Federal Plans to Develop Forests Near Yellowstone Hit : Proposals for Logging and Oil Drilling Lack Adequate Study, Wilderness Society Warns

The Wilderness Society protested Saturday that U.S. Forest Service plans for commercial logging, oil and gas drilling and road construction in national forests surrounding Yellowstone National Park threaten wildlife and water quality in one of the nation’s last large wilderness areas.

The 130,000-member national conservation organization said in a report that long-range Forest Service development plans for seven national forests adjoining the park will endanger the survival of big game--such as elk, grizzly bears, wolverines and mountain lions--as they encourage uneconomic extractive industries at the expense of recreation and tourism.

Policies that subordinate exploitation of resources to wilderness conservation are required, the report said, to ensure that a 13-million-acre “Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem” continues into the future as “a priceless reminder of what western North America was like just two centuries ago, before the arrival of European settlers.”

Questions Planning

The area takes in Grand Teton National Park and three wildlife refuges, as well as Yellowstone and all or part of the seven national forests. The parks are closed to logging and mining, but the forests are not.

Planning for individual forests is inadequate, the report said, in an area “where a single grizzly bear may roam over hundreds of miles and where elk herds freely migrate across federal jurisdictions.” It called for plans that take into consideration the cumulative effects on the entire region of environment-threatening actions in the individual forests.

The report proposed steps to link existing wild areas and shield them from timber and mineral exploitation. The result, it said, would be “the largest expanse of protected land in the coterminous United States and a magnificent showpiece for this nation’s commitment to the conservation of biological diversity.”

The rugged, spectacular park and adjoining forests straddle Wyoming’s northwest borders with Idaho and Montana.

Committee Created

Forest Service spokesman Steve Fitch told United Press International that the Park Service and Forest Service had recently created a Yellowstone Area Coordinating Committee to avoid conflicting policies. “I think that’s going to really take care of the concern for fragmentation that the Wilderness Society has,” he said.

Would Ban Sheep

David Wilcove, a Wilderness Society ecologist, recommended when the report was released that sheep ranching be banned from the preserve and that recreational areas be separated from grizzly bear habitats. He supported proposals that the gray wolf, long extinct there, be reintroduced into the area.

Most timber-cutting around Yellowstone is uneconomic, the report said. It called on the Forest Service to phase out “below-cost” sales of timber from the area’s national forests over the next decade.

It challenged assumptions on which the service had based future profits from timber sales. Those Forest Service estimates were based on figures for the 1970s, the report said, although prices have fallen substantially since then and seem unlikely to recover fully.

The Wilderness Society calculated that planned Forest Service timber sales “will require millions of dollars annually in taxpayer subsidies while threatening critical wildlife habitat and further degrading the much more valuable resource base for recreation and tourism.”

Cites Wilderness Benefits

Arguing that Forest Service budget priorities are out of date, the report estimated that the recreational and wildlife-related aspects of the 10 million acres of forests that surround the park will produce substantially more benefits over the next half century than will exploitative activities.

Although the current world oil glut has discouraged exploration and production in this country, 5.9 million acres of the forest land are eligible for oil and gas leasing and 4.7 million acres are already under lease or have lease applications, the report said.

It opposed drilling for the fuels, saying oil and gas extraction, along with geothermal exploration, “displace wildlife populations, degrade water quality, threaten unique features within Yellowstone National Park, and could result in potentially catastrophic impacts.”

It called for a moratorium on new oil and gas leases pending evaluations of the impact on each proposed site, and recommended a general deferment of mineral development in national forests.