A new Bush environmental initiative
overhaulsthe 1976 National Forest Management Act, and allows managers of the nation's 155 national forests to approve logging, drilling and mining operations without conducting environmental impact statements.
This latest environmental deregulation is just the latest in a long line of poor forest management initiatives. In January 2001, Mark Rey, a
former lobbyistfor the American Forest and Paper Association and the current Agriculture Department's official in charge of the Forest Service, reopened public deliberations of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The rule,
adopted by President Clintonin early January 2001 after three years of public hearings and 2.2 million public comments (95% of which favored wilderness protection), banned new road building on 58.5 million acres of national forests in 38 states. Although the rule affected less than a 1/3 of national forest lands, the roadless protection rule provided important long-term protection for America's few remaining wild forests.
But in 2001, the Forest Service announced that it would no longer count public comments that shared similar sentiment. That meant that millions of citizens urging the Forest Service to oppose commercial logging would be counted in one voice. In December of 2001, the Forest Service
issued a directivethat eliminated the protections for uninvntoried roadless areas of more than 100,000 acres, abolished the requirement for an impact statement prior to building a road and changed the standard for building from a "compelling need" to a "documented need", an easier benchmark to meet.
To justify rule changes, (including this latest one) the Forest Service claims that the new rules would allow forest managers to
respond more quicklyto wildfires.
But beginning in 1945, the Forest Service has had a
policy of stopping every forest fire, small or large. Such mismanagement (combined with commercial logging of old-growth trees) has left forests full of highly flammable brush and small, even age highly flammable growth. Scientists have long urged the Forest Service to allow low-intensity natural fires to burn in order to clear out the brush.
By the summer of 2002, little change in policy and years of drought left the west extremely dry and set the conditions for high-intensity fires. As the
fires raged, Republicans
claimedthat environmental obstruction prevented the Forest Service from properly thinning forests.
Despite their claims, a General Accounting Office (GAO) report
revealedthat out of 1,671 fuel reduction projects considered by the Forest Service, only 20 faced appeals and none were held up by litigation. In 2003, 97% of timber projects
proceededwithout legal challenge. The report also noted that the real obstacle to fire prevention was the logging industry and Forest Service bureaucracy. The Forest Service, as it turned out had a nasty habit
divertingfire prevention funds to commercial timber sales. The agency had diverted $1.8 million in fire prevention money to subsidize commercial timber, and in 2002 the Forest Service attorney general claimed that he
misplaced $215 million more.
more:
www.politicalthought.net
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