Larry Audsley's - Wilderness Vs. Wildlife: Sportsmen Should Oppose Tumacacori Wilderness

When Arizona Game & Fish used helicopters to move captured bighorn sheep in the Four Peaks Wilderness, animal rights and wilderness activists sued to stop them.

And when the Arizona Desert Bighorn Sheep Society built two wildlife waters on the Kofa Refuge, wilderness groups sued to have those waters removed.

In both cases, as well as in others that are similar, the activists used provisions of the Wilderness Act as the legal footing for their suits. Now the wilderness lobby is asking to extend coverage of the Wilderness Act to another 83,000 acres in southern Arizona .

Sportsmen and the Arizona Game & Fish Commission should tell them NO.

Besides providing a legal mechanism for nuisance lawsuits, wilderness regulations add cost and difficulty to activities aimed at benefiting forest health and wildlife. Although counter-intuitive, laws restricting human activity can sometimes harm both land and wildlife.

Right now the “Tumacacori Highlands” are under siege from the constant traffic of smugglers and illegal immigrants. Literally tons of discarded clothing, backpacks, drinking containers and other refuse has left much of this formerly pristine area looking like a public dump. Smugglers who pay no heed to rules of any kind continue to cut illegal roads wherever it suits them. The best protection humans can offer in the short term is a reduction to illegal border traffic, rehabilitation of illegal road sites and a massive cleanup of the mess.

In the longer term, land and wildlife agencies will need to fight fires, carry out controlled burns, and conduct research and wildlife management activities. But restrictions designed to maintain a “wilderness atmosphere” typically interfere with these types of activities, sometimes to the point of preventing them altogether.

Under the Wilderness Act and its associated regulations and directives for federal land agencies, virtually any type of stewardship activity becomes more difficult and expensive to accomplish. The Wilderness Act states that there shall be no permanent or temporary roads, no use of motor vehicles or motorized equipment, no landing of aircraft, no other form of mechanical transport, and no structure or installation except for what is minimally required to administer the area “for the purpose of the Act.” In addition to the normal environmental assessments required of any project, wilderness requires a “minimum tool analysis.” This process is spelled out in the Wilderness Act and involves documenting what tools and methods are absolutely necessary and why more primitive means cannot be used instead.

The same restrictions apply to government agencies as well as to private individuals and conservation volunteers. The result is that agency employees and volunteers often have to lug equipment and materials, including concrete, on foot or horseback over long distances and rough terrain to reach project sites that are otherwise reachable by vehicle or helicopter, and to use less efficient tools and methods to accomplish the work. Volunteers clearing brush will work with hand saws and shears instead of gas-powered chain saws that could accomplish more work faster and with fewer people. Mortality investigations of radio-collared wildlife will be made on foot unless the land agency is willing to approve a helicopter landing in wilderness on short notice. Approvals take time and often are not granted. Delays in responding to wildlife deaths results the loss of valuable information pinpointing causes of death.

Wilderness restrictions apply to all activities except any exempted by statute. Ironically, the Wilderness Act expressly permits grazing cattle and working mining claims in wilderness, but prohibits riding a bicycle (mechanical transport). Importantly, wilderness rules would likely prohibit the use of a helicopter with a banana sling to remove trash from remote areas. This is because the minimum tool analysis would find that volunteers could accomplish the work by the more primitive means of lugging full trash bags over long distances on foot

Instead of fixing the damage caused by years of illegal traffic, wilderness designation will only make fixing the damage more expensive and less likely to be accomplished.

If wilderness would truly help protect the area, this bill would be welcomed by the full spectrum of conservation groups including sportsmen. Sadly, the purported benefits are largely illusory. Only the costs are guaranteed.

Does not stop development

The public is being misled by claims that wilderness will rescue national forest land from development. Land inside the national forest is already off-limits to what most people think of as “development”. National forest land cannot be developed except for purposes consistent with the forest service's mission. We have not been seeing subdivisions, hotels or strip malls springing up inside any of our national forests. Wilderness will not help arrest urban sprawl.

But spend time talking with wilderness activists and you'll learn they consider “development” to include windmills and corrals built by ranchers, and water catchments installed by wildlife agencies and sportsmen's conservation groups. These are the types of “developments” wilderness activists like to stop.

Road-building is already regulated

They will also tell you wilderness protection is needed to prevent the spread of redundant roads, as if they had never heard of RARE II (Roadless Area Review and Evaluation). The proposed wilderness area is already destined to remain lightly roaded under RARE II.

In addition, the US Forest Service is currently developing an official Travel Management Plan which will determine which existing roads will remain open for public use. Any new roads proposed in the future will require lengthy public input and an official plan revision.

Sportsmen do not want any more roads in this area, but there are already adequate processes in place to prevent proliferation of unneeded roads.

