Undemocratic Din

Carrying the ORV industry’s gas—and venting it—is the BlueRibbon Coalition, a group dedicated to keeping public land accessible to ORV users. The coalition has acquired major funding from Yamaha, Honda, Polaris, Ski-doo and Horizon, and lists among its members scores of motor-head clubs, with names like the Missouri Mudders, and a host of firms and cartels, including the Western States Petroleum Association, American Forest & Paper Association, Boise Cascade, Idaho Cattle Association, Committee for Public Access to Public Lands, Idaho Mining Association and Northwest Mining Association. Cofounder and director Clark Collins defines the roadless rule proposed by the Clinton administration and squashed by Bush as a plot by the “GAGs” (green advocacy groups, which he has also referred to as “hate groups” and “nature Nazis”).

Also supporting and promoting the BlueRibbon Coalition has been the Outdoor Channel, the first full-time cable network with a programming focus on hunting and fishing and which reaches 11 million homes across the nation. It has included the coalition among its website links to “conservation” organizations and given it plenty of airtime to tub-thump for motorization and privatization of public land. Jake Hartwick, the Outdoor Channel’s executive vice president, says that “wise-use groups are defending the very foundation of our system” and that “environmental groups are advocating the complete abolition of private-property rights.”

But not all sportsmen are so easily seduced, and when you strip away the mirrors, gongs, water and dry ice, Collins becomes a little man in a Wizard of Oz suit. In the BlueRibbon Coalition’s home state of Idaho, the Fish and Game Department reports that at least 86 percent of elk hunters find that encounters with motorized vehicles detract from their outdoor experience. Fewer than 5 percent of the members of the Montana Wildlife Federation (composed basically of hunters and anglers) own ORVs, and the group has asked the Forest Service to close all roads that don’t service full-size vehicles.

Jim Posewitz, director of Orion—the Hunter’s Institute, a Montana-based sportsmen’s group, says: “The presence of ATVs on public hunting grounds will probably be one of the largest contributors to loss of hunting opportunity that we’ve yet experienced. It puts the animals at a disadvantage. It violates the security that wildlife once had in difficult terrain. The Forest Service and BLM have decided to disenfranchise the people who have followed the law and empower those who have violated it. Those of us who have participated in nonmotorized use have no way to stake a comparable claim.”

The BlueRibbon Coalition blames the unpopularity of ORVs on the behavior of “bad apples,” and maybe it’s right. But because the new machines can go where there is no enforcement, bad apples proliferate. Evaluating the “600cc mountain line” snowmobiles for SnoWest Magazine, Steve Janes of the SnoWest test crew filed this report: “In the four days of riding in Quebec, we estimate that we violated around 652 laws or regulations. But since our crew’s motto was ‘If you can’t break parts, break laws,’ we acted naive and ‘wandered’ off the groomed trails in search of test areas.”

The 500 combat missions flown by Colonel George Buchner over Vietnam didn’t prepare him for ORV combat in Michigan, where the machines have done an estimated $1 billion worth of damage, tearing up ground cover so badly that utility poles were falling over. Where Lake Huron collects the Au Sable River system, Buchner found trespassing ATV operators popping wheelies in his private trout stream. When he demanded their names, one rider dismounted and attacked him, breaking his nose. When he fenced his posted stream and property, ORV operators cut the wire and pulled the stakes. When he reinforced the stakes with cement, they knocked them down. When he and the Michigan United Conservation Clubs successfully pushed for a state ORV policy of “closed unless posted open,” he received death threats and had his streetlights shot out, his mailbox smashed, his driveway seeded with broken glass, the eight-strand fence on his Christmas tree farm cut in eighty-eight places, and his wife run over.

“Robin was screaming,” he says, “and the guy calmly cranked up his machine and finished running over her. He’d come through multiple barriers, multiple posted signs, three fences and a gate. She had a hematoma extending the length of her leg.”

“Basically, ORVs ran me out of Michigan,” Buchner told me from his Arizona home.

But in the end the problem comes down not so much to the nature of ORV users as to the nature of their vehicles. ORVs are designed to go “off road,” where motorized vehicles don’t belong. Their noise is undemocratic—like second-hand smoke. They need to be removed from our wildest and best public  land—not because regulations can’t control them (although they can’t), not because most people hate them (although they do), but because they intrude and usurp. Snowmobile din now penetrates five miles into the backcountry of our first national park. Winter visitors are having trouble hearing the geysers, and elk and bison are being driven from the forage of open meadows and the shallow snow of thermal areas, which they desperately require. In order for ORV operators to do their thing, everyone else, including wildlife, must cease doing theirs—at least in part.

Some people can’t enjoy our public lands without ORVs. But when there’s no escape from them, the rest of us can’t enjoy our public lands either.