What Off Road Vehicles Do (part 3)

Factory Butte, Utah BLM

By Deep Green Resistance Four Corners

In the last two posts, we talk about how off road vehicles continually break the law in going—well, off road—and how their noise and disturbance fragment habitat and push public-lands policies toward more development by turning vague routes into established roads.  In some instances ORVs are exclusively to blame for  the endangerment of a species—such as at Sand Mountain, Nevada, formerly “Singing Sand Mountain” until it was overrun by machines churning to dust the habitat of the Sand Mountain blue butterfly.  The Center for Biological Diversity writes that the butterfly “is closely linked to Kearney buckwheat; larvae feed exclusively on the plant, and adult butterflies rely on its nectar as a primary food source. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Land Management has allowed off-road vehicle use to destroy much of the Kearney buckwheat that once thrived on the dunes at Sand Mountain.” [1]

Agency inertia is easily the most immediate reason the ORVs have caused so much damage, since law enforcement is underfunded, and because policy-makers obviously don’t make a priority of protecting the terrain that’s entrusted to them.  The Center for Biological Diversity had to sue the US Fish and Wildlife Service to even get a response to a petition to list the blue butterfly under the Endangered Species Act, and the agency’s response was that they wouldn’t do it.  “Not warranted.”  There aren’t even any jobs being held hostage in this situation and others like it (such as manatees being killed by speedboats in Florida).  This is recreation and nothing more, taking ever more animals and plants from the biological legacy of the planet.

One reason why opposition to ORVs and the destruction they cause is so feeble and inadequate is because the issue has been miscast as a user-group conflict, where one gang of wealthy elitists is trying to corner access to common lands at the expense of another.  This human-centered perception forgets entirely that other beings’ lives depend on the land and water at stake.  A sea-kayaker friend of mine in Montana told me how she used to resent jet-skis and speedboats on lakes she paddles on, but decided she was just going to accept it.  “I started feeling selfish,” she told me.  But her peace and quiet is the least of it—wakes from motorized watercraft swamp bird’s nests, including in that case the loon, whose haunting iconic call is being silenced.  Also, the oil and fuel spilled by gasoline engines is toxic to fish, birds, and invertebrates.  So while the kayaker’s acceptance of the destruction wrought by others might make her feel nicer and ostensibly more democratic, she’s turning her back on the living creatures she presumably values.

And the entitlement taken by the ORVers themselves is even more aggressive and unconcerned for living things.  In some long-ago argument with a motorcyclist enraged by new restrictions on off-roading in the Mojave Desert, he shouted, “It’s the fucking desert!  Nothing lives out there!”  Anyone who’s even spent any time there knows this is ridiculous.  The Mojave is being dismembered piecemeal by solar energy projects, military bases, and an ever-worsening ORV infection; desert tortoises are being driven ever closer to extinction, along with every other Mojave lizard, snake, ground-nesting bird—many living things—in the way of the dominant culture’s activities.  It’s just another expression of what privileged access to limited and stolen resources does.  Another friend told me “I was working the booth at Sand Flats”—a Bureau of Land Management recreation area just outside Moab—“during Jeep Week.  There were thousands and thousands of ORVers in town.  I looked out the window and saw a woman smack her little boy upside the head, a guy dump his ashtray out in the parking lot, and a line of maybe forty Humvees waiting to follow each other around the backcountry.  This was just after the Iraq invasion, and I remember thinking, ‘This is everything that’s wrong with America, in one frame.  This is what we’re killing strangers for.  For oil to do this.’”  That same week, my housemate, a waiter at the local brewery, told me how he’d been tipped twenty-five cents—spitefully, to his face—because the burger he brought a jeeper wasn’t quite hot enough.  “That’s why we all call it ‘Cheap Week,’” he said.  The week you see wealthy ORV tourists swaggering around in t-shirts reading: the best trails are illegal.

What Off Road Vehicles Do (part 2)

By Deep Green Resistance Four Corners (Read Part 1 here)

The Utah Wilderness Coalition has this to say about off road vehicles:

“Most public lands are unprotected from ORVs in Utah. Roughly seventy-five percent, or 17 million acres out of 23 million acres, of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands in Utah still lack any real protection (including designated routes, maps, trail signs, and other tools to ensure that these natural areas are protected) from ORV damage.

“Utah has over 100,000 miles of dirt roads, jeep trails, and old mining tracks. Driving all of these trails would be the equivalent of driving four times the circumference of the Earth.

“The BLM allows nearly uncontrolled ORV use in areas that have known but unrecorded archeological resources, putting these resources at risk from vandalism and unintentional damage. ORVs can cause damage to fragile desert soils, streams, vegetation, and wildlife. Impacts include churning of soils, distribution of non-native invasive plants, and increased erosion and runoff. Rare plant, wildlife, and fish species are at risk.

“ORV use is growing nationwide. In the past 30 years, the number of off-road vehicles in the United States has grown from 5 million to roughly 36 million ORVs. The BLM has fallen woefully behind in the management of these machines on public lands.

What Off Road Vehicles Do (part 1)

Many of the yellow lines are old roads that have been re-injured by off road vehicles. Graphic courtesy of Canyonlands Watershed Council.

By Deep Green Resistance Four Corners

Many of the yellow lines are old roads that have been re-injured by off road vehicles. Graphic courtesy of Canyonlands Watershed Council.

Everywhere where there is affordable gasoline, ORVs are impacting deserts, forests, tundra and grasslands.  New technology has made much more terrain easily accessible to people driving quads (4-wheel ORVs), motorcycles, and snowmobiles.  This has become the new disease of the frontier, spreading soil erosion, water pollution, and invasive weeds.  In the Colorado Plateau’s especially fragile soils, motorized recreation–particularly illegal trails–crush “biological soil crusts,” (previously known as “cryptobiotic soil”) impacts that last for decades. Fine sand that was held in place by a matrix of fungi, algae, mosses, lichen, and cyanobacteria  is eroded by wind and water, leaving less purchase for larger plants and carrying dust onto mountain snows that hastens spring melt.

Off road vehicle impacts are widespread but hard to quantify, since they have many primary and secondary impacts both on the land itself and on public lands policy.  One activist told us of the map on the left, “Those are the currently existing, poorly built–usually not intentionally built at all–’roads.’ They’re not new. The only reason it was the proposed road system is that before the new RMP [Resource Management Plan], those roads had little or no legal status–they were just scars on the landscape, most of them left over from the uranium days. They were healing pretty well until the ORVers got ahold of them, and made them into a playground. And, just as importantly, lobbied to get those ‘roads’ legally designated as such, so that they couldn’t be closed. And perhaps even more importantly, the legal RMP designation of those ‘roads’ means that the area could not realistically be designated wilderness, roadless, etc. Having those old scars be designated as ORV routes essentially prevents the whole area from being protected.

Illegal trails

“The RMP is final, and is currently in effect. It is also under litigation and could be rescinded, or partially reconsidered, if the Obama Administration wants the plaintiffs to drop the lawsuit and make a deal.”

In the next few posts we’ll be examining the impacts and implications of off road vehicles, studying past efforts to prevent their often-illegal activities, and proposing possible means of resistance.  We invite commentary and suggestions.

Click here to read Part II…

Deep Green Resistance Four Corners is an affiliated action group of Deep Green Resistance International. Our mission is building a culture of resistance to defend the land base of the Colorado Plateau, a semi-arid high elevation region of sandstone canyons, mesas, buttes, and mountain ranges surrounding the four corners region of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico.