The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is accepting comments on an ill-conceived proposal to use helicopters to ignite fire on up to 20,000 acres of public lands in southwestern Colorado over a 15-year period, including in and adjacent to the Powderhorn Wilderness and Wilderness Study Area (WSA). The 62,000-acre Powderhorn Wilderness is a high-elevation landscape with one of the largest unbroken expanses of alpine tundra in the Lower 48. The Powderhorn WSA comprises another 51,000 acres of wilderness-quality public lands. The project is being posed partially in response to a natural event where a spruce beetle outbreak killed Engelmann spruce across the area—though large stand-replacing events like this occur periodically in these high-elevation spruce-fir forests. The agency’s plan for heavy-handed intervention would destroy the wild character of the Wilderness and WSA. Please speak up for the Powderhorn by November 7! This project is entirely antithetical to the letter and spirit of the Wilderness Act and has no place in Wilderness. Its stated purpose “is to return timber stands to an earlier successional development stage,” via a plethora of activities entirely incompatible with Wilderness—helicopter landings, chainsaw use, and drones to ignite fires. All of these activities violate a fundamental tenet of Wilderness—that it remains “untrammeled,” or unmanipulated. Wilderness is a self-willed landscape where we let nature roll the dice, not a place where we try to force ecological conditions to our liking. Helicopters are at odds with and prohibited by the Wilderness Act except in rare cases where such use is essential to wilderness protection or search and rescue operations. Human-ignited fire is in no way essential to protecting the Powderhorn Wilderness/WSA, yet this proposal would allow an undetermined number of fire ignitions via helicopter in the Wilderness/WSA over 15 years. Helicopters also harass wildlife and destroy the experience for wilderness visitors. The BLM should instead allow natural fires to burn in the Wilderness/WSA. Not only does the project violate the letter and spirit of the Wilderness Act, but it is unlikely to achieve one of its main goals—to “reduce the likelihood of high severity fire”—in the face of climate-driven wildfires, and could instead cause such fire if human-ignited burns can’t be controlled. And the science does not support BLM’s claims that beetle-killed trees increase high severity fire. Howard Zahniser, the author of the Wilderness Act, put it best when he implored us to be “guardians not gardeners.” Please urge the BLM to drop this proposal and let the Powderhorn be wild. Submit your comments here:
eplanning.blm.gov/eplanning-ui/project/2021619/595/8003221/comment.
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