On the
BEATEN PATH

Off-road vehicles are causing increasing damage in a number of parks, including Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida. Managing these thrillcraft has become a top priority for the National Park Service.

BY TODD WILKINSON

   FAR BELOW John Donahue's eagle-eye view, the marshy prairie of Florida's Big Cypress National Preserve is alive in a ratcheting chatter of swamp bugs, flitting wings of neotropical songbirds, and flocks of wading birds cruising toward the nearby Everglades. Donahue, the preserve superintendent, had heard stories of how off-road vehicles (ORV), namely high-powered "swamp buggies," were invading the peaceful wilderness wetland. He even followed the maze of tire tracks to confirm it.

   But until he flew over the broad mosaic in a helicopter not long after he took the top park management post and saw the consequences of some 22,000 miles of unregulated ORV trails, Donahue says he had little inkling of how massive the problem was. Or why ORV management has become a pressing priority throughout America's National Park System.

   In recent years, Big Cypress has become the blighted poster child of what can go wrong when ORVs rather than park managers take the driver's seat.

   "The destruction that has taken place in Big Cypress is one of the Park Service's dirty little secrets. It is a scandal that no one really wanted to address until John Donahue came along," says Mary Munson, director of NPCA's south Florida office. "There are parts so heavily laced with muddy tracks it looks like a motocross raceway."

   Munson blames the situation on the National Park Service (NPS), which ignored the problem until it became a crisis. "It would be unfair to put the blame for this situation entirely on ORV users-they were simply taking advantage of lax Park Service regulations. In fact, the Everglades Coordinating Council, a hunting group, was calling for stricter regulations even before the conservation community stepped in."

   Slashed across Big Cypress' interior of island tree hammocks, surrounding prairies, and speckled jewels of water is a rogue trail system that, stretched end to end, would reach from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles seven times. It's a mind-numbing transgression given that just a decade ago, barely 1,200 miles of ORV trails existed-though even that was three times the mileage of trail that preserve officials say is compatible with the mixed hardwood swamps, mangroves, hardwood hammocks, marshes, and pinelands.

   The biological diversity inside Big Cypress is impressive. A wealth of birds make the preserve their home-egrets, roseate spoonbills, herons, oystercatchers, black skimmers, wild turkeys, snail kites, least terns, bald eagles, wood storks, and more than a hundred others-as well as many amphibians and reptiles, including American alligators and imperiled eastern indigo snakes.

   Last fall, as a result of a settlement with conservationists who had sued the Park Service to halt the damage, Big Cypress, under Donahue's command, laid out a bold, multi-year strategy to close trails to secure habitat for creatures such as the endangered Florida panther and Cape Sable seaside sparrow, as well as heal land scars and deploy scientists to assess damage.

   Donahue says he is relieved that citizens across the country are rallying behind the plan to establish 400 miles of ORV trails and limit the number of permits to 2,000. Researchers from the University of Georgia are conducting a study, and Big Cypress has requested funding for a restoration ecologist.

   "We are trying to create a sustainable management system that will allow for these high-impact recreational uses without damaging the environment in any way," says Donahue.

   Another key component of the management plan is increasing regular patrols of rangers to stop illegal incursions. Until recently, Big Cypress could afford to have only five rangers patrol an area covering 700,000 acres.

   But ORV groups, which until now have enjoyed de facto primacy over the backcountry and which, under the preserve's enabling legislation, have hunting privileges there, have vowed to fight the new regulations.

   In January, a suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Florida against the Park Service that claims the management plan denies access to the preserve and substantially diminishes traditional uses such as hunting and fishing.

   Munson says some ORV users are resentful because the new measures are so sweeping. "These rules should have been introduced gradually and started many years ago. This would have given ORVers more time to accept and help shape them and be less fearful that their rural culture was being attacked."

   In fact, when NPS posted 100 new signs telling riders to stay out of closed prairie areas and wetlands, within weeks 85 had been torn down or vandalized. Although it is too early to tell whether enforcement problems will continue, the preserve appears committed to working with the ORV community to educate them about the need for drastic measures. Hunters in Big Cypress, many of whom are conservationists and have been strong supporters of ecological restoration in Everglades, have pledged to work with the preserve to address their objections.

