Reclaiming America’s natural treasures
There’s progress to report on our efforts to protect some of our most treasured natural places. This past summer, officials in the Obama administration issued a temporary halt to several Bush-era policies that put the interests of mining and logging industries before our country’s natural heritage.
Time out on logging
In the early months of the Obama administration, our staff discovered that Bush administration holdovers within the Forest Service were still moving ahead with plans to approve logging, mining and roadbuilding in national forests in Colorado, Alaska, Idaho and Oregon. In April, we documented these findings in a report, “Quietly Paving Paradise,” and urged Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who oversees our national forests, to put a stop to this major threat to our wild forests.
Thanks in part to the visibility we brought to the issue, Secretary Vilsack called a “time-out” on these destructive activities. Applications for logging, mining, drilling or road-building in nearly 50 million acres of our most pristine national forests will now require his personal approval. And in August, a U.S. appeals court decided that Bush-era rollbacks of protections in roadless forests should be overturned. That’s good news for America’s 155 national forests, including Carson National Forest.
For Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest temperate rainforest in the world, the timeout came just in time. Just weeks before Secretary Vilsack’s announcement, timber companies were preparing to carve service roads through 54,000 acres of pristine forest within the Tongass. Now, that destructive activity has been sidelined—we hope for good.
But nothing’s settled until a permanent moratorium on mining, logging and road-building is enacted. That’s why we’re calling on Secretary Vilsack to officially declare our national forests once again off limits to these destructive activities, a call echoed by Environment New Mexico supporters and thousands of online activists from our sister organizations across the country in e-mails to Secretary Vilsack this spring and summer.
Mining reprieve at the Grand Canyon
As we’ve reported, mining companies have staked more than 1,000 claims within just five miles of Grand Canyon National Park. The toxic chemicals employed in hardrock mining—including arsenic and cyanide—pose a major threat to the health of the Colorado River, which cuts through the Grand Canyon, and also to the well-being of the canyon’s tourists and wildlife. Hardrock mining has degraded approximately 40 percent of the headwaters that provide drinking water to communities across the West, according to EPA estimates.
In July, President Obama’s Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, announced a two-year hold on any new mining leases within an area of more than 1,000 acres of public land surrounding the Grand Canyon. We celebrated the announcement; now we’re joining forces with our national federation, Environment America, to call for a permanent ban and to push Congress to protect all of America’s treasured natural areas from destructive mining practices.
