GLOBE EDITORIAL
Rough ridersANY HUNTER, hiker, or bird-watcher who spends much time in the woods is familiar with the erosion and habitat destruction caused by the irresponsible use of off-road vehicles. The threat these dune buggies, modified SUVs, and dirt bikes pose to the country's national forests has been cited repeatedly by the Forest Service director, Dale Bosworth, as one of his agency's four most serious problems.
Unfortunately, the proposal the Forest Service has come up with to curb "unmanaged recreation," as he has called it, falls short of what is needed. It does not insist on a tight time frame for addressing this urgent problem and does not include provisions for the additional enforcement officers needed to ensure that users of off-road vehicles stick to the trails and roads set aside for them. The number of people using off-road vehicles in the United States rose from 5 million in 1972 to 36 million in 2000. The Forest Service pegs the number who use the vehicles in national forests and grasslands at 1.8 million -- about 5 percent of all visitors. Currently, each of the 155 forests has its own guidelines for off-road vehicles. Under the new proposal, forests allowing them would be required to limit them to trails set aside for this purpose after consultation with users, conservationists, and local and state officials. Also, law enforcement officers would be permitted to issue citations more easily. These are both steps in the right direction. But the trail designation process could be time-consuming, and until trails are designated, the Forest Service says, "the proposed rule would have no effect on the ground." This means that the abuse that Bosworth spoke so forcefully about last year could continue during a long trail designation process. "We're seeing more and more erosion, water degradation, and habitat destruction," he said, with riders creating hundreds of miles of unauthorized trails and roads every year. In New England, neither the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont nor the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire has designated trails for off-road use. The forest plan revision process for the White Mountain National Forest includes a proposal for off-road vehicles near the Sandwich Range. Critics of this proposal point out that the forest staff lacks enough enforcement officers to keep illegal users off the forest's 800,000 acres and would be hard put to police legal users.
The Forest Service deserves credit for taking the issue on in a more responsible way than other land-owning federal agencies have. But to match Bosworth's own concern over off-road vehicles, the Forest Service's proposed rule should set a time limit for the trail designation period, immediately ban all unauthorized use of off-road vehicles, and ensure that forests have enough enforcement officers to keep them out of prohibited areas. A rule like that would put the brakes on the misuse of these vehicles on public land. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
|
