Holiday Gift for Timber Industry
Yep, folks. Bush is at it again. Here's to four more glorious years!
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Holiday gift for timber industry
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Monday, December 27, 2004
IT APPEARS the Bush administration's weakening of environmental protections is going to continue into a second term.
The U.S. Forest Service last week announced plans to rewrite the 1976 National Forest Management Act to make forest planning "more timely and cost effective." The USFS characterized the new approach as a way for forest managers to respond more quickly to changing conditions, such as a threat of wildfire.
Beneath the reasonable-sounding rhetoric is a significant undermining of environmental protections for the 155 national forests and 20 grasslands. Eighteen of the forests, covering 20 million acres, are in California.
Environmental groups, who widely decried the proposal, were particularly incensed at two of the elements in the 160-page document. They predicted the new rules would lead to more logging.
One of their concerns involved the agency's proposal to give regional supervisors great latitude to develop or revise forest-management plans without an environmental-impact statement. Those plans typically guide forest uses ranging from logging and grazing to mining and gas drilling to skiing and road building.
Another major point of contention was the proposal to eliminate a 22-year- old mandate that forests be managed to maintain "viable populations" of fish and wildlife.
Mike Anderson, a senior resource analyst for the Wilderness Society, said the viable-populations rule provided the "legal bite" for lawsuits such as the one that forced a reduction in logging to save the spotted owl.
"Wildlife viability is something environmentalists have been able to count on to curb the loss of old-growth forests and to make sure that environmental concerns are taken seriously," Anderson said.
Under the new rules, forest managers would merely need to protect "ecological conditions to support diversity of native plant and animal species" -- a much lower standard.
"It rips the guts out of national forest management plans," Amy Mall of the Natural Resources Defense Council said in a statement on the new rules.
The Bush administration's latest proposal is especially disturbing in view of its other actions to promote timber harvesting in public forests. It has proposed a weakening of Clinton-issued protections for roadless areas and recently outlined a framework of rules for the Sierra Nevada that is expected to greatly increase logging. Its "Healthy Forests" initiative waived environmental safeguards under the guise of fire protection.
The Forest Service's insistence that the "flexibility" of these new rules is not designed to lead to more logging might have more credibility if this administration did not already establish a clear-cut pattern of catering to the industry.
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E-mail comments on the proposed rule changes can be sent to the U.S. Forest Service at [email protected]. Or you can send comments by postal mail to: Forest Service Content Analysis Team, P.O. Box 22777, Salt Lake City, UT 84122.
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