By October 11, 2005 the Florida Department of Environmental Protection had had enough. On that day it denied the Corps’ request. “Florida has stood up to the Corps and given the river a new lease on life,” declared Melissa Samet, senior director for water resources at American Rivers and co-chair of the Corps Reform Network. “As the river recovers from the damage that has been done, people can look forward to a healthier resource for themselves and their children to enjoy.”

Attempts at reforming the Corps have been underway for some time. For instance, the House Ways and Means Committee complained of no less than 25 over-budget projects and called for “actual [Corps] reform, in the further prosecution of public works.” The year was 1836. Upon vetoing a host of Corps boondoggles contained in the Rivers and Harbors Act, the President of the United States declared, “I cannot overstate my opposition to this kind of waste of public funds.” The president was Dwight Eisenhower.

But the Army-engineered Katrina tragedy and the State of Florida’s eloquent statement have gotten the public’s attention as never before. Under the inspired leadership of Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI) and John McCain (R-AZ) the Senate has recently passed an omnibus bill (the Water Resources

Planning and Modernization Act of 2006) that would implement real Corps reforms, protecting fish, wildlife and taxpayers in the following important ways:

Priorities. The Senate bill would require the Corps to prioritize projects according to genuine needs of the American people rather than appetites and ambitions of the agency’s congressional funders who use it as a conduit for funneling federal pork into their districts. And it would require the Corps to reduce flood danger by discour-aging unwise use of floodplains and by restoring flood-absorbing wetlands. Currently the agency has a $58 billion backlog of authorized projects–maybe 30 years worth. But it only gets $2 billion a year in construction funds.

Planning. The bill would modernize the Corps’ planning process, which currently allows it to destroy wetlands and construct dams and levees that lure the public into harm’s way. Under the new guidelines the Corps would be limited to projects that protect wetlands, fish, wildlife and the public.

Independent review. The bill would require outside review of projects to ensure that they are properly designed, cost effective, and that they reduce rather than augment flood damage. In July there was a major showdown on the Senate floor. After Senators Feingold, McCain and others got their independent-review amendment approved Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), chair of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, and Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), chair of the subcommittee that handles water-resources bills, moved to substitute their own sham review provision. It failed by a vote of 51-49.

Mitigation. The bill would hold the Corps to the same standards the agency imposes on other wetland developers–i.e. require it to compensate for impacts to wetlands and other fish and wildlife habitat by restoring or re-creating it elsewhere.

The House bill, on the other hand, is worthless. And at this writing compromise legislation has failed in conference due to conflicts over the reforms as well as more than 100 projects (many of them traditional Corps boondoggles). Still, the fact that reforms are at last being seriously debated is encouraging.

“This is a pregnant moment,” says David Conrad of the National Wildlife Federation. “We’re seeing the Corps involved in some important restoration activities critical to the long-term viability and health of some of nation’s most important ecosystems. And Congress has been throwing all responsibility to the wind, authorizing anything and everything that comes along, including reducing non-federal responsibilities for existing projects and piling additional burdens on US taxpayers. As a result the chance for restoration–the really important work of the Corps in the 21st Century–is slipping away.”

Occasionally the Corps does do some good work, most of which is undoing its past bad work. On Massachusetts’ Charles River, for example, it flabbergasted the environmental community way back in 1972 by coming out against a proposal for an expensive and ineffective flood-control dam and instead recommending and later implementing permanent protection for 8,500 acres of upstream wetlands as part of its “Natural Valley Storage Project.” On the Missouri River it restored a side channel near Nebraska City to aid native fish. On the Anacostia River in Washington, DC, it modified existing flood control to provide anadromous fish with access to five miles of the mainstem. On the Mississippi, between St. Paul and St. Louis, it restored 28,000 acres of aquatic habitat. In Washington state the Corps, in cooperation with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, invited combat engineers from the 14th Engineer Battalion to practice operations by blowing a hole in a levee near the mouth of the Skagit River, thereby restoring tidal flows and access of salmonid smolts to the rich estuary where they can grow large enough to stand a decent chance of surviving ocean predators. Having gutterized Florida’s serpentine Kissimmee River so that it no longer filtered sediments but shot them directly into Lake Okeechobee (by most accounts the best bass lake in the world), the Corps set about restoring the “crooked” places created by “the engineer of all eternity.” And, having nearly destroyed the Everglades with its drainage and channelization projects, the Corps is spending $8 billion on a partial fix-it job. “This is by far the largest aquatic ecosystem restoration project in history,” says Conrad. “All eyes in the water-resources world are watching this to see what these Americans are trying to do.”

