#off-road vehicles

Excerpt from this story from The Oregonian:

A national environmental nonprofit has asked a federal judge to protect threatened coastal martens from off-road vehicle events set for this summer in the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area.

The Center for Biological Diversity filed for a temporary injunction late last week, seeking to stop the U.S. Forest Service from issuing permits for the gatherings.

Coastal martens, also known as Humboldt martens, are small carnivorous mammals related to otters and weasels. Fewer than 400 coastal martens remain in four highly isolated populations in Oregon and California, with approximately 71 martens living in Oregon’s dunes.

The group argues that the noisy, multi-day events – including UTV Takeover held annually in Coos Bay in June and DuneFest held in Winchester Bay in late July – wreak havoc on the animals and their habitat during periods when marten kits are still dependent on their mothers. The events draw thousands of people and vehicles and feature races, sand camping, night rides and other activities.

Last May, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated 1.2 million acres of critical habitat in northwestern California and southwestern Oregon – including 28,843 acres in the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area (nearly the entire Oregon Dunes) – for martens.

Off-road vehicle use is allowed on designated routes and open riding areas established by the Forest Service in the Oregon dunes.

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The Trump administration is preparing to allow off-road vehicles on millions of acres of national forest land, according to a draft order prepared for Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary.

The move is a companion to President Trump’s decision on May 29 to repeal two executive orders that for decades had protected other public lands, including most national parks, from ATVs, dirt bikes and other off-road vehicles.

The undated Agriculture Department secretarial memorandum, which was reviewed by The New York Times, directs the U.S. Forest Service to identify which closed “roads, trails, areas, airstrips and waterways” in each national forest might be considered for year-round recreation access.

The memo would also immediately allow off-road vehicles in areas that the Forest Service has recommended to Congress should be granted wilderness protections. Right now, ATVs are not allowed in many of those areas, which are treated as if they were protected already. That move alone affects about 5 million acres, primarily in Idaho and Montana.

The pair of policies encouraging off-road vehicles is part of a Trump administration effort to de-emphasize conservation and promote recreation and economic activity on public lands.

In the coming weeks, the Forest Service is expected to issue a proposal to rescind a Clinton-era regulation that prevents new road-building in nearly 60 million acres of undeveloped land. (Mr. Abboud said any final decision on that policy would be the result of a process that includes environmental assessments and public comment.) The Bureau of Land Management has proposed to repeal a Biden-era rule that allowed public lands to be leased for conservation purposes. And the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed opening 95 percent of wildlife refuges to hunting and fishing.

President Trump on Friday rescinded two decades-old executive orders that restricted off-road vehicles on public lands, in a move that could lift prohibitions on their use in most national parks.

The first executive order, signed by President Richard M. Nixon in 1972, established strict criteria for the use of off-road vehicles on federal lands, in an effort to minimize their environmental impact. The second, signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, authorized the government to immediately shut down off-road driving if it was causing ecological damage.

Both orders applied to a variety of vehicles designed to drive on unpaved surfaces like dirt, sand, gravel, mud, rocks and snow. That included all-terrain vehicles, dirt bikes and snowmobiles.

In a fact sheet, the White House called both executive orders “outdated and burdensome,” noting that they were issued before the advent of modern technologies that can help the government detect off-road vehicle tracks in sensitive ecosystems.

“President Trump believes the American people should be able to access and enjoy their public lands without being burdened by unnecessary and outdated regulations,” the fact sheet said.

It was the latest move by the Trump administration to prioritize recreation, oil and gas drilling, logging and mining on public lands and waters across the country. The Biden administration, in contrast, had prioritized their use for conservation and renewable energy development.

Last year, the Forest Service moved to open 58 million acres of national forests to road construction and development. And this month, the Bureau of Land Management proposed to repeal a Biden-era rule that allowed public lands to be leased for conservation purposes.

Kate Groetzinger, a spokeswoman for the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group, sharply criticized the repeal of the executive orders.

Excerpt from this press release from the Center for Biological Diversity:

A judge has rejected federal agencies’ approval of activities in the California Desert Conservation Area, including a vast network of off-road vehicle routes in the West Mojave Desert. The activities are driving desert tortoises and other threatened and endangered wildlife toward extinction.

Tuesday’s ruling is a victory for conservationists. In 2021 environmental groups sued the Interior Department, Bureau of Land Management and Fish and Wildlife Service over the 2019 West Mojave Route Network Project, which failed to minimize off-road vehicles’ harms to public lands and protect endangered and threatened species and their habitats.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ruled that the Bureau violated the Federal Land Policy and Management Act by designating off-road vehicle routes without basing its criteria on minimizing damage to resources. That includes habitat for species such as the endangered Lane Mountain milk vetch, which is found only in the western Mojave Desert.

The judge also ruled that the Bureau wrongly assumed that there would be no growth in off-road vehicle activity or harm to air quality from the new routes.

Under the West Mojave plan, the BLM adopted nearly 6,000 miles of dirt roads for off-road vehicle use (that’s enough to go approximately one-quarter of the way around the Earth’s circumference). This has led off-roaders to create hundreds of new illegal roads in fragile habitat that is supposed to be protected for desert tortoises. The desert tortoise population has now declined to unsustainable levels in the western Mojave Desert.