We are making progress

[mark]

There is hope yet...

http://www.msnbc.com/news/939100.asp?cp1=1

-Mark

[BigRedFord04]

whoop! i like that judge. think we could convince him to move to texas?

[Lynda]

Whats so good about building more roads in National Forests? Dirt roads might be nice, but not fully paved easily Accessible roads.

[mark]

Its not about building roads, but the Clinton Era "roadless" initative. You see uner Clinton's executive order, millions of acres of forests (about 33% of US forests lands or 2% of all the land in the US) were deemed to be wilderness if they were found to be road free. The problem was getting to forest service to designate right of ways as roads. Under the Executive Order, all the right of ways were required to endure an official designation process to be considered a road. Until a right of way was declared be a road (a 4x4 trail for example) the area could not be maintained, thus effectivly closing the trail and closing the area. So what the forest service would do is declare an area roadless by default, then require users to petition to have a trail designated as a road. The longer the trail was unmaintained, the harder it was to get it to meet the criteria of a road. In essence, the Clinton Administration was creating defacto wilderness areas. Too bad for the Clinton's that declaring wilderness is a Congressional duty and doing it by executive order is unconstitutional.

-Mark