"Dear Mike," the governor's letter began.

That would be Mike Johanns, secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture. The letter was dated yesterday.

With it and an accompanying petition, South Carolina became the third state in the nation to seek protection of its U.S. Forest Service roadless forestland.

All three are Southern states. The other two: Virginia and North Carolina.

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The U.S. has 58.5 million acres of roadless forestland. These were protected from new road construction under the Roadless Area Conservation Rule of 2001, overturned in May of last year.

The new process requires governors to petition on behalf of their states.

Governor Mark Sanford's petition says, "Because of the enormous pressure from population growth and development facing this state, and because we are losing 200 acres a day of farm and forest land every year to suburban development, we have determined it is crucial to protect those areas which are still remote and natural and provide clean water and wildlife habitat."

In South Carolina, that amounts to 7,581 acres in the Francis Marion and Sumter national forests.

It may sound like a lot. But in fact, as the petition notes, "only 1.3 percent of South Carolina national forest land still qualifies as roadless." The national average is 31 percent.

Roadless areas, by the way, can and often do have roads, just not very many. In the East, the governor's petition explains, an area with a half mile of road per 1,000 acres counts as roadless.

The petition notes Francis Marion National Forest, as a whole, has 1,009 miles of roads on 250,000 acres of land. But it gets only enough money to pay for 51 percent of the maintenance needed on them.

Sumter National Forest has 2,642 miles of roads on 362,00 acres, and can afford to do 63 percent of the maintenance the roads call for.

You can guess the result. Roads "are being neglected and allowed to deteriorate," the petition observes. So "It makes no fiscal sense" in any case "to add new roads when the Forest Service cannot maintain what it already has."

The petition points out that the Forest Service's current backlog on road maintenance is $10 billion. In South Carolina alone, about $39 million.

Neither would the timber industry be hurt by protecting these roadless forestlands, the governor argues, since, to begin with, only about 1 percent of logging is done in national forests. Plus 1) roadless areas are a tiny portion of those forests and 2) nobody's logged the roadless areas since the late 1990s anyway.

The idea of protecting roadless areas is popular. "As of November 2004, the U.S. Forest Service had received nearly 10,000 comments from South Carolina asking that roadless areas be fully protected," the petition points out.

"I appreciate your prompt consideration," the governor's letter said.