American taxpayers need to insist that this kind of work be the new mission for the US Army Corps of Engineers. They won’t get any argument from the Corps, which doesn’t care what it does so long as it keeps busy. Like a hunting dog it is equally happy working constructively in the field or digging in the tulips. And, as it has demonstrated with a small percentage of projects, it can ladle out just as much federal pork by repairing fish and wildlife habitat as by destroying it.

 A Plague on All Your Forests by Ted Williams

Country roads may ‘take you home,’ but logging roads ruin rivers

 If you want to locate the best fishing in our national forests, find the logging roads; then go somewhere else. Road building is the federal government’s single most destructive land-management practice. Roads are mortality sinks for all manner of fish and wildlife. They fragment habitat; they cause landslides; they block fish migration with their frequently impassible culverts; they serve as delivery systems for silt that bleeds off clearcuts; they provide conduits for invasions of cowbirds and invasive exotic plants.

Consider Deer Creek in Idaho’s Caribou-Targhee National Forest. Because it is in part of the forest that, until recently, was officially roadless Deer Creek runs cold and clear, and it ripples with big Yellowstone cutts-one of the most beautiful and ephemeral essences of the American West and recently petitioned for listing under the Endangered Species Act. So pristine was Deer Creek that, in August 2003, a Forest Service survey crew determined that it should be used as the standard of excellence, “a reference area for comparison to streams impacted by various land uses.” The survey team went on to recommend “that activities not be allowed which would reduce the quality of fish and amphibian habitat in the drainage.”

That recommendation certainly is in keeping with the Forest Service’s stated “fish mission” for the 150,000 stream miles and 2.5 million lake acres we’ve entrusted it with: “World-class fishing depends on world-class habitats, and the US Forest Service together with other federal, state and local partners, is working hard to protect, restore and enhance your streams and lakes.” Well, not really.

Deer Creek, along with other pristine trout streams in the Sage Creek Roadless Area, had been protected by President Clinton’s roadless rule. Last August-two months after the Bush administration rescinded that rule-Deer Creek became the first victim of the administration’s substitute, which relies on “local control” for roadless-area management. In Idaho, dominated by timber and mining interests and with more roadless national forestland than any state other than Alaska, that’s like asking two racoons and a hen to vote on what to have for lunch. A major road was punched into the Deer Creek watershed for the benefit of J.R. Simplot Company, which will now drill 25 exploration holes and, if it finds the phosphate its geologists say is there, will expand its open-pit strip mine for another 6.5 miles-through the Deer Creek drainage and the drainages of Manning, Wells Canyon, and upper Crow creeks, all prime cutthroat habitat.

“The Sage Creek Roadless Area, which protected the headwaters of what I consider some of the best cutthroat trout streams in the state, is no longer a roadless area,” laments Pete Zimowsky in The Idaho Statesman. “It was a place where many big game hunters packed in on horseback to hunt trophy mulies and elk. It was a place where you could wander through groves of aspen on fall hikes and be amazed by the colors. . . .Will [the area] be the same for my grandson, as it was for my kids? No, it won’t.”
How did we get from a “roadless rule” that protects trout streams to one that sacrifices them? The story starts in the late 1990′s when a young, utterly aberrant bureaucrat was running the US Forest Service. His background was not in timber extraction but in fishing, guiding, teaching and fisheries biology. His name was Michael Dombeck, and he understood what no chief before or since has understood-that the most valuable resource produced by our national forests is water. Dombeck also understood that the best of that water comes from the healthiest woods, woods undefiled by roads, and that there aren’t a lot of that kind left. In fact, only 58.5 million acres-two percent of the American landscape-were designated by his agency as “roadless,” meaning they were greater than 5,000 acres and lacked the major, high-speed logging-truck highways taxpayers buy for timber companies. There were all kinds of smaller roads that allowed vehicular access by sportsmen.

