Rules of the Road: Lawyering in a Larger War

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Pages: 98-101

98 Best of the Books: Ref‌lections on Recent Literature

Rules of the Road:

Lawyering in a Larger War

By Oliver Houck

Roadless Rules : The Struggle for the Last Wild Forests, by Tom

Turner. Island Press. 192 pages.

From the July/ August 2009 issue of The Environme ntal Forum.

What is a forest for? It is a question

that provoked t he rst wave of

conservation in the United States

(when the word “environment” was still a

century away) and one of the most provoca-

tive today in environmental law. Its answer

depends on who you are, in a basic sense, a nd

what you believe. In other words, a guaranteed

argument in which few are persuaded by rea-

sons. Forests are for ghting.

Twenty years a go the forest question trig-

gered the most hard fought environmental

controversy in America. e Alaska campaign,

which lasted ten years, wolf reintroduction

into Yellowstone Park, which drew over half a

million comments, and Superfund litigation,

which continues to lead the pack in the number of lawsuits notwithstanding,

a government proposal formed in the late 1980s to prohibit new road building

in 53 million acres of national forests led to a virtual war, more public hearings

than have been conducted on any measure of the federal government in history,

over a million public comments, no fewer than ve lawsuits, that morphed

into yet more lawsuits, dueling federal circuits, spectacular ip-ops by succes-

sive administrations, and, somewhat abated, still in court, still awaiting further

developments, continues today.

Tom Turner’s Roadless Rules: e Strug gle for the Last Wild Forests tells the

story of this war. A skilled environmental writer in his own right, Turner was

also a pa rticipant in the st ruggle, which gives his book both an immediacy,