Tongass National Forest endangered by Bush Rules
"Timber! U.S. signals a shift over forest rules
By Katherine Pfleger
WASHINGTON — Environmentalists and the timber industry tend to be two bookends on a long shelf. Rarely do they meet, particularly now, as the Forest Service changes three key policies put in place by the Clinton administration.
While environmentalists believe President Bush's team is chipping away at hard-won forest safeguards, timber-industry representatives welcome relief from what they saw as an overzealous bureaucracy.
Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth finds himself caught between the two, each with a passionate interest in the 192 million acres of federal forest and grasslands, used for everything from fishing to producing timber to sheltering wildlife.
There are so many confusing regulations, the national forests are in a state of "analysis paralysis" — lots of planning and evaluating but little action, Bosworth said in an interview after eight months on the job.
He wants to make policies clear and regulations easier to understand.
Three major policies: Where they stand
A look at the status of three major policies on national forests, approved by the Clinton administration in its final months:
Roadless rule: Adopted by the Clinton administration in January, the rule protected 58.5 million acres of undeveloped federal forest land from logging, road-building and other activities, except in rare circumstances.
Status: In May, a federal judge in Boise temporarily blocked the rule from taking effect. Because of that ongoing lawsuit and others, the Bush administration says it is working to revise the rule. Decisions about development in roadless areas will temporarily be made by the Forest Service chief, with some exceptions.
Road-management policy: Also approved by the Clinton administration in January, the rule governs how more than 383,000 miles of forest roads are managed. It said that each national forest must map existing roads to help make better decisions about future construction, repair or removal of roads. The goal was to reduce a maintenance backlog.
Status: To simplify the policy, the Forest Service this month published an interim directive which also eliminated some protections for undeveloped areas. An agency spokeswoman said parts of the policy were duplicative because the protections are provided elsewhere.
Forest planning regulations: Issued by the Clinton administration in November 2000, the regulations changed long-term forest-management requirements to allow officials to limit logging, skiing, hiking and other activities in parts of national forests if they believe those activities might permanently harm the ecosystem.
Status: In April, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, concluded the rules were impossible to put in place and began a review.
But, in Bosworth's changes, environmentalists see an erosion of former Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck's natural-resources agenda and new favor for boosting timber sales and developing pristine areas.
Mike Anderson, forest analyst for the Wilderness Society, says analysis paralysis happens when the Forest Service re-enters environmentally sensitive areas, such as habitat for endangered species.
"Public opposition does lead to paralysis. We think that if they were to choose less-controversial activities ... they will have broad public support," he said.
Bosworth and the Bush administration are reviewing and revising three major policies:
• The roadless rule, which roped off 58.5 million acres of forest, free of most logging and road construction.
• A transportation policy that outlined the management of more than 383,000 miles of forest roads to reduce a maintenance backlog and protect undeveloped areas.
• A set of regulations that provided local officials with guidance for writing 10- to 15-year forest-management plans that could limit logging, skiing and other activities to protect ecosystems.
In each case, conservation groups contend, the changes being made undermine important forest protections.
Bosworth says the policies didn't work.
"Those things got all intertwined, and our folks in the field had an awful time trying to understand what it is we really wanted," he said.
The timber industry, on the other hand, is encouraged that the administration is listening to its complaints. During the 2000 presidential campaign, industry executives got the Republican Party's attention with a $1.5 million fund-raiser in Portland, Ore.
This month in Aurora, Ore., about a dozen timber-company and industry-association executives met with some of Bush's key natural-resource officials to talk about land-management policies.
The industry's message that day echoed Bosworth's on analysis paralysis: "Get us off of the total dead stop," says Chris West, vice president of the American Forest Resource Council in Portland. "Right now, the system is broken."
The issues are not new. Under a 1960 federal law, the Forest Service must manage the land for many uses, including timber production, conservation and recreation.
Under Dombeck, the Forest Service received national direction from headquarters as to the proper balance of uses. Bosworth — and the timber industry — believe such decisions are best made at the local level.
Consider the ongoing fight over the roadless rule, which was designed to end a 30-year debate on the suitable protections for generally remote, undeveloped areas.
A federal court temporarily blocked the roadless rule from taking effect in May, and the administration began to revise it with more local input.
Since then, Bosworth has issued a directive saying that he would handle all decisions about roadless-area development until each forest comes up with its own plan. He hasn't received a single request.
However, environmentalists complain about a cutoff date in the directive that allowed lower-level agency officials to sign off on some logging, most notably in Alaska's Tongass National Forest.
Ron Olsen, spokesman for the Alaska Rainforest Campaign, says those officials are making the wrong decisions and portions of about 8.5 million acres of roadless areas in the Tongass rain forest are in jeopardy — with six timber sales being planned.
"We went back to where we were prior to the roadless rule being signed in January," Olsen said.
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., believes the challenge is finding practical solutions to natural-resource issues that aren't "bureaucratic water torture" — a lesson he's learned on the Energy and Natural Resources' forests subcommittee, which he now chairs.
Under President Clinton, "not enough was done in those eight years to make balanced progress on either front" — to promote environmental protections or to help timber-dependent communities, Wyden said.
"The premium is not just saying you disagree. The premium is on saying what you are going to do."
Copyright © 2001 The Seattle Times Company
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