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MORE WAYS NREPA WILL HARM WESTERNERS

In addition to:

• 21 million acres of new wilderness

• 3 million acres of biological corridor managed as wilderness

• 1 million acres of recovery areas restored to wilderness conditions

• 3 million acres of National Park lands designated as wilderness

• 2056 miles of new wild and scenic rivers

 H.R. 1975 will create a panel to examine all unroaded areas 1000 acres and larger on all national forests in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon and Washington and make recommendations to Congress on how these lands should be managed..  No energy leasing,  timber harvest or road building in these areas will be allowed until a Congress makes a decision what to do with them.

NREPA gives this panel three years to complete its recommendations.  Considering the immensity of their task they will use all of this time if not more.  

The panel will be selected by the National Academy of Sciences and a radical environmental group called the Society for Conservation Biology.  The interests and needs of westerners and the special knowledge of local areas unique to residents will not have a voice on the panel.

There are many thousands of areas like this that must be studied and will be locked up until the studies are complete.  There is no limitation on shape so that these areas could be drawn like gerrymandered political districts with no regard for usage or common sense.  Long twisted areas with cutouts for high use roads would be common.   Current definitions of roadless allow for inclusion of old roads that are not in use and even for recently obliterated roads.  Most of the non-wilderness forest could be included in these unroaded areas.  This section of the bill by itself will eliminate virtually all multiple use including mining, timber harvest, oil and gas, and motorized recreation on the national forests in these five states.  

There is no way to predict how long these lands will be tied up by inaction by Congress; but it could be decades.  

Even then, Congress may decide to put some or all of these lands into wilderness or a similar protection status which will make this public lockout  permanent.