Idaho Wilderness Hearings

Statement:

Mr. Jayne. Thank you. Senator McClure. I'm Jerry Jayne and this is a statement for myself. It's difficult to overstate the worth of wilderness. Some of the more important ones include: The positive human expression of an evolving land ethic, ecological benchmarks and the scientific values related thereto, educational values, wildlife habitat, watershed pro tection, recreation and inspiration. And I find increasingly that one of the most important and tangible of these is the need for the pro tection of wildlife habitat because many species are largely depend ent upon the wilderness environment, and many of them are com pletely dependent upon it. 598 I think a basic question in this discussion should be relative to the existing wilderness resource; namely, how much wilderness is there in Idaho? And it's difficult to pin that down. My guess is that about 30 percent of Idaho is still wilderness; in fact 15 to 16 million acres, most of this is in the national forest. I've seen no precise amount for this, but I derive a figure of roughly 13 million acres of national forest wilderness still existing in Idaho. It's derived as fol lows: 3.8 million are designated as wilderness, that's all that is pro tected; 5.6 million is left in the current Rare II inventory; 1 million was released from the Rare II inventory in the Central Idaho Wil derness Act of 1980 and is available for timber harvest, et cetera; and about 2Vz to 3 million acres were not inventoried in Rare II because they had been discussed and dropped from further consid eration in about 30 land use plans during the 1970's prior to Rare II. This is an estimate of the existing national forest wilderness, the actual wilderness. The roughly 4 million acres that are designated are the protected subset of this 13 million. The other 9 million are what are up for grabs; they are unprotected and unfortunately most of that amount is threatened by this hasty legislation which proposes release language on only a minimal designation of wilder ness. The other 8 million acres of national forests in Idaho are cur rently roaded and available generally for timber harvest. The next question which follows from this is how much of this 13 million acres of existing national forest wilderness in Idaho should be retained? Considering that every subtraction from this 13 mil lion acre base means the loss of some wildlife habitat and the dis ruption of existing natural ecosystem, considering also that in gen eral most of the best timberland is already available for timber harvest, then it seems reasonable to me to retain a large fraction of the remaining 13 million acres of wilderness. I have no magic figure, I will probably support the Conservationist's Alternative when it comes out this fall, at least as a minimum. I would say, just throwing out a possible split of that 9 million acres, if we make 4 million more of it available for timber harvest and designate 5 million of it for wilderness, that would seem to me to be overly generous to the timber industry. This would increase the total area available for timber harvest to 12 million acres and increase the total amount of protected wilderness to 9 million acres, which we could hope to save in perpetuity. I'm opposed to release language, even soft release unless the bill, which it contains, contains also enough designated wilderness areas; and this would be a minimum of the Conservationst's Alter native which will be forumlated this fall. I support the endangered Idaho wilderness core of 10 areas and groups of areas, which you no doubt have heard the names of al ready. These include Mount Mallard-Larkins, Great Burn up North, White Cloud-Boulders, et cetera. I support also in eastern Idaho the following areas for wilderness in your bill. Thank you.