Chainsaws and the Wilderness Act

This might be a bit in the weeds for LGM readers, who at least in the comment section seem like the type of people who generally don’t go outside much, forget about long hikes in our wilderness areas. But the issues brought up here are important–how are we to manage the forests under the restrictions of the Wilderness Act? The Wilderness Act was well-intentioned and has largely been a great law, but banning any kind of machines, including chainsaws, means that you can’t fight the fires that are destroying this critical habitat. Made sense at the time, but at this point, as this essay argues, it’s rather performative:

To most people, “wilderness” is in the heart of the beholder: an abstract term for any wild or remote-feeling area. But when it comes to our federal public lands, wilderness is a proper noun, defined by the 1964 Wilderness Act. A designated wilderness area consists of 5,000 or more contiguous roadless acres that meet special criteria, including “opportunities for solitude” and “unconfined recreation” and a lack of “permanent improvements.” The law protects these areas from development and regulates activities there more tightly than on other public lands.

Earlier this spring, the U.S. Forest Service allowed the Idaho Outfitters and Guides Association to use chainsaws to clear a limited number of trails in Idaho’s Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness. Some wilderness advocates panicked, warning this would lead to the erosion of wilderness protections; some accused the agency of bowing to special-interest groups.

But the trail workers I know — skilled professionals who have spent years clearing logs and brush from trails and who deal firsthand with the devastating impacts of climate change and federal budget cuts on trail stewardship — have long sought greater flexibility on chainsaws in wilderness. Yet their voices remain largely absent from the conversation.

I spent eight years working on trail crews in Washington’s fire-prone and heavily timbered Cascade Range, primarily clearing downed logs from trails. My ranger district on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest encompassed over 700 miles of trail, about half of them in designated wilderness. I cut thousands of logs, using crosscut saws on wilderness trails and chainsaws elsewhere.

After a wildfire — and there are more fires each year in the West — a single mile of trail can be blocked by scores, even hundreds, of downed, dead trees. And trees will keep falling for years, even decades, to come. Other climate-fueled phenomena, including widespread beetle infestations, wetter, heavier snows and extreme winds, contribute to the buildup of deadfall. Each season, with an average of four or five people on the trail crew and dozens of volunteers, we were lucky to clear about half of our district’s trail mileage. Districts with smaller crews, or none at all, cleared far less.

Unsafe and impassable trails are not just inconvenient; they hinder backcountry evacuations, fire management and scientific monitoring. They also limit public access to wilderness, stifling the growth of a diverse community of wilderness lovers and defenders — something we need now more than ever.

This makes a lot of sense to me. There’s a purity in the environmental movement that reached its heights in the 90s with the spotted owl and ancient forest issues. Most of those still maintaining this kind of idea are pretty old now, but they are also in charge of a lot of the relevant organizations. The law needs to reflect reality and the reality is that it is not some massive violation on a global scale to allow people working on these issues the tools they need to work. What possible long-term impact does a chainsaw have over a slower way to clearing land? Seems an obvious one to me.