OFF-ROAD VEHICLES

Imagine you owned a beautiful spread of land in the West or quiet oceanfront property along the North Carolina coast. Would you let reckless visitors on all-terrain vehicles tear up your land? Allow dirt bikes to harass the wildlife, or even worse, crush the plants and small or slow-moving animals like baby birds and sea turtles? Would you permit jeeps to drive up the stream that trickles across your land, polluting the water?

Unfortunately, this is what’s happening all too often on America’s great national forests, parks, seashores, and other public lands ─ the land we all own. In many places, abuse by off-road vehicles is trashing our public lands, ruining the habitat that critters rely on, and degrading enjoyment of these lands by quiet users and muscle-powered recreationists.

Motorized off-road vehicles ─ a broad category that includes dirt bikes, all-terrain vehicles, motorcycles, jeeps, and snowmobiles ─ have become the scourge of our public lands. Due to increasingly irresponsible behavior coupled with technological advancements and poor government management, riders continue to use these vehicles to push their way even further and faster into remote areas, leaving few wild places safe from their reach.

The ecological damage caused by off-road vehicles is frequently devastating, and the writing on the wall is unmistakable: if we continue down the path of “anything goes,” soon we’ll have nothing left. We know that just as most Americans care about their own backyards, they don’t support destroying our public land, water, and shared natural heritage.

That’s why the Center continues to fight an aggressive campaign to curb further off-road vehicle excess. We’re committed to securing strong protections, rules, and enforcement for key areas and threatened and endangered species across the country.
OUR CAMPAIGNS
Place-based Campaigns

Off-road vehicles have become a leading threat to the ecological integrity of many of our country’s most biologically rich public lands. The Center is working diligently to protect these valuable areas.

Algodones Dunes
Desert Cahuilla lands
Surprise Canyon
Furnace Creek
Protecting America's Last Heritage Forests
San Francisco and Blue Rivers

ALGODONES DUNES

A sweeping look across southeastern California’s Algodones Dunes betrays little but a wide expanse of rolling dunes and deep-blue desert sky. But just at and beneath the surface of the shifting sands, this ecosystem literally crawls with life.

Stretching 40 miles north from the United States-Mexico border in western Imperial County to form the country’s largest dune system, the Algodones Dunes are biologically unique on a global scale. Because of the region’s extremely dry conditions, radical temperature swings, and ever-changing wind-sculpted landscape, this habitat has reared numerous rare species — including reptiles, plants, and more than a dozen insects — evolved to live nowhere else. The eastern dunes, acting as a natural dam to block waters flowing toward the Salton Sea from the Chocolate Mountains, additionally make possible special desert pools that support a diverse woodland community.

But the Algodones Dunes are also a magnet for off-road vehicles, annually drawing millions of dune buggies, motorcycles, jeeps, all-terrain vehicles, and monster trucks that tear up the desert landscape and kill plants, animals, and even people. Historically, vehicles were banned from just 16 percent of the dunes’ 160,000 acres — the 25,800-acre North Algodones Dunes Wilderness, an area far too small to significantly prevent devastation of the dunes’ native flora and fauna.
OUR CAMPAIGNS FOR THE DUNES

To give the dunes and other desert ecosystems a fighting chance, the Center and its allies sued the Bureau in March 2000 to challenge the impacts of livestock grazing, off-road vehicles, mining, and other activities on 11 million acres of land within the California Desert Conservation Area. Later that year, the Bureau agreed as part of a legal settlement with the Center and our allies to temporarily ban off-road vehicles from 49,310 acres of the dunes, and the off-road industry lost when it challenged the ban and the Center intervened. That case resulted in a rule to maintain the ban pending a permanent solution to protect the Peirson’s milk vetch, a threatened Algodones Dunes plant.

However, against the opposition of environmental groups, conservation experts, local American Indian tribes, and the state of California, the Bush administration proposed a Recreation Area Management Plan that would re-open conservation areas to vehicles; it later issued a biological opinion declaring that the plan wouldn’t jeopardize or adversely modify Peirson’s milk-vetch habitat. Thankfully, in response to the Center’s legal opposition, a 2006 federal court ruling upheld protections for the Algodones Dunes, proclaiming that current off-road vehicle closures would remain in effect for the foreseeable future.

Despite this success, many Algodones Dunes species remain imperiled. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has ignored the Center’s petitions to list 17 endemic insect species, including the rare Andrew’s dune scarab beetle, and in 2007, the Service reduced critical habitat for the Peirson’s milk vetch by 25 percent. The Center continues its efforts to protect these species from the crush and chaos of tires tearing through the sand.