No Place Distant

Roads And Motorized Recreation On America's Public Lands

David Havlick

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781597263115
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

While many of the roads on public lands provide a great service with relatively little harm, others create significant problems -- from habitat fragmentation to noise pollution to increased animal mortality -- with little or no benefit.

In No Place Distant, author David Havlick presents for the first time a comprehensive and in-depth examination of the more than 550, 000 miles of roads that crisscross our national parks, national forests, Bureau of Land Management lands, and wildlife refuges, considering how they came to be; their ecological, financial, and societal costs; and what can be done to ensure that those roads are as environmentally benign and cost-effective as possible, while remaining functional and accessible. The book:

• places the profusion of roads on our public lands in historical context
• offers an overview of the ecological effects of roads
• explores the policies, politics, and economics that have fostered road-building on public lands
• considers the contentious topic of motorized recreation
• examines efforts to remove roads and restore degraded lands to health

Bringing together an impressive range and depth of information along with a thoughtful analysis of the issues, No Place Distant offers a definitive look at the debate over roads on public lands. With its well-crafted prose and extensive documentation, it is an unparalleled resource for anyone concerned with the health or management of public lands in the United States.

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea.. . .

—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

1 Introduction

In 1975, my parents took the whole family to our first big concert in Colorado. It was John Denver, live, and he was in his prime. Smoke machines pulsed during the rowdier songs, and even from our seats high in the arena we could see an occasional glint of laser light flashing off the singer’s round glasses. On our way home that night, and many times later on family trips, we broke into one of our favorite tunes from the concert: “Country roads, take me home, to the place I beloooong . . . ” and right about there our voices cracked on the high note and we collapsed into a pile of whoops and laughter.

Like most American kids, I grew up surrounded by roads. I walked down a road to get to school, bicycled to swim practice on roads, and, nestled in my family’s car, cruised along glorious highway miles to go to the mountains, visit national parks, or vacation for the summer. Roads were part of the background, an essential feature of my daily life, and I rarely thought much about them.

Years later, I hiked with two friends through the Rocky Mountains. We walked for six months, from Mexico to Canada, into some of the wildest country remaining in the continental United States, but some of my clearest memories of the entire trip come from those times we had to cross or hike on roads. For the first time in my life, I had managed to get away from roads long enough to notice them.

More and more people are starting to notice certain kinds of roads—those found on our nation’s public lands—and a good deal of what we are discovering is troublesome. This book is about roads on public lands. These are generally not the roads we drive home on each day or the interstate highways that speed us across the country (though these deserve attention too). Public land roads tend to be modest in size, consisting of gravel or dirt or two lanes of pavement, but they are vast in number. Crisscrossing our national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, and other federal lands, these public land roads cover more than half a million miles—enough to drive to the moon and back.

If you have ever visited the Great Smokies, Yellowstone, or other national parks, you have driven on public land roads. In national forests, you can scarcely miss them. The national forests, alone, are laced with enough roads to wrap around the earth more than eighteen times at the equator.

By comparison, the interstate highway system runs through most major U.S. cities and every state. At 43,000 miles it has been called the largest public works program in the history of the world, dwarfing the Panama Canal, Egypt’s pyramids, and the Great Wall of China.¹ Public land roads span nearly thirteen times the length of all the interstate highways.

This book examines the 550,000 miles of public land roads. Unlike the interstate highway system, most of these roads are not multi-lane thoroughfares and many are no longer even passable by high-clearance automobiles. To date, few people have considered the road system on public lands in any comprehensive way. Lacking this overarching view, we have put roads in many places without sound planning or a long-term vision and without considering the overall consequences or cumulative impacts.

Found most abundantly in the millions of acres of public land in the western United States, roads on our public domain vary in their characteristics and impacts but they all have one feature in common: they need to be noticed. These roads, and the surging industry of motorized recreation, now threaten to undermine many of the fundamental features that Americans have valued in their public lands for more than a century.

