FORESTS

Bush Administration Revises Roadless Rule

May 5, 2005  - - The Bush administration has supplanted a Clinton-era rule banning road construction in nearly 60 million acres of national forest with a complex prescription for state-by state decisions on which areas should retain protections.  

The new rule gives governors a primary role in making recommendations. If the governors choose not to take the opportunity in the next 18 months, the Forest Service may begin an analysis of whether and where activities requiring roads, like logging and mining, would be appropriate. The final decision on the status of all 56.5 million acres once protected as roadless will rest with the federal government.

Before the earlier rule was adopted as President Bill Clinton was leaving office in January 2001, federal rules set aside about 24 million acres, prohibiting road development there. These remain protected. But as a result of Thursday's decision, about 32 million acres are now potentially subject to development pressure.

Existing administration policies require the approval of the Forest Service chief, Dale Bosworth, before roads can be built in any roadless area. These policies will remain in force, Mr. Rey said.

The decision does not affect the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, where roadless protections had already been removed, but where there have been few bidders for newly available timber.

To the extent that the situation in the Tongass forest reflects in fundamental shifts in the economics of the timber industry, it may be a harbinger of what can be expected in the lower 48 states. A growing percentage of wood products are now imported; Mr. West put the current level at about 30 percent. In addition, the tree farms of the Southeast are providing an increasing share of building materials.

President Bush Revises Forest Planning

Dec 2004 -- The Bush Administration issued new forest planning regulations that simplifiy and streamline implementation of the 1976 National Forest Management Act (NFMA), the law that directs management plans to be developed and implemented for all national forests every fifteen years.  The regulations affect recreation, endangered-species protections and livestock grazing, among other things, on all 192 million acres of the country's 155 national forests.

The action rescinds the previous rule as well as creates a new Categorical Exclusion under NEPA, for adopting, revising and amending forest plans.   The government will no longer require that its managers prepare an environmental impact analysis with each forest's management plan, or use numerical counts to ensure there are "viable populations" of fish and wildlife. Traditional environmentalists consider this a retreat from environmental protection of our national forests.

The changes will:

1. Reduce the number of required scientific reports and ask federal officials to focus on a forest's overall health, rather than the fate of individual species, when evaluating how best to protect local plants and animals.
2. Require more active participation by scientists and better utilization of current scientific data.
3. Replace a bureaucratic planning process with a more corporate management approach that will allow officials to respond to changing ecological and social conditions.

The changes represent a modernization of the planning process the Forest Service has been using since 1982 to manage our national forests. Under the old policy:

• It took the agency an average of 7 years and $7.5 million to produce just one forest plan.
• The process was so burdensome and time consuming that the plans were obsolete before they were finished.
• The outdated plans and red-tape have prevented the Forest Service from responding to changing conditions in forests, such as insect and disease outbreaks, hurricane and storm damage, and catastrophic wildfires.

Proponents of the Administration's new regulations believe the changes will streamline the process while continuing to allow for full public participation.  Opponents of the changes believe the regulations will promote logging and other commercial exploitation of the national forests and relegate the public to the sidelines. Opponents believe that only strict federal rules can guarantee a haven for animals that seek refuge in the forests. Although the administration sought to update the rules to address new challenges, such as invasive species and forest fires, and to give the public input on how to manage the forests rather than commenting on individual projects, the disagreement over these changes will probably lead to more litigation, which will increase uncertainty in this sector.

The new rules:

1. Give economic activity equal priority with preserving the ecological health of the forests in making management decisions
2. Potentially liberalizes caps on how much timber can be taken from a forest.
3. Will cut Forest Service planning costs by 30 percent and
4. Will allow managers to finish what amount to zoning requirements for forest users in two to three years, instead of the nine or 10 years they sometimes take now.

Activists and timber industry representatives have complained that the 15-year management plans, which describe how federal officials auction off timber, locate campsites, allocate grazing rights and protect vulnerable species in each forest, can take five to nine years to complete and are out of date when they become final.

Just before leaving office, Clinton finalized a set of regulations that emphasized ecosystem health and wildlife protection over commercial exploitation; President Bush reversed those rules just before Thanksgiving 2002.