Mail Tribune News -Wanted: 1 million more wilderness acres

Wanted: 1 million more wilderness acres

Ashland-based Headwaters heads `Oregon Wild's' expansion campaign

By PAUL FATTIG

ASHLAND -- The Kalmiopsis Wilderness would triple and the Red Buttes Wilderness quadruple under a statewide wilderness campaign launched Wednesday.

Although the coalition of environmental, business and religious groups behind "Oregon Wild" say specific sites won't be identified until the end of the year, they want to expand the current wilderness areas as part of the roughly one million acres of additional wilderness they seek in the region.

The Kalmiopsis currently blankets 180,000 acres in the middle of the Siskiyou National Forest. The 20,323-acre Red Buttes Wilderness, located immediately south of Applegate Lake, includes portions of the Siskiyou, Rogue River and Klamath national forests.

The campaign also hopes to expand what is known as the Zane Grey roadless area on Bureau of Land Management property along the Rogue River about 25 miles west of Grants Pass. That site is adjacent to the 36,000-acre Wild Rogue Wilderness managed by both the Forest Service and the BLM.

However, many of the estimated 100 roadless areas being considered by the group are as small as 1,000 acres, organizers said.

A dozen environmental groups in the Rogue Valley have joined together to support the effort. The Ashland-based Headwaters environmental coalition is heading the Southwest Oregon campaign.

The areas provide a permanent place for old-growth timber, ecological diversity, clean water and a spiritual sanctuary for humanity, Robert Lonsdorf, director of the forest protection program for Headwaters.

"Locally these areas represent the foundation of an open-space plan for the Rogue Valley and a key to the restoration of the forests, rivers, watersheds and salmon runs in this region," he said.

The campaign has drawn fire from the timber industry. Increased wilderness would cut industry jobs, reduce accessibility to public lands and increase environmental problems overseas after the industry is forced to look to foreign lands for raw timber, said David Hill, executive vice president of the Southern Oregon Timber Industries Association.

But campaign backer Virginia Lemon, who chairs the environmental action committee at the Rogue Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, disagreed.

"I believe that what we are doing is part of the growing conviction that morality and ethics are an important base for fighting ecological catastrophe," she said.

Noting that her church already has adopted a wilderness just northeast of Mount Ashland, she feels it is her "religious duty to protect the Earth."

The campaign marks a change in the environmental movement, observed Dominick DellaSala, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Klamath-Siskiyou region.

"The environmental community, for several years, has been on the defense," he said. "It's nice to be advancing proposals that put us on the offense."

The economy is on their side, said Wendell Wood, regional field representative for the Oregon Natural Resources Council.

"Conservationalists believe what we are proposing not only does not harm our economy, (but) it is simply the best thing we can do to enhance our economy that is already strong and will continue to grow and diversify," Wood said. "It is our environment that attracts people to the state."

Statewide, Oregon Wild hopes to increase wilderness designation by 5.5 million acres.

The campaign would dovetail with the roadless area plan announced last October by President Clinton which would provide permanent protection of up to 50 million acres of already roadless areas of 5,000 acres or more on national forestland.

The coalition is calling for the protection of more than 100 areas of public land in Southwest Oregon.

Those could include such sites as the McDonald Peak roadless area on Mount Ashland, the Rough and Ready Creek drainage in the Siskiyou National Forest and the 50,000-acre Kangaroo roadless area in the Siskiyou, Rogue River and Klamath national forests.


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