Go to the mobile version of this Web site.

Login | Contact Us | Site Map | Paid archives | Alerts | Electronic edition | Advertise | Subscribe to the paper | Today's Extras

Breaking News:

Subscribe

Dentry: Act now before roadless areas perform disappearing act

Published August 16, 2006 at midnight

Text size  

More Outdoors Columns & Blogs

More stories »

Watch the little golf ball.

As a member of the public interested in Colorado's natural lands and heritage, your input is requested on Colorado's Roadless Areas Rule, a legal document with absolutely no authority to do anything except to stall while the drilling rigs move in.

Still, you should comment. You can do so by going to a form on the Colorado Department of Natural Resources Web site, .co.us, and clicking on Roadless Areas Review Task Force. The task force's draft recommendations also are there.

Already, more than 90 percent of people who have commented are in favor of keeping roads and other development out of roadless areas in National Forests.

And that doesn't include those one-size-fits-all postcards members of conservation organizations sent in. It doesn't include people who never made it to the public-comment meeting in Denver because they had to work or because the host agency, DNR, mislaid the invitations.

From start to unfinished, the process of deciding what Coloradans want done with their share of roadless areas has been a magic act. Now you see the golf ball, now you don't even see the audience.

Even the lopsided "bipartisan" Roadless Areas Review Task Force disappeared. Its last meeting was a phone-in conference call, because it ran out of funds.

DNR kindly opened two listening rooms for the conference at its Denver headquarters. The media was sequestered in one, some public in the other. Wouldn't want those troublemakers mixing it up.

All this sorcery started with George W. Bush, who didn't like Bill Clinton or the 96 percent of people who told the federal government they wanted roadless areas kept that way. Anyway, George was busy trying to sell off some other national forest lands at the time.

So George, no fan of big government, simply overruled the people and the feds. But he didn't take the rap. Like the old magician I remember from years ago, he slyly slipped the golf ball prop into someone else's pocket.

He turned it over to the states, as if states really have a say in how the feds do things. As if, for example, this state had a say Thursday in the Bureau of Land Management's lease of 17 inventoried roadless forest areas in western Colorado to drilling companies.

The Bush administration promised to keep hands off those roadless areas while the states decided for themselves. See, that wasn't a lie. The golf ball's not in either hand.

"Watch da little golf ball," the old magician would say in an accent part Polish and part Brooklyn. He was a nightly fixture in a dark cabaret in Baltimore. He was as old as dirt, and he had known the Great Houdini.

He was more believable than some others who practice mass deception.

The Roadless Rule is a state document that tells the USDA Forest Service what to do with roadless areas on federal land. This Alice in Wonderland arrangement is scheduled to pass to Gov. Bill Owens by Sept. 13. Owens can rewrite the whole thing before submitting it as a petition to the federal government by Nov. 13.

The feds can accept its terms, for kicks, or ignore it while the drillers move in.

Amazingly, the task force that hammered out Colorado's draft didn't do a completely awful job at satisfying everyone a little, except wildlife, and no one very much.

Essentially, the document forbids road building in national forest roadless areas, as before.

Exceptions include temporary roads for some ski areas, grazing allotments, for fire prevention or public health and safety.

Only temporary roads would be allowed for established mineral leases, and new leases couldn't build any roads (directional drilling would have to be used).

All the temporary roads would be closed to public recreation and would be reclaimed later.

The task force did all that with a minimum of public notice. It is supposed to take public comments into consideration before issuing its final draft. Time is growing short; the comment deadline is Aug. 25, nine days from now.

So everyone gets a say, after all. As sure as there is a golf ball sticking out of your ear.

Post your comment

Registration is required. Click here to create your free user account, or login below.

Comments are the sole responsibility of the person posting them. You agree not to post comments that are off topic, defamatory, obscene, abusive, threatening or an invasion of privacy. Violators may be banned. Click here for our full user agreement.




(Forgotten your password?)




News Tip

Know about something we should be reporting? Tell us about it.

Sponsored links



Reprints