   But Big Cypress isn't alone in its problems; and ORVs are not the only vehicles causing those problems. From the coastal dunes of Cape Hatteras and Cape Cod national seashores to the interior of Yellowstone, from salmon spawning streams in Alaska to the stark canyon country of southern Utah, parks are confronting a noisy and growing army of people who enjoy motorized recreation. In fact, the acronym "ORV" refers to a variety of land and water fun craft, ranging from all-terrain vehicles such as four-wheel motor bikes, swamp and dune buggies, and motorcycles, to personal watercraft such as jet and air boats, to specialized seasonal machines such as snowmobiles.

   The presence of these vehicles is huge and growing. The number of two-stroke engine-powered personal watercraft alone has increased by 240 percent since 1990. Twenty years ago, the U.S. Forest Service estimated that ORVers logged 5.3 million visitor days each year. Eight years later, the number had grown to 80 million, and by 2020 the agency expects to top 118 million ORV visitor days.

   In September 2000, the General Accounting Office (GAO) released the sternly worded findings of an investigation into the impacts of personal watercraft and snowmobile use on public lands. Although the GAO noted that the Park Service, out of all the public land agencies, was doing the most to address rising conflicts, it said that land managers, including those employed by the Park Service, suffered from a woeful lack of information. "Land management agencies," the report said, "continued to allow the use of these vehicles in many units with little or no information on the effects, if any, these vehicles are having on resources and environment. While we recognize that the agencies have limited resources, in our opinion, it is difficult to properly manage the use of these vehicles if units have no or inadequate information on their impact."

   The information that is available shows a wide range of effects. Last year, a research study funded in part by the North Carolina Beach Buggy Association found that ORVs were one factor, along with floods, high winds, and predation, that caused a "dismal" nesting season for a number of shore bird populations, including piping plovers, which dropped to their lowest levels in 11 years. ORV tracks were observed in tern nesting colonies, and three dead chicks were found in tire tracks at the edge of a temporary closure.

   In addition, at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Mojave National Preserve, Cape Cod National Seashore, and dozens of other parks, trespassers from adjacent national forests and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands trample vegetation, disrupt sensitive wildlife, and cause noise pollution.

   The wounds that ORVs blaze in fragile arid and wetland ecosystems allow noxious weeds, one of the greatest threats to native plants and animals, to gain a foothold.

   Effects are also being felt by humans. In Yellowstone, park workers greeting winter visitors at entrance station tollbooths have become physically sick from breathing snowmobile exhaust. Fresh air has had to be pumped into their workspaces and monitors installed to check carbon monoxide levels.

   Visitors also have noticed. In a 1995 survey conducted by the University of Idaho Cooperative Park Studies Unit at Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, visitors frequently cited noise, pollution, and the number of snowmobiles as what they liked least about their experience at the parks. In Yellowstone, the GAO noted that although annual auto use outnumbers snowmobiles 16 to one, snowmobiles generate between 68 and 90 percent of all hydrocarbon emissions and 35 to 69 percent of all carbon monoxide.

   Even the industry acknowledges that the two-stroke engines that power these vehicles are dirty in the amount of hydrocarbon exhaust they emit, the noise they generate, and the amount of unburned gasoline they discharge into the water and soil. No fewer than half a dozen scientific studies corroborate claims that these vehicles represent a serious threat to the environment.

   Advocates of restrictions point out that ORV riders represent a small fraction of outdoor recreationists, yet they are given access to a disproportionately high percentage of public lands. ORV riders have access to hundreds of millions of acres of public land in the West administered by the BLM, Forest Service, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1999, personal watercraft and snowmobiles were used for recreation in 475 of the 1,018 federal land management units, according to the GAO.

   Recognizing these problems, the Park Service is now taking unprecedented action to manage ORV use, including a ban on snowmobiles in Yellowstone beginning in 2003, but it is meeting stiff resistance from powerful lobbyists in Congress. A plethora of ORV lobbying organizations, spearheaded by the Pocatello, Idaho-based Blue Ribbon Coalition, claim they are interested only in safeguarding recreational public land access for American families. Blue Ribbon, which claims to have 600,000 members, has also worked alongside politicians in the West who are trying to remove the snowmobile ban in Yellowstone. With billions of dollars in potential profits at stake, ORV manufacturers who support Blue Ribbon's efforts see national parks as tools to help them build consumer markets and to wield more political clout with Congress.

