Summer Solstice 2007, Volume 12 #2

Road builders do an amazing thing. They pulverize rock and turn it into opportunity and a chance to live the American dream. We must suppress this elitist urge to limit mobility, because roads are freedom. — John Caldara, President of the Independence Institute And it made most people nervous. They just didn’t want to know what I was seeing in the refuge of the roads — Joni Mitchell Wildlands CPR works to protect and restore wildland ecosystems by preventing and removing roads…

The BLM decided to restrict travel on Sand Mountain Recreation Area to designated routes in an effort to protect dwindling habitat of the Sand Mountain blue butterfly. The Sand Mountain Recreation Area consists of a series of wind blown sand dunes that are the remnants of an ancient lake. The butterfly, found only at this over-run Nevada off-road vehicle recreation site, makes its home in the shrubs growing in the dunes.

The restoration of damaged lands and waters and the revitalization of deteriorating com­munity assets across Montana present multiple opportunities to benefit businesses, work­ers, communities, wildlife, and water quality. Montana is in a position to lead the West in developing a restoration economy that attracts investment and creates “green-collar” jobs with local employers while enhancing our land, water and communities.

The U.S. is home to 3,981,512 miles of public roads (US Dept. of Transportation 2004). Unfortunately, the number of these roads that are currently lighted or will be lighted is not recorded by either the Department of Transportation nor the Federal Highway Administration, and therefore is unknown. We can infer that the majority of these roads are at least illuminated over specific portions. Ritters and Wickham (2003) report that 20% of the coterminous United States lies within 127 m of a road. In addition, U.S.

In May 2007, conservation groups and the U.S. Forest Service settled a lawsuit involving an enjoined motorcycle project in proposed Wilder­ness in Washington State. The settlement and final judgment leaves in place the federal court’s June 2006 published decision and permanent injunction that requires a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), not a mere EA, before construction of the full Mad River off-road vehicle (ORV) project [The Mountaineers v. U.S. Forest Service, 445 F. Supp. 2d 1235 (W.D. Wash. 2006)].