Court Blocks Forest Service from Increasing Motorboat Permits in Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

— By Kevin Proescholdt

In a clear victory for wilderness, Federal District Judge John Tunheim issued a ruling on August 26th that blocks the U. S. Forest Service from dramatically increasing the number of motorboats in Minnesota’s 1.1 million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW).

The Forest Service had raised the number of day-use motorboat permits for three “chains of lakes” from the previous level of 2,376 up to 6,892, a tripling of motorboats on these lake chains within the canoe country wilderness. Judge Tunheim’s ruling will force the agency to reduce the motorboat permits to the previous lower level. The three lake chains are Moose-New Found-Sucker-Birch, Seagull River-Gull-Saganaga, and White Iron-Garden-Farm-South Farm.

The case stems in part from the 1978 BWCA Wilderness Act (P.L. 95-495) and in part the area’s 1993 management plan. The 1978 law required the agency to establish entry point quotas for the BWCAW, the nation’s most heavily visited unit of the National Wilderness Preservation System, and to cap motorboat use at the annual average that existed from 1976-78. Quotas were required for both overnight motorboat visitors (on those lakes where motorboats were still allowed) and overnight paddle-only visitors, and for day-use motorboats. On lakes that are partially within the wilderness boundaries, homeowners and resort owners and their guests (located on the portion of the lake outside the wilderness boundary) were exempted under the law from needing a permit to travel on that particular lake on which their homes or resorts were located.

But the 1993 plan continued the Forest Service practice of allowing these so-called “exempt users” to travel deep into the interior of the wilderness on chains of lakes that were accessible from the entry lake. In allowing this use, the agency permitted far more motorboat use within the wilderness than Congress intended, since these “exempt” visitors did not have to compete with the general public for the limited number of available motor permits. Wilderness advocates challenged this practice in an administrative appeal and subsequent litigation. In 1999 the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that this Forest Service practice was unlawful.

Rather than abide by the appeals court ruling, the Forest Service decided to recalculate the required overall motorboat cap and raise the quotas to allow more motorboat use under the permit system, even though the appeals court did not direct the agency to recalculate the motorboat cap or quotas. It was this effort to recalculate the cap on motorboat permits and triple the motorboat quotas that was blocked by Judge Tunheim’s ruling.

In his opinion, Tunheim wrote, “There is no indication that the [appeals court] fathomed that the USFS would use its decision as justification to take the rather extraordinary step of recalculating a statutory cap that had been set for nearly two decades.” His ruling upholds this part of the 1978 law and blocks a dramatic increase in motorboat use within the wilderness.

The Minneapolis law firm of Faegre and Benson did a terrific job of representing the plaintiffs in this case: Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, Sierra Club, Superior Wilderness Action Network, American Lands Alliance, Minnesota Canoe Association, American Canoe Association, and Minnesotans for Responsible Recreation. Thanks go to Betsy Schmiesing, Rick Duncan, Brian O’Neill, and Colette Routel from Faegre for their superb work.

Wilderness preservation is an American invention—a unique contribution of our nation to world civilization. As we approach the 40th anniversary of the Wilderness Act (September 3, l964), Americans should renew their pride in and commitment to the National Wilderness Preservation System. It is one of the best ideas our country ever had.

One place to start the celebration is with the recognition that wilderness is the basic component of American culture. From the its raw materials we built a civilization. With the idea of wilderness we sought to give that civilization identity and meaning. Our early environmental history is inextricably tied to wild country. Hate it or love it, if you want to understand American history there is no escaping the need to come to terms with our wilderness past. From this perspective, designated Wilderness Areas are historical documents; destroying them is comparable to tearing pages from our books and laws.We can not teach our children what is special about our history on freeways or in shopping malls. As a professional historian I deeply believe that the present owes the future a chance to know its wilderness past. Protecting the remnants of wild country left today is an action that defines our nation. Take away wilderness and you diminish the opportunity to be American.

Of course our nation changed its initial wilderness environment. Early on we eliminated a lot of wild places along with the wild people who were there before us. But in this process of pioneering we also changed ourselves. In time Americans began to understand that the conquest of the wilderness could go too far for our own good. Now, many think, it is time to conquer a civilization notorious for its excesses. Unrestrained growth can be ironic; bigger is not better if the support systems are compromised. Wilderness is an anchor to windward in the seas of increasingly frightening environmental change.

