A group of enviros from around the U.S. descended on Salt Lake City yesterday to deliver to the U.S. Forest Service 700,000 comments supporting a Clinton administration plan to ban road-building on 40 million acres of roadless national forest land. Enviros also called for the plan to be strengthened by explicitly prohibiting helicopter logging, mining, and off-road vehicle use and by including the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Author Bill McKibben writes in the Washington Post that excluding the Tongass from the plan is akin to compiling an edition of Shakespeare’s complete plays that omits King Lear. The public comment period on the roadless initiative ended yesterday, and the administration is expected to make a decision on a final policy by September.
