ISSUE BRIEF: Stop Wilderness Designations in California
Please preserve access to federal lands in California
The Issue:
The 1964 Wilderness Act created the National Wilderness Preservation System. The Act gave Congress the ability to designate areas as wilderness. To date over 600 wilderness areas have been designated encompassing over 105 million acres.
A wilderness designation effectively locks up land from any type of multiple use activities, including: road construction, forestry, water storage and conveyance, energy development and recreational activities that require a motorized vehicle.
They also deny access to many citizens who have a right to use our public lands. Wilderness designations do not allow any mechanized vehicles in the area, including bicycles and wheelchairs, which makes access to these areas severely restricted by the citizens who own the land.
Wilderness designations also negatively impact the West’s ability to fight and prevent forest fires. Since fighting fires is banned in wilderness areas, government agencies have to allow fires to burn themselves out. So anyone or anything near these potential unmanaged wilderness areas across the West could be in danger of future forest fires.
These concerns are particularly heightened by legislation recently introduced by California Representative Mary Bono. H.R. 3682, the California Desert and Mountain Heritage Act, would designate certain federal lands in Riverside County, California as wilderness, and it would designate certain river segments in Riverside County as a wild, scenic, or recreational river.
Impacts
When an area is designated as wilderness, an meaningful ability to use the land for multiple use purposes is lost forever. In this case, H.R. 3682 could damage public access and recreation in this inland Southern California area. It is precisely because of these impacts that legislation affecting the public’s access to public lands must make an allowance for input from local communities and those who use and depend on these resources for work and recreation.
Perhaps the most important “public access” issue presented by H.R. 3682 is its impact on firefighting efforts. This is a prime concern in Southern California, given the perennial fire dangers inherent in this arid region.
While Representative Bono added language to H.R. 3682 to permit tree removal and other fire prevention work to lessen the danger to communities that are located close to the proposed wilderness areas, the U.S. Forest Service has inadequate funding to properly manage wilderness areas with prescribed burning and mechanical thinning of vegetation. Regardless of the fire prevention language in this bill, the red tape and environmental review processes are so prohibitively difficult that it is likely that this fire prevention work will not actually be done. As a result, this bill could negatively impact firefighters’ ability to fight and prevent forest fires in that Southern California area.
Status of Issue
Democratic control of both bodies of Congress has meant that wilderness designations are a much more active topic in the 110th Congress. H.R. 3682 could easily pass the House and Senate without these concerns being addressed.
Solution
Tell Congress to oppose H.R. 3682, and similar wilderness designation legislation, unless there is support from the impacted state's delegation, local community input and support, and the area clearly has the characteristics of a wilderness area as defined by The 1964 Wilderness Act.