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Show f * V I -.(• S I E R R A C L U B Uinta Chapter I865 .Herbert Avonuo Salt' Lake City, Utah 84108 March 8, 1972 i ' Druid Arch by Nelson Wadsworth Mr. Vern Harare, Regional Forester Federal Building 324 25th Street Ogden, Utah 84401 Dear Hr. Hamre: The following is the statement of the Uinta Chapter of the Sierra Club presented at the public hearings on the Undeveloped Area Inventory held in Salt Lake City. Utah on March 8, 1972. My name is David C. Raskin. I am the Conservation Chairman of the Uinta Chapter of the Sierra Club. I wish to thank the Forest Service for this opportunity to present the views of our nearly 600 members in the State 6f Utah. I do not believe that it Is necessary to reiterate all of the rationale for setting .. aside significant portions of our public lands to be managed essentially in their natural state. We are all familiar with the generally agreed-upon needs for maintaining some sort of balance in our use of public lands. Too often some people think only in terms of development for economic gain such as timber production, mining, intensive grazing, roads, lodges, dams and reservoirs, etc. They tend to think of those as the only legitimate uses of lands because they provide short-term profits for some corporations and individuals. We also hear the developers claim that since National Forest lands are required to be managed on the basis of multiple use and sustained yield, and since wilderness is said to be a single-purpose use/ we should have no x^ilderness in our National Forests. The Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of i960 states that » The establishment and maintenance of areas of wilderness are consistent with the purposes and provisions of the Act." Obviously, the Congress felt that wilderness is a legitimate use of the National Forest lands. What we need at this point in time is a comprehensive land-use plan to determine which areas are most suitable for development and which areas are best left in their natural state. I am here to make a strong plea for the latter option. As of January 31, 1971 there were 10,37^,000 acres of officially designated wilder-neSS. in t h e N a t i o n a l Wilderness Preservation System (MPS). Of this total, the State of Utah had 0 acres.; • In addition, there were 56,8^9,000 acros under review for inclusion in the NWPS. Utah's share of that x*as 970,000 cicres. Although Utah has more de facto wilderness than almost all of the other states, we do not have a single jgre__in the IMPS and less than 2% of the acreage under reviex-f is in Utah. Contrast that record with that of our neighboring State of Wyoming which has 1,782,000 acres in the NWPS and another 2,938,000 acres under review. That represents almost 5 times the number of acres in Utah which are under review for inclusion in the NWPS, |