If you just count major roads, the Forest Service has built or paid timber companies to build 383,000 miles worth-222,000 miles more than exist in all of our national highway system. You and I got to pay for these roads twice-first, with our fish, wildlife, plants, soil and water; then with our tax dollars. And we’re paying for them still because the Forest Service can’t begin to maintain them and, as a result, they’re sloughing into the lakes and streams it claims to be “working hard to protect.” The road-maintenance backlog is now $10 billion. Meanwhile, we’re paying for new national-forest roads. Roads are the main reason sales of the public’s timber cost the public about $400 million a year.

Roadless areas are roadless for an excellent reason; they were the places Big Timber didn’t want to go-the steep, infertile, icy, fragile, water-rich, trout-filled places. In fact, the national forests themselves were acquired because the timber industry didn’t want them. Even today, after the industry has high-graded its own holdings, the national forests contribute less than five percent of the nation’s lumber and pulp. If all national-forest logging ended tomorrow, our economy wouldn’t flinch, and private-land operators would be spared subsidized timber sales that drive down fair-market value of their logs.

Dombeck, like every other thinking conservationist, concluded that the last thing our national forests needed was more major roads, especially in areas greater than 5,000 acres where none exist. So in January 1999, as part of a modern “transportation policy” for his agency, he proposed an 18-month moratorium on road building in 130 national forests. The industry, accustomed to doing whatever it pleased on our national forestland, was apoplectic. In separate, ultimately unsuccessful, actions the State of Idaho and the Wyoming Timber Industry Association sued in federal district court.

In the most extensive and wide-ranging environmental review in the history of federal rule making, the Forest Service held 600 hearings in 37 states and collected 2.5 million public comments, 96 percent supportive. A poll by Responsive Management of Harrisonburg, Virginia, revealed that 84 percent of America’s hunters and 86 percent of America’s anglers favored keeping roads out of roadless areas. It was by far the most popular rule ever hatched by a federal resource agency.

On January 12, 2001, largely on the strength of that public commentary, President Clinton issued the Roadless Area Conservation Policy directive that ended virtually all logging, roadbuilding and coal, gas, oil and other mineral leasing in 58 million acres of our last best forestland.

Then George W. Bush became president. To run the Forest Service as undersecretary of agriculture, he selected Mark Rey who, as a timber-industry lobbyist and later as a staffer for forest subcommittee chair Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), had dedicated himself to increasing the cut on our national forests.

Immediate revocation of an initiative as popular as the roadless rule would have been politically costly. So the Bush White House set about administering daily drops of arsenic. First, it put the rule on hold for two months; then it refused to defend it in court. It even aided and abetted the plaintiffs by gushing about the timber industry’s imagined woes-this despite the pledge to Congress by John Ashcroft, taken under oath during his confirmation hearings as attorney general, that he would defend the rule as the “law of the land.”

In July 2001, in one of Rey’s most cynically brilliant moves, the Forest Service issued an “interim directive” to local agency brass instructing them that the decision on whether or not roadless areas should be protected would now be in their hands. No longer would Forest Service officials committed to roadless protection be able to blame it on federal law; now they’d have to confront their neighbors, the powerful, well-connected timber executives who employed them, and the legislators who vote Forest Service appropriations and say: “Sorry, I’ve decided those trees are off limits.” The directive also proclaimed that there would be no roadless protection for Alaska’s Tongass and 11 other national forests. In September Rey proposed exempting major activities in roadless areas from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). In December he issued a directive that relaxed standards for road construction in roadless areas.

As Rey chipped away at Clinton’s rule he launched concurrent attacks on the roadless areas themselves and on national forests in general. To circumvent the inconvenience of the Endangered Species Act, which requires federal agencies to consult with professional scientists of the Fish and Wildlife Service or NOAA Fisheries on projects that would destroy habitat of listed species-timber sales, for instance-the Bush administration now proposed “self-consultation” by agencies like the Forest Service, which, under Rey, functions as a wholly owned subsidiary of the timber industry. Rey did away with the wildlife liability regulations, implemented under President Reagan, which required the Forest Service to maintain viable populations of fish and wildlife across each planning unit. In its place he imposed a standard that requires managers merely to think about fish and wildlife sustainability. As part of the administration’s “Healthy Forest Initiative,” Rey tried (and is trying still) to categorically exclude timber sales and forest plans from environmental review and cut the public out of forest-management decision making.

