Colorado Wild

One of the biggest loopholes conservationists want closed in Colorado’s revised roadless rule released by the state Monday is an exception for logging roads up to 1.5 miles into the national forest around communities threatened by wildfire in the wake of a devastating beetle-kill epidemic.
Colorado Wild’s Ryan Bidwell told the Denver Post that exception opens [...]

The Bush administration appears to be charging even harder down the road to a new Colorado roadless rule despite a meeting of a U.S. Forest Service advisory group in Washington earlier this month that revealed numerous problems with the plan.

This is the Bush administration’s last chance to implement its vision of how to administer pristine forest and park land. While in the Senate, President-elect Obama opposed the Bush administration’s plans for roadless areas.

The battle over management of Colorado’s 4.4 million acres has abruptly intensified, after years of federal intervention, state resistance and legal wrangling dating back to the final days of the Clinton administration.

At stake, according to a coalition of environmental groups fighting to protect roadless areas, is whether wide swaths of relatively unscathed national forest will be made more accessible to motorized vehicles, allowing incursion by logging companies, oil and gas drilling, construction of water pipelines and power transmission lines, and expansion by the state’s ski industry.