The Public Lands

To understand the roads, their impacts, and their possible futures, we first need to understand public lands. The lands discussed in this book are part of the U.S. public domain, owned by the citizens of the entire nation and managed purposefully by four different federal agencies. These agencies—the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, and U.S. Forest Service—employ more than 70,000 engineers, biologists, landscape architects, law enforcement officers, rangers, foresters, planners, and administrators to tend to the daily and long-term management of more than 600 million acres of land.²

Some of these lands are well-known, include outstanding natural features or wildlife, and attract millions of visitors each year. The national parks, in particular, have gained fame throughout the world. Many countries have created their own park systems after the U.S. model, which further contributes to the conservation and enjoyment of natural places. National parks such as Acadia, the Everglades, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Glacier are as varied as they are treasured. In all, there are more than 89 million acres dedicated in the national park system. These lands are to be managed for the conservation of natural scenery and wildlife, as well as for the lasting enjoyment of human visitors. And visit we do: in 2000 more than 287 million people came to at least one of the 384 units of the national park system.³ With highways intentionally linking one park to another, and scenic routes prominently constructed through their midsts, the way we visit most of these parks is on roads.

Though slightly less famous, the national forests cover more area, attract more annual visitors, and generate a steadier stream of controversy over their management than do their sibling parks. At 191 million acres, the national forests would appear plenty large—and some of them are—but they are pledged to a multiple-use agenda for management that frequently pits timber harvest against wildlife habitat, mining claims against water quality, and motorized recreation against wilderness protection. Roads flow through this mix like muddy water, providing access to hunters, for instance, even while degrading habitat needed for their prey. And with more than 345 million visitor days each year (a visitor day equals one person visiting for a 12-hour period), the national forest system in many places is struggling to keep pace with public demands.⁴

Although President Theodore Roosevelt protected the first national wildlife refuge in 1903, just a few years after the first national forest reserves were set aside and before all but a handful of national park designations, most refuges have dodged the mixed blessing of popularity felt by the national parks and national forests. The majority of the national wildlife refuge system’s 92 million acres are in Alaska, which makes them seem remote and inaccessible to many Americans. However, the refuges of the lower forty-eight states are the public lands most likely to exist within an hour’s drive from a major city.⁵ Whether for egrets or bison, alligators, elk, or humans, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages the national wildlife refuge system to preserve fish and wildlife habitat for future generations. Despite often spectacular settings and many units’ proximity to human populations, the national wildlife refuge remains the least attended of the four main public land types, with 35 million visitors each year.⁶

The final and largest chunk of public lands is managed, fittingly, by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Comprising some 236 million acres, BLM lands include large parcels of western lands that were never claimed for other private or public uses such as homesteads, railroads, national parks, state lands, Indian reservations, or military sites. Many of these lands developed a reputation primarily as range for cattle grazing. Though BLM lands in southern Utah, Nevada, California, Idaho, and Montana are increasingly being “discovered” for their spectacular canyons, desert ecosystems, or recreational opportunities, these lands still struggle to shed their reputation as the lands that nobody wanted. More than 70 million visitors each year demonstrate that BLM lands are not, in fact, ignored, but these lands continue to receive some of the most liberal use and hardest impacts—from off-road vehicles (ORVs), cattle grazing, or mining—of any of our public lands.⁷

The BLM manages more than 80,000 miles of road on its lands, which ranks it a distant second to the Forest Service for having the greatest number of roads. At its latest count, the Forest Service recognized more than 386,000 miles of constructed road, as well as more than 60,000 miles of unplanned or illegal roads created by ORVs and other forest uses.⁸ The national wildlife refuges and national parks have relatively few roads of their own, checking in at slightly less than 10,000 miles each. In addition to the roads managed and administered by these federal agencies, another 115,000 miles of state, local, or private roads cross federal public lands. Although this book will focus on the 550,000 road miles under federal jurisdiction, many of the ecological, economic, and social impacts discussed should be applied to the entire network of nearly 700,000 miles. Table 1-1 itemizes road miles on the four types of federal land discussed in depth in this book.⁹

There are a few other categories of public land that are not much covered in this book. The Department of Energy and Department of Defense manage a number of areas for bombing ranges, missile tests, military maneuvers and training, and other purposes, but these are typically not open to the public and often have impacts other than roads or ORVs with which to contend, including undetonated explosives or radioactive wastes. The Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers also manage federal lands, primarily for flood control and hydroelectric projects, and again these fall outside the focus of this book. The total federal land base is approximately 634 million acres, including Bureau of Reclamation, Department of Defense, and Department of Energy lands.¹⁰

Public Land Roads

As Americans recognized public lands with special features, it rarely took long for people to clamor for access. Within five years of the first national park designation of Yellowstone in 1872 and more than two decades before the Duryea brothers built America’s first automobile, federal land managers set out to build roads that would allow people to see the geyser basins, wildlife, forests, and mountains of Yellowstone for themselves.¹¹

Table 1-1.

