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OHV Community Impact upon WEMO Plan
OHV attorney David Hubbard comments on impact he sees us having on BLM thinking
The following is from a recent message from David Hubbard, OHV attorney, to the leaders of the OHV organizations which retain him, including ORBA. While many of you will not understand the details of the Desert Tortoise issues he mentions, most of you know that it is primarily because of the Desert Tortoise that each of the new management plans for the California Desert calls for the closure of vast areas of the desert to OHV recreation.
If you have ever doubted our impact on the thought processes of BLM, you need only look at pages ES-7 and ES-8 of the Final WEMO Plan to see that we are forcing the federal decision-makers to re-evaluate long-held assumptions regarding the desert tortoise. In discussing the goal of "genetic connectivity" among tortoise subgroups, the Plan/EIS indicates that "one has to question the validity of the biological goal in the first place." Then the plan goes on to make the following statement:
"There is also the question of whether or not connectivity is appropriate in the West Mojave. Sign count data collected since 1998 revealed that there appears to be a spread of disease or some other mortality factor that may be facilitated by the connectivity
suggested in the [desert tortoise] recovery plan. If these patterns are truly resulting from disease spread, one needs to question the validity of maintaining connectivity among conservation areas. Having the Ord-Rodman and Pinto Mountain DWMAs physically separated from the two western DWMAs may strengthen the conservation strategy because there is no connectivity and they may be less vulnerable to regional spread of disease.
"That the alternatives fail to result in connectivity among the DWMAs and adjacent recovery units is not considered a serious flaw with any of the alternatives for the reasons given above. Although there is no connectivity between conservation areas, there are still habitats crossing these borders that will allow tortoises to pass unimpeded from one recovery unit to an adjacent one. It is strongly
recommended that the new recovery team consider the issue of connectivity in light of the new information now available."
I should also point out that the revised Plan/EIS now includes an alternative (Alternative F) entitled "Aggressive Disease and Raven Management." I think they are finally getting the message, or at least part of it.
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