Speak Out Against Human Meddling in Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

Your comments are due May 21, 2018

The U.S. Forest Service is proposing a significant new manipulation project inside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW). Your comments are needed by May 21st to convince the agency to not manipulate this iconic Wilderness and several roadless areas along its edge.

The 1.1 million-acre BWCAW lies in Superior National Forest in northeastern Minnesota. It is one of the most popular and well-visited areas in the entire National Wilderness Preservation System. The Hi Lo Project area lies within the Kawishiwi Ranger District north of the town of Ely along a road known as the Echo Trail.

With the Hi Lo Project, the Forest Service proposes to burn 1,314 acres within the BWCAW.  In addition, the agency proposes to log 1,362 acres in some of the five inventoried roadless areas along the Wilderness boundary in the project area, and to burn 2,761 acres in these inventoried roadless areas.

The proposal to burn forests within the BWCAW is not for any wilderness activity, nor for any ecological purpose. Rather, the Forest Service proposes to "harden" the Wilderness boundary to prevent future wildfires inside the BWCAW from escaping the Wilderness boundary and burning outside the Wilderness.  Such prescribed burning would manipulate the Wilderness and impose human will and intent on the landscape. Such manipulation is not authorized by the 1964 Wilderness Act, which requires that Wildernesses be unmanipulated by humans and remain "untrammeled by man."

Wilderness Watch certainly supports allowing natural, lightning-caused fires to play their ecological and evolutionary role in the BWCAW, but the Forest Service proposal in the Hi Lo Project represents exactly the kind of manipulation that the architects of the Wilderness Act sought to prevent.