Dentry: No retreat on wildlands

Published February 13, 2007 at midnight

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Picture a woman who looks like your grandmother sitting at the kitchen table in curlers and robe, reading the morning paper. She says to her husband:

"Oh, dear, Harold. Another shopping center has gone under the plow."

If memory serves, that was the caption of a delicious 1980s cartoon by one of my favorite cartoonists, Dick Guindon, who retired early this century from the Detroit Free Press.

Immortalized for his collection, The World According to Carp, Guindon was a wizard of irony and blunt-force trauma. Clearly, that imaginary news story was bittersweet funny because it never can happen.

The United States, and Colorado, have been on a one-way street since native Americans donated their land to developers and bison volunteered to become livestock.

We love to stamp out messy nature. It's what we do. Build anything, and everybody will come.

Manifest Destiny marches on - although on a smaller scale now, since so little wild stuff is left to tame.

Among the last briar patches begging for slash-and-build are specks within our heavily trampled national forests that are known as "roadless areas." Roadless areas are primeval places, except for trespass roads, which score them like battle scars.

Hunters and conservationists want roads kept out of roadless areas. Outfitters, naturalists, backpackers and trout fishermen want roads kept out of roadless areas. Watershed managers want roads kept away from pristine roadless headwaters.

The Colorado Division of Wildlife performed an exhaustive inventory of the state's 4.1 million roadless acres and unanimously recommended full protection on behalf of elk, owls and endangered hunters.

More than 90 percent of Coloradans polled during a Bush/Owens campaign to trash roadless protections said the areas should stay protected under a 2001 federal Roadless Rule that former King George W. Bush junked illegally (according to a 2006 U.S. District Court decision).

That should settle it, but it hasn't. Neither wildlife nor public opinion was allowed to figure much in a petition Bill Owens sent to the U.S. Forest Service in November.

Exalted by Owens as a document preserving Colorado's "scenic landscapes, abundant wildlife and mountain vistas," Colorado's wish list, developed over two years by a task force composed of 70 percent pro-development Republicans, also sneaked in a few "compromises."

The "compromises" allow road construction and logging in much of the backcountry, under various guises, and provide for motorized livestock herding, coal mining and ski-resort expansion.

Now it falls to Gov. Bill Ritter to do something with the currently illegal document. I would suggest recalling it and using it to ignite one of the Forest Service's habitat-enriching controlled burns.

But no more sleight-of-hand "compromises."

In the history of U.S. and Colorado land use, compromise always is a one-way street leading away from the briar patch. The plow never comes to the shopping center.

Coloradans already have expressed their overwhelming desires, and they were trampled by the Bush/Owens petition.

Any compromise merely promotes the continued whittling away of the last scraps that remain of our wildland, fish and wildlife heritage.

If we keep compromising, our public lands will resemble the storied farmer's three-legged pig. (Coming soon as a one-legged pig.)

Pig that good, you wouldn't want to eat it all at once.

dentrye@RockyMountainNews.com

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