[at-l] Merry Christmas y'all.

[Slyatpct at aol.com (Slyatpct@aol.com)]

Good time to pray... for the forests.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/23/politics/23forest.html

Administration Overhauls Rules for U.S. Forests

By FELICITY BARRINGER 

Published: December 23, 2004

WASHINGTON, Dec. 22 - The Bush administration issued broad new rules 
Wednesday overhauling the guidelines for managing the nation's 155 national forests 
and making it easier for regional forest managers to decide whether to allow 
logging, drilling or off-road vehicles.The long-awaited rules relax longstanding 
provisions on environmental reviews and the protection of wildlife on 191 
million acres of national forest and grasslands. They also cut back on 
requirements for public participation in forest planning decisions. 

Forest Service officials said the rules were intended to give local foresters 
more flexibility to respond to scientific advances and threats like 
intensifying wildfires and invasive species. They say the regulations will also speed 
up decisions, ending what some public and private foresters see as a legal and 
regulatory gridlock that has delayed forest plans for years because of 
litigation and requirements for time-consuming studies. "You're trying to manage 
towards how we want the forest to look and be in the future," said Rick D. Cables, 
the Forest Service's regional forester for the Rocky Mountain region.The 
rules give the nation's regional forest managers and the Forest Service increased 
autonomy to decide whether to allow logging roads or cellphone towers, mining 
activity or new ski areas.Environmental groups said the new rules pared down 
protection for native animals and plants to the point of irrelevance. These 
protections were a hallmark of the 1976 National Forest Management Act. "The new 
planning regulations offer little in the way of planning and nothing in the 
way of regulation," the conservation group Trout Unlimited said in a statement. 
Martin Hayden, a lawyer with Earthjustice, a law firm affiliated with the 
Sierra Club, accused the administration of watering down protections "that are 
about fish and wildlife, that are about public participation, or about forcing 
the agency to do anything other than what the agency wants to do.""What you are 
left with is things that are geared toward getting the sticks out," Ms. Hayden 
said. The original 1976 law on forest management was intended to ensure that 
regional managers showed environmental sensitivity in decisions on how the 
national forests would be used. During the 1990's, the Clinton administration 
sought major revisions in the rules governing how the act was carried out. But 
the Clinton-era regulation was not completed in time to take effect before 
President Bush assumed office. The new rules incorporate an approach that has 
gained favor in private industries from electronics to medical device 
manufacturing. The practice, used by companies like Apple Computer, allows businesses to 
set their own environmental goals and practices and then subjects them to an 
outside audit that judges their success. These procedures are called 
environmental management systems. When the Forest Service started investigating these 
systems, said Fred Norbury, a deputy associate chief at the Forest Service, "what 
we discovered to our surprise is that the U.S. is a little behind the rest of 
the world and we in government are a little behind the curve." In the case of 
the Forest Service, the supervisors of the individual forests and grasslands 
will shape forest management plans, and the effects of those will be subject to 
independent audits. The auditors the Forest Service chooses could range from 
other Forest Service employees to outsiders, said Sally Collins, an associate 
chief at the Forest Service. She said the auditors could come from an 
environmental group or an industry group like timber "or a ski area, local citizens or 
a private contractor."Forest supervisors are appointed by the Forest Service 
to manage national forests and report to regional managers. Some are more 
supportive of pro-timber policies, while others are more steeped in the 
environmental ethos.One of the ways the new rules give forest supervisors more power is 
that they are allowed to approve plans more quickly for any particular forest 
use - ranging from recreation to logging to grazing - and to adjust plans with 
less oversight.

For instance, an existing requirement to keep all fish and wildlife species 
from becoming threatened or endangered is jettisoned. In its place is a 
requirement that managers consider the best available science to protect all natural 
resources when they are making decisions. Michael D. Ferrucci, a partner in 
the Connecticut consulting firm Interforest and a former forest manager who now 
performs audits for private industry and state governments, said Wednesday: "I 
personally think the flexibility implied in this approach is terrific. It 
will help to unlock the power and creativity of a lot of good people."  

He added: "Most environmentalists and most scientists who follow forestry 
understand that more flexibility is needed. But there is a risk of making some of 
the mistakes we made 20 and 25 years ago. The mistake we made was to be a 
little too narrowly focused on the timber side." In the 1980's, extensive logging 
took place in places like the Tongass National Forest in Alaska and Oregon's 
old growth forests. But Chris Wood, the vice president for conservation at 
Trout Unlimited, warned that the new approach would require a heavy financial 
commitment to ensure enough people could monitor the impact of regulations and 
alert managers to problems. Amy Mall, a forestry specialist at the Natural 
Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said in a statement: "The rule 
is illegal. It rips the guts out of National Forest management plans. It 
doesn't ensure that the Forest Service provides the necessary resources to implement 
plans." The final rule requires forest managers to comply with the 
requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act, the cornerstone of the current 
environmental regulations on government and industry. But an accompanying 
proposal - which is open to public comment for 60 days - gives managers new 
discretion on what kind of environmental review constitutes compliance.Mr. Norbury of 
the Forest Service said that under this proposal, the forest supervisor would 
be making the call as to whether a particular plan must undergo a full 
environmental impact statement, a more modest review or no formal review. In 
Congress, where partisan divisions over environmental protections have grown more 
acute in recent years, the new rules were greeted with enthusiasm by Republican 
leaders and anger by Democrats.Representative Richard W. Pombo, the chairman of 
the Republican-controlled House Resources Committee, hailed the change, saying 
that currently "the process is so burdensome and time consuming that the 
plans are obsolete before they are finished."But Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, the 
ranking Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, said, "The Bush 
administration's new plan threatens to derail decades of progress in that direction by 
backing away from longstanding, bipartisan commitments to nontimber resources 
like wildlife, public involvement and scientific review."