The intellectual revolution that changed our attitude toward wilderness from a liability to an asset is one of the most profound in environmental history. In the begining of the American experience wilderness was “howling”: feared and hated by European colonists who longed to bring order and security to uncontrolled nature. Their religious heritage taught them that god cursed wild places; the civilizing process was a blessing. Only gradually and incompletely did these old conquer-and-dominate biases give way first to wilderness appreciation and then to preservation.

Romanticism, with its delight in awesome scenery and noble savages, underlay changing attitudes. So did the concept that wilderness was the source of a unique American art, character and culture. The Adirondacks and the Grand Canyon were the American equivalent of the Acropolis and Buckingham Palace.. By the l850s Henry David Thoreau could celebrate the physical and intellectual vigor of the wild as a necessary counterpoint to an effete and stale civilization. He called for people and landscapes that were “half cultivated.” He realized that saving some wilderness from development would help keep the New World new.

Granted, few paused to read Thoreau’s essays at the height of westward expansion, but a half century brought significant physical and intellectual changes in the United States. Discontent with urban environments, and the perception that the frontier was vanishing, brought new popularity to wilderness. National parks (notably Yellowstone, the world’s first in l872, and Yosemite, l890) began a policy of protecting unmodified public land for its scientific, scenic and recreational values. John Muir organized the Sierra Club to defend the parks in l892 and rallied the nation around the idea that wilderness was a valuable component of a diverse and strong civilization. In the early 20th century Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation movement included concern for protection of big wild country in which pioneer skills, such as hunting and camping, had meaning. By the 1920s the United States Forest Service was giving administrative recognition to large roadless areas of the national forests. Simultaneously, the growing science of ecology called importance to wildernesses as reservoirs of basic biological and physical processes. Understandably, Aldo Leopold, a forest ecologist, led the way in calling for wilderness preservation and defining an ethical, not merely an economic, relationship to land.

What was new about the Wilderness Act of l964 was the way it gave specific, systematic and secure protection to wilderness qualities and the wilderness experience. The law spoke about the importance of securing “an enduring resource of wilderness” for the American people. The language itself was revolutionary. Traditionally Americans reserved the term “resource” or “natural resource” for hard-core economic stuff like lumber, oil, soil, minerals and hydropower. In describing wilderness as a “resource,” Howard Zahniser, who wrote most of the Act, and Congress enlarged the definition of that term to include space, beauty, solitude, silence and biodiversity. They created a framework for understanding wilderness protection as just a legitimate use of the public lands as the extractive industries.

As a professor I sometimes used a literary metaphor to explain the evolution of American wildeness policy. Think about individual national parks and forests as books. In time they were “shelved” in libraries such as the National Park System and the National Wilderness Preservation System. Rangers, who might be thought of as “librarians,” provided protective and custodial services. By the 21st Century the task of collecting and cataloging was largely over. Most of the wilderness we will ever have is identified and at least nominally protected. The challenge now, to continue the metaphor, is to improve our ability to read the books we have reserved. We need to become more environmentally literate. This task calls for a new generation of educators and interpreters who will help people realize full value of the preserved wilderness resource. Scientists are important, but so are poets, theologians, historians and philosophers. With their help we may realize the highest potential of our preserved wilderness: using it for instruction and inspiration in how to live responsibly and sustainably on this planet.

In l964 the American public understood the Wilderness Act to be anthropocentric. Wilderness was protected as a scenic outdoor playground. Recreation and the economic gains that came from tourism justified the policy of preservation, and they served the cause well. But, as the Endangered Species Act of l972 suggested, there were higher horizons for wilderness valuation. New philosophies called environmental ethics or ecocentrism gained credibility. If, as the ecologists claimed, nature was a community to which people belonged, didn’t we have a responsibility to recognize the intrinsic value of its other non-human members and of natural processes? Wasn’t it plausible to assume that nature had rights human ought to respect?

Wilderness figured importantly in this new ecocentric philosophy because it was uncontrolled environment. We didn’t make it; we don’t own it; and our use of it is not in the old utilitarian style.. Indeed designated wilderness could be understood as not for people at all. As the Act states, humans are “visitors” who do not remain. Wilderness, then, was someone else’s home. It was an environment in which to learn that we are members and not masters of the community of life. An environmental ethic, rules establishing fair play in nature, is the logical next step. Why not do for other species what we have tried to do for oppressed minorities within our species?

Restraint is at the core of the new valuation of wilderness as a moral resource. When we protect wilderness we deliberately withhold our power to change the landscape. We put limits on the civilizing process. Because we have not conquered and do not dominate wild nature, we demonstrate understanding of the basic ethical concept of sharing and fair play. In this case it’s the rest of life on the planet that’s involved! Thoreau realized that “wilderness is a civilization other than our own.” Respecting it by restraining our impact is the key to effective global environmentalism. The kind of ecocentrism wilderness teaches is not against humans at all; it transcends them and recognizes that their best interest is ultimately that of the larger whole.