Road Miles on Federal Public Lands

Similarly, the national forests had scarcely reached their adolescence in the 1920s and ’30s before the proliferation of roads caused agency employees such as Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall to sound the alarm: America was losing many of its natural treasures to “mechanized man.”¹²

Other public lands, including many of those now managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and BLM, were roaded even before their designation as refuges or resource lands. In some cases, the road building has barely faltered since.

Roads on our public lands have been a mixed success. We have unquestionably been able to reach and utilize more raw materials from our nation’s forests, mineral reserves, grasslands, and waters thanks to roads. We now have easy motorized access to lands that once seemed unimaginably distant or difficult, from the summit of Pikes Peak to the dunes of Death Valley. As a case in point, some 300,000 motor tourists drive to the 14,110 foot crest of Pikes Peak every summer, but sedimentation and erosion problems caused by the road were recently the focus of a successful Sierra Club lawsuit.¹³ In other words, many people enjoy and make use of this road, even as others—and the courts—recognize that it generates unacceptably high impacts to the surrounding environment.

The financial ledger for roads is also cluttered with both liabilities and benefits. The wealth of our nation has often come rolling into market on public land roads. Driving the other direction, countless Americans have learned to value and appreciate natural beauty and our nation’s heritage by coming to visit and learn about public lands. Roads helped national parks, especially, become well visited and well loved. Early National Park Service director Stephen Mather falls off some lists of conservationists’ heroes for just this reason: Mather pushed for roads in many places as a way to boost the country’s support for national parks. Managers in some of these same parks are now trying to eliminate cars or remove roads to salvage the air and water quality, wildlife habitat, and natural experiences to be found there.

There is surely some merit to the idea that in order to appreciate a place it helps to know it, and the best way to know a place is to visit. Had I never been able to visit Yosemite or Rocky Mountain National Park as a boy tucked in my parents’ car, I might never have cared enough to walk away from these same roads on later family outings or as an adult. Yet there are many of us who also place tremendous value on lands that we will never see in Alaska or the Amazon or Antarctica, in part because they are so difficult to reach and have so few roads. Clearly we do not need to drive to an area to appreciate it, and for some places the fact that we cannot drive there makes it all the more precious.

Beyond the environmental effects or financial spreadsheets, the way we view roads on public lands is inextricably linked to our values as a nation and our values as citizens. In the end, our ideas about how public lands ought to be managed will dictate how we decide to treat roads and motorized access on our public domain.

Like Leopold, Marshall, or even Mather, I come to roads with a certain mix of appreciation and apprehension. I am grateful that millions of us can drive each year to visit our public lands, while I am also genuinely relieved that we cannot drive everywhere on these same lands. This book, then, is not written to convince anyone that all roads are bad; I don’t believe they are, and many roads provide a great service with relatively little harm. Rather, I contend that many roads—and especially certain types of roads—are causing problems for no particular good. By most measures, we currently have too many roads causing too many problems on our public lands.

Appropriate Access?

Roads on public lands, and elsewhere, continue to prove controversial because they represent so many things to so many people. If the benefit of a road could be isolated to one purpose covering a specific place and time, then we might be able to evaluate with relative ease its costs and the appropriate response of building it, maintaining it, or removing it. Unfortunately, roads and the equations we are left with which to evaluate them are far more complex.

For example, a single road will often cross many different environments as it connects point A with point B. The ecological impacts of the road will be different when it runs along a riverbank, cuts across a steep slope, drops down a gentle swale, or splits through a fore...

Table of contents

• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 From Bicycles to Board Feet: A History of Public Land Roads
• 3 The Ecological Effects of Roads
• 4 The Cutting Edge: Money, Politics, and Access
• 5 Industrial Revolutions: The Motorized Recreation Boom
• 6 Public Values, Public Lands
• 7 Changing Landscapes: Society, Technology, and Road Removal
• 8 The Road Ahead
• Appendix: Contact Information for Selected Organizations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Island Press Board of Directors