BUSH HAS NO EXCUSES for THIS ASSAULT ON OUR COUNTRY....
and it's against CHRISTIAN VALUES....funny how that never enters into ANYTHING BUT WAR for this Selected President
Surrender in the Forests
July 18, 2004
The Bush administration has taken apart so many
environmental regulations that one more rollback should not
surprise us. Even so, it boggles the mind that the White
House should choose an election year to dismantle one of
the most important and popular land preservation
initiatives of the last 30 years - a Clinton administration
rule that placed 58.5 million acres of the national forests
off limits to new road building and development.
There are no compelling reasons to repudiate that rule and
no obvious beneficiaries besides a few disgruntled Western
governors and the timber, oil and gas interests that have
long regarded the national forests as profit centers. It's
not even a case of election-year pandering to Western
voters; indeed, early returns suggest that most Westerners
below the rank of governor do not like the Bush proposal at
all. Especially aggrieved is the so-called hook and bullet
crowd - anglers and hunters who, though overwhelmingly
Republican, have become increasingly disenchanted with the
administration's timid and in some cases careless policies
on wetlands, mercury pollution and oil and gas exploration
on sensitive public lands.
One explanation is that the timber industry's allies in the
Agriculture Department, where the proposal was hatched,
sensed they were running short of time to complete their
demolition job on the forest protections they inherited
from the previous administration. Over the last three
years, the department has weakened carefully devised
agreements aimed at preserving old growth trees in the
Tongass National Forest, in the Pacific Northwest and in
the Sierra Nevada. It has persuaded Congress to adopt a
fire-prevention strategy aimed at least as much at helping
the timber industry as it is at saving communities from
devastation. And it has proposed revisions in forest
management policies that would short-circuit environmental
reviews, weaken safeguards for endangered species and limit
public participation in land-use decisions.
For broad impact, though, nothing quite matches the
decision to scuttle the roadless rule. Nearly three years
in the making, that rule essentially gave blanket
protection to some of the last truly wild places in
America, critical watersheds for fish and wildlife and
important sources of drinking water for metropolitan areas
in the West. The Bush administration offers instead a less
protective and more uncertain system under which state and
local officials would become the moving force in deciding
whether to log or conserve forest lands. This represents a
big swing in the ideological pendulum, essentially
returning control of an important part of national forest
policy to the very people from whom Theodore Roosevelt and
Gifford Pinchot, both Republicans, wrested it when they
established the Forest Service a century ago.
Killing the roadless rule is also indefensible on fiscal
grounds. There are already 365,000 miles of roads in the
roughly 90 million acres of national forests that are and
will remain open to commercial development. Many of these
roads are in poor shape, crying out for maintenance. It
makes no economic sense to build more.
The administration promises that prohibitions on roads and
logging will be continued on a much smaller number of
roadless acres already protected under forest plans that
predated the Clinton rule - a "just trust us" attitude that
inspires universal suspicion among conservationists. White
House officials argued further that the rule's
one-size-fits-all policy ignored local needs, and that two
unfavorable court decisions had left them little choice but
to junk the Clinton program and propose a new one.
This is disingenuous. It is true that district judges in
Idaho and Wyoming had invalidated the rule. But the
administration offered only a perfunctory defense in Idaho
and not much more in Wyoming. More to the point, the United
States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned
the Idaho decision, and there was a good chance the 10th
Circuit would overturn the Wyoming decision. Indeed, the
real motive for the rollback may have been to get the new
rule out before the legal landscape shifted completely in
favor of the old rule - or before somebody less attentive
to the needs of the timber industry moved into the White
House.
nytimes.com |
