Perhaps as much as to any other single thing, Alaska owes its wildness and the splendor of its wildlife resources to its roadlessness. The clamor to change that grows and off-road vehicle users are behind most of it. Motors invade roadless areas, wilderness-quality lands, even designated wilderness and National Parks. The Wilderness Society
believes that in Alaska, areas must be closed to recreational motorized uses, including snowmachines and helicopters. These areas should be opened only after careful planning and analysis of environmental consequences.
We also recognize the need in Alaska for exceptions to the normal restrictions placed on motorized access for customary and traditional uses.
Rapid Expansion
Off-road vehicle use and abuse have expanded exponentially in Alaska over the past two decades. Dirt bikes, all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles, helicopters, jet skis and powerboats are taking their toll in the Great Land just as they are in the Lower 48.
That toll is well documented: damage to wetlands, water and air quality, fish habitat, anadramous streams, lake shores, rivers and bird nesting areas. As the power, range and number of these machines increase, so does the damage to the natural world. Existing laws, regulations and policies provide the necessary tools to manage ORV access in Alaska. But the agencies lack the will to use them.
Patterns of access and use are mostly created by the users and without agency planning or environmental consideration. The Alaska Department of Natural Resources says that 95 percent of south central Alaska, an area nearly 35 million acres in extent, is open to snowmobile use. And this is cross-country use, not use restricted to designated trails. But state and federal agencies are geographically evenhanded in their dereliction: they ignore off-road vehicle management in every other part of the state just as they do in south central Alaska.
Traditional Uses
The historic use of off-road vehicles in Alaska for transportation to homesites or for subsistence activities (berrypicking, fishing and hunting) is protected by the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). ANILCA is a special piece of U.S. land law, primarily because of its emphasis on protecting wilderness ecosystems in their entirety, including wildlife populations and cultural uses.
Users of motorized vehicles and industry claim that traditional use should include the destructive recreational use of these machines on our public lands. Under pressure from those motorized recreationists and industry lobbyists, land managers ignore the damage. As a result, illegal motorized use occurs in National Parks, in designated wilderness areas, in qualified candidate wilderness areas, thus threatening future wilderness designation.
Our Position
The position of The Wilderness Society and its partners is clear: In Alaska, as elsewhere, lands must be closed unless specifically opened to recreational off-road vehicle use. And they must be opened only after careful planning and environmental analysis determines the appropriateness of the use in light of other significant environmental and recreational values.
The 1866 Mining Law: Assault on Protected Landscapes
While metastasizing ORV use portends the piecemeal destruction of some of the American public's most treasured places in Alaska and elsewhere, the Interior Department now proposes to surrender them wholesale. The device by which it will accomplish that massive giveaway goes by the curious name of "RS 2477." A 19th Century artifact, it was a provision of the 1866 Mining Law. The Interior Department proposes to give it modern life and deadly effect.
The law was written at a time when the nation was encouraging settlement on the western frontier. The old statute gave miners the right to build roads across the public domain. In 1976, with the frontier clearly closed, the Congress repealed the old law but left open the opportunity for consideration of claims that predated the repeal.
Congress imposed a moratorium on processing of claims under the 1866 Mining Law several years ago. But in early January 2003, the Interior Department published a new rule that will allow it to move forward with such claims and without any public participation or environmental consideration in the process.
Using the rule, the department will simply disclaim any interest in the routes and lands involved, whether they are in wilderness areas, National Parks, National Wildlife Refuges, National Monuments, tribal or other Native lands or anywhere else.
Alaska's public lands are among those most at risk from the new scheme. Claims in Alaska could total nearly a million miles of routes, criss-crossing the state. That total gets large quickly because the State has already claimed rights of way for every section line, the invisible lines that demarcate square-mile sections of land. The Alaska Supreme Court upheld the state's right to make such an outlandish claim. And we know from statements an Interior Department official made in Alaska late in 2002, the department intends to use the new rule to transfer ownership of 22,000 lakes, streams and waterways in Alaska to the state.
The claims have almost nothing to do with legitimate transportation needs, everything to do with who controls the land, access to it and uses on it. The beneficiaries of the new rule will be dirt bikers and other ORV users (who are loudly cheering the rule), and oil and gas and mining interests. Losers will be the public whose lands these are and the air and water, fish and wildlife they now protect.
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