The Wilderenss System, then, is still a place to recreate; but it is also evidence of our capacity for badly-needed self restraint in our relationship to nature. Wildernesses are places to learn gratitude, humility and dependency; to put our species’ needs and wants into balance with those of the rest of the natural world. Even if never visited them, Wilderness Areas have value as a symbol of unselfishness. Wilderness preservation is a gesture of planetary modesty by the most dangerous animal on Earth! On its 40th anniversary, let’s celebrate the Wilderenss Act as the dawn of a kinder, gentler and more sustainable relationship with our planet. Can anything really be more important?

At over a million acres, the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana offers visitors a truly remote Wilderness experience. Hiking through dense forest, alpine meadows and towering peaks, it is not unusual to go days without sighting another human being. It is a Wilderness where it is still possible to experience solitude, where backcountry travel and self-reliance are necessary skills and the hectic buzz of modern life is replaced by a more ancient silence. Above all, the Bob Marshall is a place where the hand of man, so heavy in most places, is largely absent, a place Congress set aside to remain untrammeled for the health of flora and fauna …and future generations of Americans.

In light of the critical importance of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, we were disturbed to learn that the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (MFWP) are proposing to poison 11 alpine lakes with antimycin to remove hybrid trout and replace them with westslope cutthroat trout. The project proposes to use motorized rafts and electric pumps to spread the poison on all 11 lakes, and to use helicopters to deliver personnel and supplies to two lakes that are located a mile from the nearest trail. The scope of the project is mind-boggling; on George Lake alone, the “treatment” will require 2,695 units (10,106 lbs) of antimycin, 16 helicopter flights, 8 people, a potassium permanganate drip station, and stock animals.

Wilderness Watch supports the restoration of native fish populations to their historic range, though we believe that fishery programs must be administered in a manner that gives equal consideration to the entire aquatic ecosystem and that respects the Wilderness resource. The lakes in question are historically fishless, stocked at the behest of sportsmen in the early 1900s. The project seeks to address this past manipulation of natural systems with even further manipulation – a strategy that is clearly inappropriate in Wilderness. The Wilderness Act mandates that Wilderness remain untrammeled by man, that it retain its primeval character and influence, and that it be administered so as to preserve its natural conditions. If the non-native trout were to be removed, the lakes should revert to their natural state, not become yet another artificial trout pond for anglers.

Though antimycin is regarded to be safer than rotenone, both chemicals have documented effects on non-target organisms such as amphibians and aquatic biota. Recently, the New Mexico Game Commission voted to disallow the use of fish poisons as a management tool in Department of Game and Fish projects aimed at increasing the distribution of native fish. Additionally, a Regional Water Board in California tabled a request by the California Dept. of Fish and Game to poison streams and lakes in the Carson-Iceberg Wilderness pending further environmental analysis.

The diversity, abundance and populations trends of many other aquatic species in the Bob Marshall Wilderness are not well known, nor are they discussed in any detail in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) conducted by the BPA. Before embarking on a project of this magnitude in a designated Wilderness owned by the American people, the BPA, Forest Service and MFWP should implement a long-term inventory and monitoring study so the irreparable harm is avoided.

Ironically, though antimycin is highly toxic, the overall success of the proposed project is highly debatable, as a single treatment of piscicides is unlikely to eradicate all of the non-native trout. Despite this fact, the DEIS does not address a follow-up treatment and instead focuses on a long-term stocking program. There is little doubt that even if the introduced westslope cutthroat population swamps the existing population, some hybridization will occur.

Last but certainly not least, the Wilderness Act prohibits the use of motorized equipment and mechanical transport “except as necessary to meet the minimum requirements for the administration of the area for the purpose of this Act.” (emphasis added). The stated purpose of the Act is to preserve the wilderness character of designated Wilderness. This project, which is designed to establish a westslope cutthroat fishery in naturally fishless lakes, fails to meet that test. The proposed use of motorized equipment is merely a matter of convenience for agency personnel, not of need.

In short, the proposed project not only poses serious concerns to the wilderness character of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, but is likewise unnecessary, huge in scope and expense, illegal in its use of motorized equipment, irresponsible in its use of piscicides, and unlikely to succeed. Wilderness Watch sees no purpose in continuing the destructive history of agencies “playing God” in our last wild lands and will do its best to continue to fight for one of our nation’s premier Wildernesses.