A new federal rule lifts restrictions imposed four years ago on roadless areas within national forests, reopening 142,000 acres of designated roadless area in North Carolina to logging and related road building.

The new rule calls for the governors of individual states to weigh in on how roadless areas within national forests in their state should be managed. The 2001 rule that banned logging, mining and road building on the nation’s last remaining roadless areas was a flawed “inflexible one-size-fits-all approach,” according to the new rule. State governors are more familiar with the demands on public lands in their region and should be consulted in how to manage those lands, according to the rule. Governors have 18 months to come up with their preferred management policy for roadless areas within their state and submit it to the national forest service.

Environmentalists are opposed to the idea, claiming that governors of individual states shouldn’t be in charge of national forests.

“They are owned by all the American people, not individual states. This management policy doesn’t make any sense,” Bryan Whitaker, organizer for the Appalachian region of the Sierra Club’s National Forest Protection Campaign. “Each national forest is preserved by everyone in the country.”

The U.S. Forest Service says it is not relinquishing management of federal lands and will still make the final decision on what level of protection roadless areas in each national forest deserve — they are simply asking for input from governors.

Restrictions on logging, mining and road building in roadless areas were implemented in 2001 following an extensive, three-year public process initiated by the Clinton Administration. More than 600 public hearings were held across the country generating 1.4 million comments — 96 percent of which called for roadless areas to be placed in a lock box.

The revisions to roadless area protection had a 120-day written comment period last summer.

“The decisions to reverse the roadless rule did not go through near the same rigorous public participation process as the initial rule,” said Jackie Dobrinska with the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition.

Dobrinska said the Bush Administration has been looking for ways to undo the roadless rule since he got into office and is simply couching it in the context of allowing state participation.

Her sentiment is widely shared by environmentalists.

“By gutting the roadless rule the Bush administration has once again exposed its agenda for liquidating our natural resources to the highest bidder,” said Ben Prater, ecologist with the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project.

The new rule states there were numerous flaws in the roadless protections, including “applying one set of standards uniformly to every inventoried roadless area.” There also have been nine lawsuits filed against the U.S. Forest Service over the roadless protections since 2001.

“The Department believes that revising (the roadless rule) by adopting a new rule that will allow state-specific consideration of the needs of these areas is an appropriate solution,” the new rule states.

Environmental groups are already gearing up to lobby Gov. Mike Easley to uphold the strictest protections for roadless areas.

The existence of remote roadless areas is one asset that has made Western North Carolina a major outdoor tourism destination.

“There’s still a frontiersman attitude in America where people yearn to go out in the wilderness, and these are the last places you can do this,” Dobrinska said. “As we get more and more stressed in the increasingly urbanized world, people are turning more and more to these areas. Remote recreation is increasing so we need these areas to fulfill that niche.”

The argument over roadless areas represents only a small sliver of territory — half a percent of the land in North Carolina is classified as roadless.

Mark Shelley of the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition called the remaining roadless areas “postage-sized parcels.”

“Our national forests make up a small part of our state and there are a few wild areas within those national forests,” Dobrinska said. “We can’t ever go back once a road has been built in roadless area.”

The protections were implemented in response to a gradual loss of roadless areas by national forest managers who scheduled logging — and thus road building to facilitate the logging — in remote sections of the forests.

They’ve got smaller and smaller and smaller, so they put a moratorium on building new roads in roadless areas,” Dobrinska said.

To qualify as a roadless area, there has to be less than half a mile of road per thousand acres.

Opponents to roadless area protections claim this standard was too broad and lumped areas into protection that were not truly “roadless.”

The Pisgah and Nantahala national forests are more fragmented by roads than the average national forests. Roadless areas make up less than 15 percent of North Carolina’s national forests. Nationwide, 31 percent of national forest lands are considered roadless areas.

There are 2,500 miles of roads in North Carolina’s national forests, mostly in the Pisgah and Nantahala, although some are in the Uwharie. The majority of forest service roads are gated and used only by forest managers and logging companies, leaving less than 1,000 miles of forest roads open to the public, nearly equal to the miles of interstate highway in North Carolina.

For more information, call Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition at 828.252.9223 or www.forestcoalition.org.