Goshandgolly, Smokethrower.
Zero acres? Not exactly. There are places where building roads makes no sense. I'm fine with that. "Roadless areas" under the Clinton rule alone are 58 million acres, out of 191 million acres under Forest Service. This was done because of solid Congressional opposition to new wilderness designations, very strong and Clinton couldn't go that way. Instead, we're talking simple lack of roads as the only criteria for putting lands into a bureaucratic, "de facto" regime that is wilderness without the capital W.
In effect, it was an enormous expansion of lands managed as wilderness with no regard for actual "outstanding" character as Congress intended.
The national total for "wilderness" as in "roadless" in addition to undesignated, now practically wilderness, is 109 million acres. So, a full fourth of USFS is "roadless" bureaucratic wilderness, plus designated areas of about 39 million more -- so 45 percent of the Forest Service estate is already single-use wilderness that prohibits any kind of modern (as in effective) management techniques (including firefighting) or modern-era recreation using any modern or mechanized implements.
That's not a small percentage, especially when you consider that over 90 percent of recreation visits are "non-wilderness" in method or means. Flipped over, that's 45 percent for the exclusive recreational use of only ten percent at most of all forest users. And that's not enough of the multiple-use pie? Really, smokescreen?
Half of the "legitimate" wilderness is in Alaska, 56 million acres designated over the howling objections of Alaska's delegation to Washington by freshly-unelected James Earl Carter and a Democratic Congress. I lived in Alaska when that happened, and people were P I S S E D at Carter's highhandedness. You know, the same pro-gun Jimmah Caddah that forced the NRA to get serious about gun rights?
I guess as long as the government leaves you your smokepole, or something else to smoke there in Colorado, it's all good for you. Fine.
