This editorial, extensively excerpted:
By Kevin Proescholdt
Updated: 11/28/2008 07:13:06 PM CST
Thirty years ago this fall, President Jimmy Carter signed the 1978 Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) Act into law. While this law provided important protections for the BWCAW, it did not address all challenges in protecting the area for future generations.
That's how it's been all along in the effort to protect the Boundary Waters wilderness — progress is difficult, and it happens in stages.A compromise provision in the 1964 Wilderness Act (the law that provided statutory protections for wilderness areas and established the National Wilderness Preservation System) singled out the Boundary Waters for continued logging and motorboat use, practices normally not allowed in areas so protected. This provision made the BWCA a wilderness in name but not necessarily in management.
As a consequence, a series of controversies erupted in the late 1960s and early 1970s over mining, logging, snowmobiling and motorboating in the BWCA. By the mid-1970s, Congress again turned its attention to the canoe country to try to resolve the controversies. The resolution did not come quickly or easily.
After a very public three-year debate, Congress finally passed the 1978 law after a number of weakening compromises made in the House and Senate. Led by U.S. Reps. Donald Fraser and Bruce Vento from Minnesota and Philip Burton from California, this law ended logging in the BWCA (and protected the remaining 540,000 acres of unlogged forest), reduced (but did not eliminate) motorboat use, phased out snowmobiling (except for two short access routes to Canadian properties), tightly restricted mining within the Boundary Waters and established a BWCA Mining Protection Area outside the wilderness, officially added "Wilderness" to the area's name, and expanded the area by about 68,000 acres in key additions like the Hegman Lakes, Brule Lake and the Fowl Lakes.That helped, but threats to the area's wilderness character persist. Motorboats still run across about one-fifth of the BWCAW's water surface area. On two wilderness portages, jeeps and ATVs drive across along the trails hauling boats. Mining was not absolutely forbidden, and new proposed sulfide mining projects just outside the Boundary Waters pose major threats from acid mine drainage. Global climate change may significantly change the BWCAW's ecosystem. Ecosystem processes like fire are not always allowed to fully function without human manipulation. Excessive visitation at times threatens the area's solitude and wilderness character. Despite the law, illegal motorboat and snowmobile use still occurs. And the remaining roadless areas in the Superior National Forest, most of them along the periphery of the BWCAW, are threatened with road-building and logging.
In 2001, the federal government finalized the Roadless Area Conservation Rule to protect 58 million acres of inventoried roadless areas in our National Forests nationwide, including about 61,000 acres in the Superior National Forest here in Minnesota. But the Bush administration threw out the roadless rule and instituted instead a state-by-state petition process. Various federal judges have ruled both for and against the original roadless rule and the Bush plan, leaving both approaches in legal limbo.
Protected roadless areas have great value in their own right. They provide some of the best fishing, hunting, hiking and remote camping areas. They harbor fish and wildlife and blocks of undisturbed forest often not found in logged areas and those with roads. They offer opportunities for scientific study and research, and they safeguard sources of clean drinking water.In the Superior National Forest, roadless areas provide additional benefits because of their proximity to the BWCAW. Roadless areas help preserve the BWCAW itself by blocking negative impacts like invasive species or traffic noise from reaching the wilderness; they provide wilderness-like recreation when the BWCAW is at visitor capacity, and they provide the primary source of lands that might one day be added to the BWCAW.
Kevin Proescholdt directs the Wilderness and Public Lands Program for the Izaak Walton League of America. A former BWCAW guide, he helped pass the 1978 law through Congress and co-authored the definitive book on that struggle, "Troubled Waters: The Fight for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness."
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May 2008 BWCA camping photos from here. As always, click to enlarge.