Foreword: No Place Distant

Editor’s Note: This excerpted Foreword is from the book No Place Distant by David G Havlick. Copyright © 2002 David G Havlick. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C. The Foreword is written by Mike Dombeck, former Chief of the U.S. Forest Service.

Every American is affected in some way by roads on public lands. Roads affect our pocketbooks, our recreation experiences, the quality of the water we drink, and much more. Over one-half million miles of roads have been constructed on the lands that you and I, as citizens of the United States, own. In other words, we have built enough roads to circle the Earth twenty times on less than one-quarter of the total land base of the United States.

As a young boy growing up in northern Wisconsin’s Chequamegon National Forest, I observed on more than one occasion the after-effects of a road built into a vast acreage of forest — usually for the purpose of timer harvesting. No longer could I hike in those areas and enjoy the solitude and wilderness that I once imagined Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and the ancestors of our neighboring Chippewa Indians experienced. No longer were they the magical, distant places far from the growl of a Jeep or the whine of a snowmobile. Spring ponds, with native brook trout bigger than a twelve-year old could imagine, soon became fishing holes littered with beer cans and candy wrappers, their banks chewed up by vehicle tracks. The character of the lands was altered, perhaps irrevocably.
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Roads have had a significant influence on how humans interact with and use the land, as well as a profound and lasting impact on the land itself. Once a road or trail is etched on the land, more than just physical changes occur; our attitudes also change. We become accustomed to traveling along its route. Soon we perceive it to be our “right” to travel that route, regardless of the impacts. This “I have the right” mind-set is much more pervasive on public lands. Though many citizens are very respectful of public lands, others are not. Certainly, I know of no private landowners who allow anyone to go anywhere at anytime on their land with any kind of motorized or even non-motorized vehicle.

Today, we can go to more places easier and faster than at any other time in history. In recent years, our ability to reach even the most remote areas has only increased. Traditional impediments to distant places— water, ice, snow, desert, or mountains—are no longer barriers to access. We are producing bigger and better off-road vehicles in larger numbers than ever before. Just a few decades ago the Jeep and snowcat were cutting edge, owned only by a very few. Now we invade the wildlands en masse on off-road vehicles, dirt bikes, snowmobiles, and jet skis.
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What about the ecosystem health of wild places? Wild lands are immensely important for their high-quality, undisturbed soil, water, and air. These three key resources are the foundation of ecosystem and watershed function, upon which long-term sustainability and all other resource values and uses depend. Healthy, functioning watersheds catch, store and release water over time. They reduce the downstream effects of flooding, providing clean water for domestic, agricultural, and industrial uses, and help maintain abundant and healthy fish and wildlife populations. Undeveloped wild lands serve as biological strongholds for threatened and endangered species and are essential to their long-term survival.

Another critical purpose of a watershed is to keep water on the land longer. The porous, vegetated topsoil of undisturbed watersheds acts as a sponge, soaking up moisture to replenish groundwater tables and aquifers. By contrast, when land is disturbed or has poorly maintained dirt roads, torrents of runoff can erode stream banks and roadways and carry tons of rich topsoil and silt downstream or downslope. Maintaining these areas relatively intact ultimately saves downstream communities millions of dollars in water-filtration costs.

Pristine areas are far more likely than roaded and developed areas to support healthy ecosystem function, including the diversity of native plants and animals. And areas of higher biological
diversity are more resilient in response to such natural disturbances as storm events or drought. Unspoiled areas are more resistant to the proliferation of exotic invasive species, which is a major and growing problem throughout the country. Many species, such as the grizzly bear, elk, and wolf, are dependent on large, undisturbed areas of land for their survival. Roads and trails, especially those that are poorly maintained, are major sources of sediment, which adversely impacts aquatic species.
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Opportunities to enjoy nature by hiking, camping, picnicking, wildlife viewing, hunting, fishing, cross-country skiing, and canoeing must never be lost. Opportunities to pursue scientific and cultural studies must never be lost. Opportunities to experience firsthand the solitude of undisturbed landscapes must never be lost. As Wallace Stegner said in “Coda: Wilderness Letter,” published in The Sound of Mountain Water (Doubleday, 1969): Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.

— Mike Dombeck is former Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, a fisheries biologist, and is a
University of Wisconsin System Fellow and Professor of Global Conservation at the University of
Wisconsin-Stevens Point.