Los Padres Wilderness Badly Depleted, Study Says

Over the last two decades, Los Padres National Forest, which includes Ventura County’s vast back country, lost more wild lands to human encroachment than any other forest in California, according to a study released by an environmental group Wednesday.

In the last 19 years, 130,000 acres of untrammeled land in Los Padres forest--a mountainous coastal expanse from Carmel to Castaic--has been degraded, largely by off-road vehicles, concluded the report by the Davis-based California Wilderness Coalition.

One of every 5 acres of U.S. Forest Service wilderness lost in California since 1979 is in Los Padres.

Urban development brings more people and machines to the forest, particularly around Ventura, San Luis Obispo and Santa Maria, Forest Service officials say.

Alisdair Coyne, an organic gardener from Ojai and conservation director of the Keep the Sespe Wild Committee, said he has seen the changes. Hikes in the back country are increasingly interrupted by dirt bikes and their trails.

“The Forest Service hasn’t been living up to its responsibility to manage the character of the forests. They’re letting off-roaders go all over wherever they wish, and that’s a terrible shame,” Coyne said.

But Forest Service officials say that in response to environmental concerns and declining logging, fewer roads have been built in recent years across California mountain ranges.

And dirt-bike tracks near places like Lockwood Valley, Ballinger Canyon and other off-road vehicle sites do not rule out designation of protected wilderness areas in the future, said Mark Bethke, a district ranger for the Los Padres forest.

“We have a great deal of emphasis on wilderness in this forest,” said Peg Boland, deputy supervisor for Los Padres. “We are very aware of trying to manage so we don’t preclude opportunities for future wilderness.”

Nevertheless, the report by the California Wilderness Coalition concludes that undeveloped areas in California national forests have been disappearing at the rate of nearly 100 acres a day since 1979. That was when the Forest Service identified 6.3 million acres of potential wilderness in 18 national forests in California. Much of that land has since been developed with congressional approval, leaving little more than half untouched.

At that rate, all the state’s remaining forest wild lands would be degraded or gone by the end of the 21st century, members of the group contend.

Logging roads, motorcycles and other human encroachment threaten remaining “wilderness-caliber” land. Such territory is vital for wildlife and offers escape for an increasingly urban populace, according to the report. Significant development has touched 675,449 acres that the Forest Service identified as roadless and “wilderness-caliber” in 1979--a loss of 11%, the study concluded.

The figures do not, however, include land formally designated as protected wilderness. About one-third of the nearly 2 million acres in Los Padres is designated wilderness, the highest level of land-use protection.

‘Philosophical Differences’ Cited

Janice Gauthier, spokeswoman for the Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest region, said many of the areas counted as lost in the coalition’s report were within 1.8 million acres of land that Congress allowed the Forest Service to designate for uses ranging from logging to mining to cattle grazing. She ascribed her agency’s differences with the coalition as “philosophical disagreement.”

“There’s nothing illegal and there’s no scandal. I’m not sure they told the whole story,” Gauthier said.

The study shows that getting away from it all is becoming increasingly difficult in the nation’s most populous state. The portrait contained in the report shows that as California’s population surges, more and more people will be forced to share a shrinking amount of open, untrammeled mountain country.

“These are California’s last wild places,” said Paul Spitler, executive director of the coalition, which represents California’s leading environmental groups. “We can’t bring back the wilderness we’ve already lost, but by acting now, we can save what little remains.”

Human impacts on wild lands in the national forests within California’s borders are distributed unevenly, with development pressing hard into Southern California’s mountains while largely skirting remote forests such as the Siskiyou in the north. The landscapes at risk range from chaparral slopes in Ventura County to timbered peaks near Lake Tahoe to the rain forests east of Eureka.

The 340-page report, titled “California’s Vanishing Forests: Two Decades of Destruction,” is the first comprehensive inventory of California’s national forest wild lands in nearly 20 years.

Release of the document will probably increase pressure on the Clinton administration to impose a moratorium on new road building in California’s national forests. Environmentalists seek a ban on new road construction, although the Forest Service proposal would exempt much of northwest California. A decision on whether to impose an interim moratorium is expected in November.

Benefits of Wild Lands Told

Scientists say large tracts of unspoiled land provide food and shelter for animals such as salmon, deer and songbirds. People, too, benefit from wilderness because healthy ecosystems provide essential human services, including natural water filtration, flood control and soil conservation. Wild territory also affords urban dwellers an escape from concrete and noise, a value that Congress has recognized since the 1964 Wilderness Preservation Act.

“People really depend on national forest wilderness areas as a respite from urban life,” said Barbara Boyle, California director of the Sierra Club. “We’re going to need more wild spaces as California’s population grows. From the point of view of critters and human beings, we’re going to have to protect what’s left.”

But critics of the report say things are not as bad out in the middle of nowhere as it indicates. For example, they note, nearly 20% of the 24 million acres of national forest in California are already designated wilderness, the highest form of protection. In addition, substantial wild areas are found in state and national parks and public lands managed by the U. S. Bureau of Land Management.

In counting losses of roadless area, a chief criterion to qualify a tract of land as wilderness, the California Wilderness Coalition examined forest maps, plans and aerial photographs. The coalition counted land as lost for wilderness if tracts of 5,000 acres or more were significantly degraded by dams, power lines, roads, off-highway vehicle use or other uses.

Spitler acknowledged that some of those areas may still contain lots of open and scenic land.

Yet in some key respects, timber groups, environmentalists and the Forest Service for the moment appear to be moving in the same direction, emphasizing the need to limit development in roadless areas.

Timber harvests in California have been cut in half in the last decade, in part over concern for endangered species, requiring fewer roads for logging trucks and less development in the forests, said Chris Nance, spokesman for the California Forestry Assn.

“We’re seeing a shift in the Forest Service. We’re seeing less of an emphasis on commodity and extractive uses and more of an emphasis on conservation and scientific management practices,” Gauthier said.

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Lost Forest

More than 675,000 acres of national forests in the state have been affected by development since 1979, according to the California Wilderness Coalition. Following are the forests in Southern California and acreage degraded in each:

Angeles: 9,818

Cleveland: 750

Los Padres: 130,067

San Bernardino: 22,000