The Bush administration officially killed the roadless rule on May 5, 2005, replacing it with a rule that gives Rey power to decide what roadless areas, if any, get protected but meanwhile invites the governors of each state to do the Forest Service’s work for it-that is, commit to an expensive, tedious and perhaps ultimately pointless exercise in which state employees gather data, do inventories, dispense information and hold public hearings. Forest supervisors and regional foresters have been quietly contacting governors and urging them to forget about making recommendations for roadless-area protection and just let the Forest Service deal with it in its planning process.

“If you’re not going to have a nationwide policy, why create a special process like this?” asks the Sierra Club’s Sean Cosgrove. The answer, of course, is that it sounds better than just announcing you’ve killed the roadless rule.

Some states, however, understand that “local control” is a euphemism for business as usual. Local control, after all, is why our national forests are already sliced and diced with 383,000 miles of roads-enough to circle the globe 15 times. The attorneys general of California, New Mexico and Oregon responded to Rey’s subterfuge by suing the Bush administration, charging that by replacing the roadless rule with a state-by-state petition process the Forest Service violated NEPA.

“When the 2005 Rule was announced, I made it clear that the federal government’s actions placed an unfair and unnecessary burden on states that would amount to a price tag of millions of dollars and result in piecemeal management of federal forest land,” declared Oregon governor Ted Kulongoski. “The 2005 Rule turns back the clock on years of work, including public input and taxpayers’ dollars, and the end result is greater uncertainty about the protection of our special roadless areas-not greater security.” In November the Bush administration rejected Kulongoski’s request for a rule amendment that would give states greater assurance that fish, wildlife and clean water be protected in roadless parts of national forests.

New Mexico’s attorney general Patricia Madrid said: “Our water supply comes from our forests and depends upon those forests remaining healthy . . . The federal government acknowledges that road-building and timber harvest will result in decreased water quality, increased sediment and pollutants; yet they refuse to protect our state’s few remaining pristine areas. They have also refused to follow federal law that requires them to look at the impacts of their actions on the environment . . . When the Bush administration refuses to obey the law, we have no choice but to sue them.”

“I am filing this lawsuit because the Bush Administration is putting at risk some of the last, most pristine portions of America’s national forests,” announced California’s attorney general, Bill Lockyer.

On the other hand, Idaho’s elected officials-most notably Sen. Larry Craig and Governor Dirk Kempthorne-are positively giddy about the demise of roadless protection. This seems odd because the state’s 9,322,000 acres of roadless national forestland is keeping imperiled fish and wildlife vital to the state’s economy on the planet and, at least in some cases, off the Endangered Species List. For example, Idaho’s roadless areas contain 68 percent of the state’s remaining bull trout habitat, 74 percent of the chinook salmon habitat, 74 percent of the steelhead habitat, 58 percent of the cutthroat habitat, and 48 percent of the redband rainbow trout habitat. And these areas produce the biggest and most elk and deer. After construction of new logging roads on the Targhee half of Idaho’s Caribou-Targhee National Forest, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game cut the elk rifle season from 44 to five days.

Idaho is also home of the most tireless and pernicious of all roadless-protection opponents-a wise-use, timber-mining front called the BlueRibbon Coalition. Here’s an example of how it operates: In 2004 the Forest Service asked for local input in preparing a new travel plan for the Caribou half of the Caribou-Targhee, as if locals owned the forest. Accordingly, Marv Hoyt, Idaho director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, sat down with virtually all invested non-motorized user groups-such diverse outfits as the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, the Eagle Rock Backcountry Horsemen, the Idaho Conservation League, the Southeast Idaho Recreation Alliance, the Western Watersheds Project, and the Southeast Idaho Mule Deer Foundation-and hashed out an eminently fair compromise over a period of about three months. “We had some 50 individuals and organizations,” Hoyt recalls. “We went over the maps of the whole forest, and we put together a balanced alternative that left 50 percent of the routes open to motorized use. Everybody signed it, and we sent it to the Forest Service. The BlueRibbon Coalition went after and obtained the document via a Freedom-of-Information-Act request, then mailed threatening letters to the organizations and individuals who had signed it, even boycotted businesses. They went after people in a really nasty way.”

The BlueRibbon Coalition’s letter, signed by its director, Clark Collins, read in part: “As representatives of recreation interest groups who enjoy the trails on the Caribou National Forest, we are offended by many of the recommendations you apparently support. . . . We would like to know what level of involvement you had with this document. We want to accurately represent your position to our readers. . . . A lack of response on your part will leave us no choice but to assume that you are in total agreement with the document, and we will so inform our members.”

