On the shoulder of Southern California, the nation's capital of freeway sprawl, there is still country virtually as roadless, raw and unpeopled as ever.
More than half a million acres are in the Los Padres National Forest, where the terrain, steep and folded like a compressed accordion, is home to the endangered California condor, provides drinking water for Santa Barbara and acts as a primitive playground for people who jam the urban valleys down the coast.
On the eastern edge of the state in the Inyo National Forest, the nation's highest desert mountain range looms -- an empty place of ancient bristlecone pines, bighorn sheep and windy solitude. To the north, in the Tahoe National Forest, old-growth sugar pines and incense cedars tower in backcountry that has never heard the buzz of a chain saw or the roar of an SUV.
Those places are among 58.5 million acres of national forest protected under a Clinton administration rule that banned road building and commercial logging. Almost all the wild lands are in Alaska or 11 other Western states, including 4.4 million acres in California.
The most sweeping conservation move of the Clinton presidency, the bans were both applauded and attacked for placing 31% of the national forest system off limits to timber cutting and to the creation of new roads.
Two weeks ago the Bush administration made its own move -- proposing to drop the Clinton prohibitions and instead give state governors a considerable say in whether the areas are protected.
The proposal is the latest in a series of administration actions that are reshaping management of the West's vast public lands, rolling back not only Clinton-era conservation policies but some that date from the Ford and Reagan years.
Underlying the push for reversal is a battle that has raged for decades over the purpose of the 192 million acres of national forest. Are the forests for logging, mining and energy production? Recreation? Protection of water and wildlife? The laws governing the forests say they should be used for all those purposes, leaving the task of finding a balance to the U.S. Forest Service and federal officials.
But priorities shift from administration to administration, perhaps never so dramatically as in the last dozen years.