   In opposing restrictions, the industry also downplays the harmful effects of mechanized vehicles. In response to recently proposed closures of sensitive sand dune areas on Bureau of Land Management tracts to protect endemic plants and animals, ORV groups said impacts were exaggerated. "There seems to be a concerted effort to lock this country up with respect to outdoor activities," Mark Harms, owner of an off-road tire store and a member of the American Sand Association, told the Associated Press. "There's going to be nothing left to do if this keeps going."
However, the Park Service's underlying theme, which gained momentum during the final months of the Clinton administration, is that parks must act now to reclaim their natural quiet and serenity or risk losing it forever. Plans are under way to ban personal watercraft from most Park Service waterways; to prohibit snowmobiling in Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and dozens of other parks; to tightly restrict ORV users to designated trails in preserves like Big Cypress; and to move toward regulating beach driving in several national seashores.

   "This is not a campaign waged against motorized vehicles or, as some in the public have claimed, the first step toward eventually eliminating all human activity from national parks," says Destry Jarvis, counselor to the Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks in the Department of the Interior. "What we are doing is returning to the very reason parks were created and seeking to protect the natural values that set them apart. Where laws are being broken, it will stop."

   In particular, Jarvis says a substantial body of evidence suggests that the Park Service has not complied with the agency's own Organic Act and other laws, such as the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. The Park Service Organic Act clearly instructs park managers that they can promote public enjoyment of natural resources, but only to the extent that those activities leave attractions "unimpaired" for future generations.

   Concerns about maintaining this balance in the face of increasing mechanization and economic pressures have been around a long time. Fifty years ago, naturalist Aldo Leopold observed in his classic A Sand County Almanac the coming conflict between nature and motorized vehicles: "The local Chamber of Commerce, at first quiescent at the novelty of a hinterland officially labeled as wild, tasted its first blood of tourist money. It then wants more, wilderness or no wilderness. The jeep and the airplane, creatures of the ever mounting pressure from humanity, thus eliminate the opportunity for isolation in nature." Leopold continued, "Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains; a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness."

   Conservationists today agree. "At the moment, national parks represent the front lines of a philosophical battlefield," says Bethany Walder, executive director of Wildlands CPR in Missoula, Montana. "If the Park Service shows courage, then maybe other public land management agencies will, too."

   In 1999, Wildlands CPR and 112 other conservation groups including NPCA petitioned the U.S. Forest Service to overhaul its ORV regulations, which in some national forests were having a negative effect on adjacent national parks. "Some conservationists were saying, 'Don't do this because you'll awake a sleeping giant in the ORV industry,'" Walder says. "My response was that the giant isn't sleeping. It's wide awake, and its roaring and stomping all over public lands, and the only way to stop it is to stand in its way."

   Conservationists have built a strong case for system-wide reform of ORV management in national parks, says Kevin Collins, NPCA director of park recreation and use. Collins praises Park Service Director Robert Stanton for drafting Director's Order 55, which compels park superintendents to prohibit activities such as ORV use that would impair park resources. Still, he notes that ORVs have long been on the radar screen of federal land managers. During the 1970s, both presidents Nixon and Carter issued executive orders requiring agencies to write plans for handling expanding ORV use. It wasn't until the 1990s, however, when a new generation of faster and more powerful machines hit the market, that ORVs became a major concern.

   Just as Yellowstone National Park is seen as a bellwether for how to curb snowmobile use, Big Cypress could be a model for taking a tough stand on warm weather ORVs.

   "I'm trying to demystify some myths," says Big Cypress Superintendent John Donahue. "We're not mandated in our enabling legislation to have ORVs, but they are not prohibited either. Any off-road vehicle use should be carefully regulated because it's the law."

   Now that Big Cypress has repledged itself to be a powerful guardian, it's up to the new Congress and president, who hold the crucial purse strings, to allow him to do his job. "We are extremely concerned about the danger of loosening or weakening this plan before it has a chance to take effect," NPCA's Munson says. If a new administration is not as concerned about maintaining the natural integrity of parks, it could mean that the ORV plan becomes ineffective or won't be carried out.

   "Superintendent Donahue has demonstrated extraordinary courage by standing firm and doing what is right. He is not only upholding the law, he is making a principled stand on behalf of the American public," Munson adds. "One user group should not be allowed to destroy a park unit just because it has been allowed complete freedom so far. This is not a popular stand-even a dangerous one-in the backwaters of Florida. But to the rest of the country and the entire park system, John Donahue is a hero."

TODD WILKINSON, is a regular contributor to National Parks, and lives in Bozeman, Montana.