12/2/2002
KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
Abandoning Environmental Safeguards in Our National Forests
The Bush Administration continues its enthusiastically ruthless attack on a quarter of a century of environmental policy, much of it environmental policy originally initiated by previous Republican administrations. This time it is our National Forests that are the target. With timber industry officials in charge of the National Forests, the Bush Administration wants to go back to the “good old days” when our forests were used almost exclusively as warehouses of cheap commercial lumber.
It is not clear what the excuse for this environmental backsliding is. During the last 15 years, as we increasingly managed our National Forests for the full range of forest values they could produce, including clean water, wildlife, fisheries, recreation, open space, and scenic beauty, commercial timber harvests on those public lands declined dramatically. But this nation was still able to sustain a decade-long housing construction boom that allowed more and more Americans to own their own homes. This was possible because timber harvests shifted to more appropriate private timberlands, because exports of unprocessed logs were reduced, and because the trees that were harvested were more efficiently and completely utilized. We were able to both protect our National Forests and build our homes.
But the timber industry rarely sees more than commercially valuable logs when it looks at a forest, and, when it looks at our National Forests, it sees the potential for a cheap, subsidized, raw material source. From the industry’s point of view, a forest that is not clearcut to take all of its merchantable trees is a wasted forest. Hence the drive to relax forest protection so that commercial logging can again be king in our National Forests.
Under existing federal law, each of our National Forests must prepare a plan that guides how different parts of the forested landscape will be managed over the next decade or two. We went through this National Forest planning process back in the 1980s, and it is time to carefully and thoughtfully do so again. In the 1980s the Forest Service turned the planning process into an unbelievably technical and complicated process, using computer models that only a handful of people understood. Those computer models were subtly rigged to assure ongoing, high levels of commercial logging. Because those levels of harvest could not be sustained without violating many national environmental laws including the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, federal courts systematically forced reductions in harvest levels.
Now the Bush Administration wants to re-live those days of aggressive commercial logging and legal conflict. It has proposed to completely abandon doing environmental impact analysis of these National Forest management blueprints. It would also get rid of any citizen right to appeal those management blueprints. In addition, it would no longer seek outside, independent, scientific review of its own internal scientific claims. Finally, our National Forests no longer would have to be managed to protect and maintain healthy forest ecosystems. In short, the timber industry executives running the Forest Service seek to keep the US Forest Service and the public in the dark as to the environmental consequences of its overall forest management decisions. It also seeks to render the public helpless to do anything about the environmentally dangerous decisions it may make.
The Bush Administration has offered two justifications for this gutting of a scientific and environmentally sensitive forest planning process. The first is the need to speed up the planning process. The second is the desire to involve more of the public in the National Forest Planning process. Both are attractive goals that can be pursued without abandoning environmental review and safeguards.
It was the Forest Service that turned the National Forest Planning process into an arcane and complicated process that it could easily manipulate. That both slowed the process down and turned the public off. It was not the US Forest Service’s concern with healthy forests, wildlife, fisheries, recreation, and scenic beauty that slowed the process down and discouraged people from participating in the planning process. It was the opposite.
Involving the public from the very beginning of the planning process, before there is an agency agenda that is going to be pursued regardless of public attitudes, is an excellent idea. If honestly and effectively pursued, that approach is likely to accelerate the whole planning process. But that does not require that environmental impacts not be analyzed and presented to both the public and Forest Service decision makers. It does not require that the public and Forest Service decision makers remain scientifically ignorant. It does not require that the commitment to protecting forest health and ecosystem integrity be abandoned. It does not require that citizens be forbidden from appealing bad government decisions.
The new proposed rules that would govern planning on our National Forests are nothing but a sweet-sounding cover for a timber industry attempt to take back control of forests that were never theirs but which industry has always coveted. Those forests belong to the American people and should be primarily managed for the noncommercial values they provide to us day in and day out. We need no return to the “glory days” of public lands ravaged by monstrous clearcuts, trout streams silted up by erosion from logging road, and the extinction of the native wildlife that are our historical and cultural legacies.