Forest plan revisions make sense

Blotches of purple, representing "recommended wilderness," were scattered across the Kootenai National Forest map that outlined the starting proposal for a new long-range forest plan.

But as of Monday, the forest has changed direction and "recommended wilderness" is no longer part of the picture. In its place are new category designations such as "Wild Lands" and a new color-coding scheme on the forest map.

The change has infuriated wilderness advocates, who feel they have lost everything they've been working for by participating in the forest plan revision process the past few years. Meanwhile, snowmobilers in Lincoln County thought they made great gains with the elimination of a formal recommendation that some 163,000 acres be designated as wilderness.

Neither perception is quite right. And neither group is getting exactly what it wanted.

The fact of the matter is that the plan should be realistic, not hypothetical. If there is realistic potential for certain areas to eventually be designated as wilderness by Congress, the forest should offer protections and a formal recommendation for a particular area that stands the best chance of a congressional designation.

If not, the forest should not be proffering "de facto" wilderness protections for lands that have no foreseeable chance of winning a congressional designation.

The forest's new "Wild Lands" designation, assigned to about 124,000 acres, carries most of the same protections assigned to "recommended wilderness," including the controversial exclusion of snowmobile use.

But while those protections will ensure the viability of Wild Lands for a someday-maybe wilderness designation, there is no formal Forest Service recommendation that can be manipulated with lawsuits and lobbying into being more than what was intended.

The new designations also offer some more selective partitioning for about 40,000 acres that were once lumped into the recommended wilderness areas. Now those lands are protected from logging, road building and mining, but less impacting snowmobile use can continue. Under the new designations, established snowmobiling would continue in the Ten Lakes area near Eureka, the Northwest Peaks area in the extreme northwest corner of the state, and in a basin north of the Scotchman Peaks where snowmobiling currently isn't allowed.

There should be more of that kind of specificity in the new forest plan, rather than bluntly blocking off large chunks of land for wilderness designations that may never happen.