Last year, in the course of a telephone conversation with one of my Senator's aides, I was told this terrible truth. "When green groups can rally ten thousand comment letters, and snowmobilers can't manage to deliver more than a thousand, it makes it tough for us to stand up for you. There is only so much we can do, Viki. This is a democracy, remember, and your folks are sounding like a minority here in D.C."
That comment made my stomach lurch. This young woman was absolutely right. For years I've watched as environmental extremists and agenda driven "public servants" have stacked the deck against recreationists. They really don't have to work very hard at it. In the case of snowmobilers, all the other side really needs to do is schedule public comment periods for the spring and summer months.
Once we put our sleds away, we toss our access issues in the garage with last year's trail map! We go merrily about our lawn mowing while groups like the 'Bewilderness Society' and the 'BilgeWater Nutworks' keep those anti snowmobile cards and letters stacking up on desks in Washington.
As you read Secretary of Interior Gale Norton's very interesting comments below, you can see that the current administration is doing everything they can to help us maintain our winter access to Yellowstone Park. Over the chorus of howling and whining from our opponents, our friends in Washington opened the Yellowstone EIS process again. They took some serious political risks to give the snowmobile community the opportunity to rally the troops - to make a mighty noise in support of our sport.
So far, I'm not terribly impressed.
The public comment period for the Supplemental Environmental Impact Study is coming to an end. May 29th is fast approaching and our opponents are pulling out all stops. The fact that the snowmobile ban is no longer a 'slam dunk,' has environmental extremists running scared. In these final minutes, our opponents are doing everything within their power, spending every dime necessary to be sure the anti-snowmobile comments dwarf those snowmobilers submit. And they are counting on us to do what snowmobilers typically do in these cases. Nothing.
I challenge you to do three things today.
1) Send a comment letter for yourself, then ask three friends to do the same. A letter is ready for you to sign at:
www.saveyellowstonepark.com2) Sign the petition at:
www.petitiononline.com then pass the URL on to EVERYBODY in your address book.
3) Send this letter on to every snowmobiler you know...
Just pretend for a moment that the future of snowmobiling depends on what you do today… because, guess what?! It does!
The following is excerpted from a UPI report published on April 9, 2002:On Tuesday Interior Secretary Gale Norton sat down with several United Press International editors for a Newsmakers Breakfast. The following is a transcript of the questions, and her responses on drilling the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve, on the environment and on other issues covered by the Interior Department:
Q. Some of the environmental groups have very harshly criticized the administration and its environmental policies, one group even giving the administration a grade of "D" in its annual report. How do you answer the critics when they say the administration so far has not been very good stewards of conservation since President Bush took office, particularly on issues such as seeking rollbacks on regulations in the use of snowmobiles in national parks since a lot of these issues have made their way into federal court?
A. There are some who focus on the areas of disagreement and others who focus on the areas where we have agreement. We've been working with a number of the environmental groups on things like our Cooperative Conservation Initiative and had those groups coming out in support of the president's proposal; but what gets the attention is the outer areas where there is disagreement.
Let me describe what we are trying to do in Yellowstone as an example. What we want to do is find areas of reasonable approaches, areas of trying to balance the recreation interests and environmental protection interests, trying to balance things so we can try to meet as many different needs as possible and to find ways to stretch our resources to do that.
In the Yellowstone area, the Clinton administration had proposed a complete ban on snowmobiles. We looked at that and said, "That may be going too far. Let's see what else can be done to try and accommodate the needs." The first thing that's significant is that the technology of snowmobiles is changing. From what I have heard, I haven't seen one in person yet, the new generation of snowmobiles, the four-cycle engines as opposed to the old two-cycle engines, are far less polluting and far quieter. That minimizes, right there, the two main complaints that people have about snowmobiles in Yellowstone. We wanted to find out what the effect of that new technology would be and so we're going through the environmental impact analysis now.
Secondly, because they had taken the approach that they were going to just ban snowmobiles totally, they hadn't looked at what you can do to manage them without banning them entirely. We started doing things like putting speed limits; saying that the snowmobiles can only be on what would be paved roads in the summer time and so they are confined to the paved roads; having better enforcement, we've had a lot more people out there issuing tickets for the snowmobiles that are getting off track; educating the snowmobilers through their clubs about the impact on wildlife.
One of the things that was a big problem in the last administration was they basically had everybody line up to get their permits to go into Yellowstone, and they'd sit there and rev their snowmobiles as they were waiting in line to get their permits. We said, "Why don't we just sell the permits off site so they can just walk in someplace, buy their permits, and then when it's time to go through they just go on through and get out of town. We're doing a lot of those things. We're looking at some additional measures along those lines, perhaps restricting the number of snowmobiles, requiring that they only go through in groups, setting times when they can go through and when they can't, looking at the routes they can go on -- there are a whole variety of different things that we can do to still allow people who want to have snowmobiles as a recreation alternative to have that possibility and yet accommodate the interests of others.