Loss of hunter access

However, if this bill becomes law, hunters and hikers should expect to see their access gradually diminish over time because pre-existing land ownership issues and legal obstacles will be impossible to overcome in a designated wilderness. Many of the existing roads that would be “cherry stemmed” cross private property before reaching the national forest, which means continued access depends on the good will of the landowners. It is not unusual for ranchers, mine owners and other landowners to suddenly decide to lock gates on sections of road crossing their property. Even though most roads leading to the forest have been maintained at public expense for many years, including the portions on private property, Arizona 's laws seem to favor property owners' rights to control access across their land.

These types of closures have already occurred in the proposed wilderness area at locations such as Peck Canyon and the Sopori Ranch. When such closures affect vast areas, Arizona Game and Fish and the forest service will usually attempt to purchase property or easements for an alternate road circumventing the private section. But in a federal wilderness area, the forest service would be powerless to authorize any alternate or replacement road that crosses the wilderness boundary to link up with the cherry stem.

Off-road driving already illegal

Wilderness is being promoted as a cure for ATV abuse. But what many don't realize is that off-road driving is already illegal throughout all of the Coronado National Forest . We shouldn't need to reclassify land as wilderness in order to prevent an act that is already illegal.

Off-road driving could be greatly reduced simply through better signage and enforcement. Sportsmen already know this become some of us have confronted off-road abusers and been dismayed to learn they didn't know they were doing anything wrong or illegal.

During the past year Arizona sportsmen worked to pass House Bill 2443 which would have provided stronger laws, funding and better legal enforcement tools for managing off-highway vehicle problems. It was widely noted by sportsmen that the state's environmental activists, including the principal advocates of the Tumacacori Wilderness, chose not to support HB 2443. HB2443 passed in the state house, but fell short by one vote in the senate. Had the environmental community supported the bill, it would certainly have passed and Arizona would not remain one of the few states that allows unlicensed ATVs to be driven around on its public lands.

The refusal of wilderness advocates to work collaboratively with other stakeholders to resolve off-road driving issues calls into question whether they truly want to reduce off-road damage, or if they would rather exploit ATV concerns in order to obtain broader access restrictions.

Active vs. passive management of land and wildlife

Wilderness activists have persistently used wilderness regulations to obstruct activities with which they disagree. It turns out they disagree with almost any human intervention designed to improve conditions for wildlife, especially game species.

Within the natural resources community, both professional and academic, there are diverse opinions regarding the active involvement of humans in managing flora and fauna. Preservationists favor a hands-off approach to public lands and wildlife, while active-management proponents believe organic elements of the landscape should be managed to some degree, especially where human impacts are already interfering with natural processes.

Citizen volunteers routinely join with public lands and wildlife agencies to carry out active management projects. Sportsmen's groups help fund reintroductions of native species such as antelope, bighorn sheep and turkeys from areas where these species have been extirpated or reduced to a level where genetic diversity has become a concern. Other projects include developing and maintaining water sources, disease investigations, clearing brush where natural fires have been suppressed or are long overdue, and removing mesquite and cedar trees that grow in unnatural places because of seeds deposited by cattle.

All of these activities are made more costly and difficult, if not impossible, by wilderness designations.

Wilderness takes precedence over wildlife

Wildlife advocates should be concerned that land agencies administering wilderness areas invariably prioritize the “wilderness experience” for human visitors above any needs for wildlife. Arizona 's 23-year history with wilderness reflects a pattern of land agencies and the courts putting wildlife second to “wilderness values.” This is true even on wildlife refuges, where one would expect wildlife to have priority over all other objectives.

Land agencies recognize that wildlife does not distinguish wilderness from non-wilderness since wildlife exists outside wilderness. Rather the unique and defining qualities of wilderness are its being “untrammeled by man…without improvements or human habitation…protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions … with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable…”

To the wilderness activist, the two water tanks constructed on a 665,000-acre refuge to help save a declining herd of bighorn sheep apparently aren't “substantially unnoticeable,” even though the tanks were colored to match the surrounding terrain. And although the refuge was originally established for sheep and only later designated a wilderness, the suit asks for protection of wilderness areas “from actions that may diminish their wilderness character and ecological value.”

When wilderness values and wildlife needs square off in legal battles, wilderness values often prevail due to the strength of the Wilderness Act and the absence of similar statutes specifically protecting the needs of non-endangered wildlife. However, the chilling effect of wilderness on active management is perhaps greatest in its more insidious form: as an inhibiting factor for land agency bureaucrats reviewing project proposals and requests. With the lurking potential for legal challenges and protests, agency reviews take longer and the results often err on the side of avoiding confrontation with activists.

For the groups actively lobbying for more wilderness – Sierra Club, Sky Island Alliance, Center for Biological Diversity and various organizations with “wilderness” in their title – the Tumacacori Highlands Wilderness is a political trophy that will help keep their movement thriving and donor funds flowing, while at the same time expanding their opportunities to wage cultural and political warfare against ranchers, hunters and government agencies.

For the sportsmen's groups, more wilderness guarantees that the money we raise and spend for wildlife will be less effective and in many cases wasted, and that control of wildlife and public lands policy will be shifted from professional biologists to the legal and political system.

Sportsmen should unite against wilderness. Our wildlife and public lands deserve better care and treatment than wilderness allows.