I Stand Corrected...Sort Of

On Thursday I had a post concerning Rep. Maloney's legislation to designate 23 Million acres of wilderness in the Rocky Mountain West.

Part of the article I excerpted stated:

It calls for the removal of more than 6,000 miles of existing roads, primarily within national forests. Old logging roads would be removed, and habitat restored in most of those areas, creating about 2,300 jobs...said Michael Garrity, executive director of the Montana-based Alliance for the Wild Rockies...

I took Mr. Garrity to task, saying if there was 6,000 miles of road then these areas didn't qualify as wilderness, since wilderness areas are by law roadless.

Friday morning in the comments section, Anonymous wrote the following:

Garrity is not talking about removing roads from designated Wilderness(You are right, there are no roads there). He is talking about roads on other forest service lands.

Today, instead of relying on press accounts I went to Maloney's website and read the bill. Mr. Anonymous was right and I had misread the article. Those roads were on FS lands not proposed for wilderness. It is more accurate to state not currently proposed for wilderness, as you shall see.

Upon reading the bill, I found it to be worse than I expected. It does much more than designate 23 million acres as wilderness.

Title II of the bill creates 7.7 milion acres of "Biological Connecting Corridors." The management prescriptions for these corridors bans timber harvesting, oil and gas development and construction or reconstruction of roads. It even goes so far as to state that road densities should be "as nearly as possible, zero miles of road per square mile of land area" and in no instance should the road density be more than "0.25 miles per square mile."

Title III designates more than 56 Wild & Scenic rivers.

Title IV creates a "National Wildland Restoration and Recovery System" of 1,023,000 acres. Recovery is defined as restoring these lands "to a natural untrammeled condition and the restoration of the undeveloped roadless character of such land." This title also establishes the "National Wildland and Recovery Corps." And what is this corps to do? In addition to planting trees they are to commit "road obliteration." That's right, "road obliteration." What happens after the areas are restored and made roadless? The bill states "the Forest Service shall evaluate the suitability of such component for inclusion in the National Wilderness Preservation System."

So there it is. Designate a million acres for recovery, hire 2,300 people to "obliterate" 6,000 miles of road and once you're done include these now roadless areas in the wilderness system. In my original post I accused them of manufacturing wilderness and that still stands. I can't think of a better example than this bill.

Putting that aside, I am as concerned about unemployment as Rep. Maloney. I know she represents New York City and those folks are as deserving of jobs as anybody. Therefore, I would propose an amendment to her bill which would do the following:

---Create an "Urban Restoration and Recovery System"

---Create an "Urban Recovery Corps"

---Prescribe the "obliteration" of buildings and roads in New York City, and

---Designate the recovered land as "Obama Obliteration Areas"

This would be a much more efficient and cost-effective way of "creating" jobs. After all, you wouldn't have to haul the workers to hell and back to rip out the roads. If this didn't create enough jobs we could throw in Washington, D.C. Come to think of it, I might want to designate the area from NYC to DC as a "Biological Connecting Corridor" and Rep. Maloney could walk or ride horseback to work.

In reality, neither of our programs would work. Lasting jobs are the result of producing something, not of obliterating things.