Buzz,
I know you're a Forest Service employee, RMRS no less, so you of all people should KNOW the management restrictions on "roadless areas" ARE so close to those in big-W designated wildernesses that there is no practical difference in policy or results on the ground. Don't deny what you know is true. I've still got a copy of that 1400-page monster EIS for the roadless rule. Don't make me dig it out and start book-chapter-verse.
The only exemption for road construction is with a Chief's ruling of some kind of threat. Any trails built will be non-mechanized or at the minimum non-motorized, because motorized use is a wilderness disqualifier -- and wilderness is the end goal for these lands.
Minerals, ski areas, active forestry, and the modern recreational uses preferred by a gigantic majority of USFS recreationists (you're USFS and have read the recreation visitor day (RVD) reports, so you know I'm correct) don't happen in wilderness, they can't, by law.
And they are also proscribed, for all practical purposes, for "roadless areas," by a unilateral edict of policy.
This edict occurred when the USFS was led by Mike Dombeck and his #2 guy in charge of the "roadless rule" was Chris Wood (his current bio reads "senior policy and communications advisor to the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service where he helped protect 58 million acres of publicly owned land," who JUST HAPPENS to be today President and CEO of Trout Unlimited, a position he took in fall 2001 right after leaving the Forest Service -- and was at TU while TU was fiscal sponsor of TRCP predecessor and Trout Unlimited "project" TRCA, A for Alliance.
Convenient, that was. Coincidence, purely.
But Wood's bio ties right into your claim about "only 18% of those lands are in designated wilderness, or around 34.7 million acres." His bio "helped protect 58 million acres" -- protection meaning a status that is wilderness with so few exceptions as to be meaningless. That's still 93 million acres, fully 48% of the Forest Service's entire land base. That's a lot of the total, even using your numbers -- half the land is reserved for, at most, the 10% of recreationist days that use politically-correct means or activities.
To claim that "roadless areas" don't count on the landscape as wilderness is untruthful.
To deny that "roadless areas" are not wilderness in fact, wilderness in terms of policy, is profoundly dishonest, especially coming from an agency employee.
And to claim that 160 million acres of USFS are open to multiple use (as under the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act, and perhaps even the Organic Act) when you KNOW that even areas open under existing Forest Plans are tied up in court way too often -- in THEORY, perhaps, but as long as we have Molloy and Christensen as federal judges, in PRACTICE you know, through your day job, that's flat out not true!
Again, you won't register that the 56 million acres of wilderness in Alaska came in one bill, at the end of the outgoing Carter adminstration over Alaskan opposition. Alaska is half the size of the entire Lower 48, and got a vast chunk of unpopular wilderness equal to half what everyone else has? I was there, and a lot of people were NOT okay with it. And do we want to argue about ANWR and the 1009 area (I think)? Oh, that's not really wilderness, nope.
And, when you mention BLM, don't say a WORD about the National Monument designations or the creation of the National Conservation Lands System. Don't tell what happens to mineral exploration or cattle grazing or transportation infrastructure in National Monuments, never mind hunting. Don't tell about the long history of NM's becoming National Parks (no hunting, kids) after a "decent interval."