The Forest Service responded to the alternative offered by the non-motorized users with a draft travel plan that completely blew them off and gave the motorheads all sorts of new ATV and snowmobile roads. “So the message is this,” says Hoyt, “‘If you intimidate people and stymie public comments, you’ll get rewarded.’”

With a few notable exceptions America’s sportsmen have been strangely silent on roadless-area protection, despite the fact that about 85 percent of them want it. Unfortunately, many of these exceptions are among the 15 percent who don’t want it. They include officials of make-believe conservation organizations such as the Ruffed Grouse Society (who obtain major financing from the timber lobby by whooping it up for roads and clearcuts at every opportunity) and outdoor writers who imagine that Clinton’s rule was a conspiracy to separate their butts from their four-wheelers (despite the fact that roadless areas have plenty of off-road-vehicle access) and thereby allocate to predators the game they otherwise would have shot.

Burt Carey, president of Western Outdoor Writers and editor of Rocky Mountain Game & Fish, California Game & Fish, and Washington-Oregon Game & Fish magazines, complains about what he calls “the Clinton administration’s thirst for creating wilderness and de facto wilderness (roadless areas) during Slick Willy’s second term, and his zeal in repopulating the American West with wolves, linx, grizzlies and other carnivores, and portions of the Southeast with wolves and panthers.”

According to Jim Shepherd of The Outdoor Wire-which bills itself as “the Outdoor Sports Industry’s Daily Transaction Newsletter”-the effort to limit roads on public land is really a plot by the antis. “To keep hunting alive in America,” writes Shepherd, “it’s critical that hunting become easier, rather than more challenging. Anti-hunting forces recognize that fact. They’ve already changed their tactics from their failed full-on assault on firearms to a ‘kinder, gentler’ approach to eliminating hunting: protecting the environment by increasing ‘protected’ wilderness areas. As more and more federal lands fall under the ever-broadening definitions of ‘protected’ areas, hunters and the hunting industry must recognize the fact that what some perceive to be diminished efforts to eliminate hunting is, in fact, a retrenching of the efforts to a more subtle-but equally fatal-outcome.”

In a rambling harangue delivered to conferees of the Outdoor Writers Association of America in June 2004-a year before the Bush administration officially killed Clinton’s roadless rule-Kayne Robinson, then president of the NRA and formerly GOP chairman of Iowa, railed against such imagined slights to sportsmen as their alleged eviction from roadless areas. “The Clinton administration closed millions of acres to hunting and shooting,” Robinson proclaimed. “Every acre should be reexamined.”

Mike Dombeck, the architect of the roadless rule (which didn’t close a single square foot of national forestland to hunting or fishing) happened to be sitting in the audience next to OWAA board member Tony Dean. Dombeck poked Dean in the ribs and asked him what the hell Robinson was talking about. (At a press conference later that day Robinson was unable to come up with a single example of land closed to sportsmen by Clinton’s rule.) The following week Rich Landers of The Spokane Spokesman-Review offered this commentary: “The NRA’s campaign to ‘propel hunter rights into the public arena’ stinks of opportunism. Robinson is trying to recruit uninformed hunters with the same big talk and promises a pimp uses to lure vulnerable girls into his realm. Some 12 million to 15 million American hunters are not NRA members, and this is no time for them to change their minds. Now, more than ever, a sportsman who is not an environmentalist is a fool.”

In the early 1980′s, when Bill Geer of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership was directing the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, he instructed his biologists to look for environmental factors that limited the size and number of deer. They found that the most important factor by far was road construction. “And in those days,” he recalls, “we promoted as many roads as the Forest Service.” So Geer had his agency do an about face and start closing roads. It proved to be the best thing he could have done for anglers and hunters.

I asked Geer why sportsmen keep working against their own interests-letting groups like the NRA and the Ruffed Grouse Society speak for them on roadless protection, voting in a president and legislators who cheerfully sacrifice fish and wildlife for the convenience of their campaign contributors. He couldn’t answer the question, but I liked his response: “I’ve had this theory ever since I was director in Utah. You could tell hunters and anglers that ‘tomorrow we’re going to round you up and shoot you,’ and they’d piss and moan about it all night long, and next morning they’d be lined up waiting to get shot.”