The Bush administration's assault on forest protections is something of a case-study in what can happen when conservationist logic gets stood on its head.
In addition to tearing away at the Clinton-era roadless rule and seeking to allow more logging through so-called categorical exclusions, the Bush team has used the rhetoric of forest protection to justify an unprecedented expansion in logging on public land. Citing the threat of wildfires, the administration has called for a program of aggressive "trimming" of federal forests. That sounds good -- just about every mainstream environmental group supports selective thinning. But the Bush team's version looks an awful lot like commercial logging.
The president wants to do a lot more than just clear brush and cut down small, fire-prone trees. He wants to give big logging companies access to millions of acres of federal forests, and he wants to make it worth their while by letting them cut down bigger, older trees -- the very trees which are most fire-resistant. Finally, Bush wants to do all this without the bothersome process of public hearings and environmental reviews.
The Bush approach -- unveiled gradually over the wildfire seasons of 2001 and 2002 -- became the underpinnings of the administration's new "Healthy Forests" initiative. The plan would allow loggers to cut bigger, older trees far from homes and communities -- an approach that does little to protect wildfire-threatened towns and cities. And the plan calls for logging projects of up to 1,000 acres to be exempt from environmental reviews and consultation. Never mind that a May report from the General Accounting Office found that 95 percent of thinning projects move ahead quickly without any such exemptions. In just one example of the new approach, the Forest Service, released a plan in June calling for a tripling in the amount of logging allowed in the 11 national forests in California's Sierra Nevada range.
"The ultimate upshot of all of this is to give the timber industry the keys to the kingdom," says Marty Hayden of Earthjustice.
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