Winter Solstice 2008, Volume 13 #4

Located in central Utah, The Paiute ATV Trail (PT) is a large network of roads and “motorized trails” that have been linked and promoted for off-road vehicle recreation. PT routes range from custom-designed ATV-only tracks to paved roads through small towns; the majority of the PT uses ordinary dirt roads on federal public lands, sharing them with general traffic.

In 2001 I spent a delightful few days backpacking near the Mexico/United States border in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.  There are three things I’ll never forget about that trip: having our lunch interrupted by the sonic boom from a fighter jet flying very nearby; finding what we thought were jaguar tracks in the sand, and; being awakened in the night by a group of people, most likely illegal immigrants, walking not far from our tent, well off the trail.

Restoration program The results of the November elections appear to have given the entire world a new sense of hope for the future, and the environmental movement is no exception. The incoming Obama administration and the more environmentally-friendly 111th Congress present a huge opportunity for increasing efforts to revive and protect wild places on our public lands.

In 1983, a group of citizens gathered under the largest madrone tree in the world, symbolically located in the middle of the remote Mattole watershed along California’s northern coast. The Mattole’s 300 square miles are remarkably wild, with a sparsely populated landscape of temperate rainforests, native prairies, and oak woodlands. But the watershed suffered severely from decades of sedimentation, choking the vegetation and depleting native salmon.

Watershed restoration often requires economic, in addition to scientific justification in order to gain political support (Norgaard et al., 2007; Rubin, 2000). In these cases restoration includes socio-economic arguments in which the economic benefits accruing from restoration are enumerated (Davis, 2004; Cowling, 2007; Holl and Howarth, 2000). However, many of the benefits of properly functioning watersheds are neither fully known nor taken into account in traditional market systems (Holl and Howarth, 2000; Costanza et al., 1997).

The Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA) won a big victory for us all in July 2008, forcing the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to evaluate wilderness characteristics in its revision of resource management plans.  The decision also expanded National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) case law on the range of alternatives that should be evaluated in agency management plans. The Court’s Ruling