A Plague on All Your Forests

On January 12, 2001, largely on the strength of that public commentary, President Clinton issued the Roadless Area Conservation Policy directive that ended virtually all logging, roadbuilding and coal, gas, oil and other mineral leasing in 58 million acres of our last best forestland.

Then George W. Bush became president. To run the Forest Service as undersecretary of agriculture, he selected Mark Rey who, as a timber-industry lobbyist and later as a staffer for forest subcommittee chair Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), had dedicated himself to increasing the cut on our national forests.

Immediate revocation of an initiative as popular as the roadless rule would have been politically costly. So the Bush White House set about administering daily drops of arsenic. First, it put the rule on hold for two months; then it refused to defend it in court. It even aided and abetted the plaintiffs by gushing about the timber industry's imagined woes--this despite the pledge to Congress by John Ashcroft, taken under oath during his confirmation hearings as attorney general, that he would defend the rule as the "law of the land."

In July 2001, in one of Rey's most cynically brilliant moves, the Forest Service issued an "interim directive" to local agency brass instructing them that the decision on whether or not roadless areas should be protected would now be in their hands. No longer would Forest Service officials committed to roadless protection be able to blame it on federal law; now they'd have to confront their neighbors, the powerful, well-connected timber executives who employed them, and the legislators who vote Forest Service appropriations and say: "Sorry, I've decided those trees are off limits." The directive also proclaimed that there would be no roadless protection for Alaska's Tongass and 11 other national forests. In September Rey proposed exempting major activities in roadless areas from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). In December he issued a directive that relaxed standards for road construction in roadless areas.

As Rey chipped away at Clinton's rule he launched concurrent attacks on the roadless areas themselves and on national forests in general. To circumvent the inconvenience of the Endangered Species Act, which requires federal agencies to consult with professional scientists of the Fish and Wildlife Service or NOAA Fisheries on projects that would destroy habitat of listed species--timber sales, for instance--the Bush administration now proposed "self-consultation" by agencies like the Forest Service, which, under Rey, functions as a wholly owned subsidiary of the timber industry. Rey did away with the wildlife liability regulations, implemented under President Reagan, which required the Forest Service to maintain viable populations of fish and wildlife across each planning unit. In its place he imposed a standard that requires managers merely to think about fish and wildlife sustainability. As part of the administration's "Healthy Forest Initiative," Rey tried (and is trying still) to categorically exclude timber sales and forest plans from environmental review and cut the public out of forest-management decision making.

The Bush administration officially killed the roadless rule on May 5, 2005, replacing it with a rule that gives Rey power to decide what roadless areas, if any, get protected but meanwhile invites the governors of each state to do the Forest Service's work for it--that is, commit to an expensive, tedious and perhaps ultimately pointless exercise in which state employees gather data, do inventories, dispense information and hold public hearings. Forest supervisors and regional foresters have been quietly contacting governors and urging them to forget about making recommendations for roadless-area protection and just let the Forest Service deal with it in its planning process.

"If you're not going to have a nationwide policy, why create a special process like this?" asks the Sierra Club's Sean Cosgrove. The answer, of course, is that it sounds better than just announcing you've killed the roadless rule.

Some states, however, understand that "local control" is a euphemism for business as usual. Local control, after all, is why our national forests are already sliced and diced with 383,000 miles of roads--enough to circle the globe 15 times. The attorneys general of California, New Mexico and Oregon responded to Rey's subterfuge by suing the Bush administration, charging that by replacing the roadless rule with a state-by-state petition process the Forest Service violated NEPA.

"When the 2005 Rule was announced, I made it clear that the federal government's actions placed an unfair and unnecessary burden on states that would amount to a price tag of millions of dollars and result in piecemeal management of federal forest land," declared Oregon governor Ted Kulongoski. "The 2005 Rule turns back the clock on years of work, including public input and taxpayers' dollars, and the end result is greater uncertainty about the protection of our special roadless areas--not greater security." In November the Bush administration rejected Kulongoski's request for a rule amendment that would give states greater assurance that fish, wildlife and clean water be protected in roadless parts of national forests.

New Mexico's attorney general Patricia Madrid said: "Our water supply comes from our forests and depends upon those forests remaining healthy . . . The federal government acknowledges that road-building and timber harvest will result in decreased water quality, increased sediment and pollutants; yet they refuse to protect our state's few remaining pristine areas. They have also refused to follow federal law that requires them to look at the impacts of their actions on the environment . . . When the Bush administration refuses to obey the law, we have no choice but to sue them."