Bush administration rewrites rules
Forests and wildlife more vulnerable to clearcutting
The Bush administration is expected to issue new final rules this month to gut forest protections and increase logging on national forests.
The new rules alter how the US Forest Service will manage all national forests, including Superior and Chippewa National Forests in northern Minnesota. The new regulations under the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) would limit public participation in deciding how public lands are used, bypass certain environmental and wildlife protection requirements, and allow logging anywhere in the forest under the guise of preventing forest fires.
The rules were proposed the day before Thanksgiving, 2002, in an effort to downplay their media coverage. Since then, the Department of Agriculture received thousands of comments against the proposed removal of environmental protections. But the final rules are substantially unchanged from the ones proposed in 2002.
They also mirror the timber industry "wish list" from the American Forest and Paper Association's 2001 congressional testimony. Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey, who supervises the Forest Service, is a former lobbyist for the American Forest and Paper Association.
The rewritten NFMA rules would:
• Allow timber sales and other projects even if they are inconsistent with the forest plan
• Allow logging anywhere in the forest -- even where it is prohibited by the plan -- under the guise of "salvage logging" or "fuel reduction"
• Abuse the "categorical exclusion" provision in the National Environmental Policy Act to exclude forest plans from meaningful environmental analysis
• Eliminate the current requirements for maintaining native wildlife species on national forests
• Eliminate public appeals of forest plans