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Politics Returns in Forest Fire Debate September 19, 2002 By TIMOTHY EGAN COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho, Sept. 16 - Even on a day when a late-summer rain coats the arthritic woods, it is clear that Idaho Panhandle National Forest is sick. Beetles have sucked life from thousands of acres. Floods have torn out mountainsides and stirred up old mining pollution. A century of fire suppression and logging has radically altered the forest fabric. To save this forest, one of the nation's largest at 2.5 million acres, forestry officials have concluded that they have to burn or log sections of it, tear out some roads and then hope that nature takes over the healing. The Bush administration and Western Republicans like that idea, especially the logging part. But the administration is pushing to go further: to suspend environmental laws and citizen appeals so logging in dangerously fire-prone forests like this one can be done without disruption. The White House has asked Congress to exempt about 10 million acres of federal forest land from environmental reviews to speed treatment of overgrown forests. But as the Bush plan moves through the Senate this week in the form of a rider promoted by Senator Larry E. Craig, Republican of Idaho, the resistance among environmentalists and some politicians has grown fierce. A tentative peace that fell over public forests this summer, during one of the most disastrous wildfire years in history, has disappeared, replaced by a political battle that threatens forest management. While the summer blazes made the management of ailing forests more urgent than ever, environmentalists say the president is using fire treatment as a way to let the timber industry log without laws. Gov. John Kitzhaber of Oregon, a Democrat, accuses the administration of betraying an agreement among Western governors to treat fire-prone forests without suspending the law or taking away judicial appeals. President Bush signed on to the governors' 10-year plan last May, but then took it a step further in an initiative unveiled three weeks ago. Opposition to the Bush plan promises to be particularly intense here in the Idaho Panhandle, which has at least one legendary trout stream and a tradition rich in silver mining and logging. Several retail-level environmental groups have persistently thwarted plans here to treat forests by cutting down trees. All 16 proposals to log or thin the Panhandle's woods in the last two years were stalled by appeals from these groups, forest officials said. Still, the plans are moving ahead, usually in a modified form to answer the concerns of critics. One logging plan would cut 1,400 acres in an area that holds water for thousands of people in Idaho and Eastern Washington. It has been appealed by the Lands Council, based in Spokane, Wash. The group also appealed another plan, which called for quick removal of beetle-infested trees. "There are a lot of dead and dying trees out there that need treatment," said Dave O'Brien, the spokesman for the managers of the Panhandle national forest. "But the law gets very difficult to comply with. We end up spending so much time just trying to make these forest decisions bulletproof." The biggest hindrance to healthy forests, Bush officials say, are laws that force managers of public land to spend too much time responding to citizen objections. The documents these laws produce "are more akin to bedtime reading for insomniacs as an alternative to `War and Peace,' " said Mark Rey, who guides forest policy for the administration. "I had hoped we would get a judicious thinning of the administration's proposal instead of a firestorm," Mr. Rey said, using the metaphor of a season in which more than six million acres of forests have burned, well beyond the annual average. But what the Bush administration characterizes as "gridlock" and "analysis paralysis" is seen by others as the messy but necessary products of making land decisions in a democracy. The president's plan, they say, would take the public out of public forest management. "This plan is about as extreme, wrongheaded and overreaching as it could possibly be," said Michael Francis of the Wilderness Society. The wilderness group is not opposed to thinning forests for fire prevention near urban areas, but does object to large-scale logging in the name of forest health. Neil Beaver, a hydrologist with the Lands Council, said his group opposed the biggest of the logging projects here because of a fear that it would lead to worse flooding and stir mining sediments in the heavily polluted Coeur d'Alene valley. Other environmental leaders fault the administration for breaking with the Western governors' 10-year plan, just months after praising it as a breakthrough for consensus. "I was shocked when the president's first initiative on forest health was to try to take the public out of the process," said Greg Aplet, a Wilderness Society scientist who was one of the environmental advisers to the governors. Finally, a group of forest ecologists from Western universities who have deep ties to the Forest Service sent a letter this week to Mr. Bush and Congress opposing the suspension of laws that allow for citizen appeals. "While some appeals are frivolous, many are not," said the letter, whose lead signer was Dr. Jerry Franklin of the University of Washington. "Our concern is that if citizens are denied their legitimate right to protest poorly conceived forest projects, then the issue will become more polarized, and we will have more sit-ins and other acts of civil disobedience." Even if the Senate approves part of the Bush plan this week, and environmental laws are suspended for the one year called for in the Senate amendment, the Forest Service has an enormous task in trying to reduce fire risk in the West. About 70 million acres of Forest Service land are dry, overgrown and ready to burn after a century of fire suppression. The Forest Service no longer talks of preventing fires in these areas, but letting fire do the work it once did in the natural world. "It is absolutely critical that we get fire back into those woods," said Dale Bosworth, the chief of the Forest Service, in an interview. But forest managers cannot simply start fires and walk away. Homes, as well as healthy forests, are threatened by blazes that can get out of control. Over the last two years, the Forest Service has treated about 3.5 million acres, Mr. Bosworth said, and it has done so without suspending environmental laws. Mr. Bosworth would not say if the agency needs exemption from laws to do its job, as the president calls for. "We need simplification of the process," Mr. Bosworth said. "And there are a lot of ways to do that." Exactly how many fire treatment programs are snagged by citizen appeals is unclear. The General Accounting Office said in a report that fewer than 1 percent of fire prevention projects were delayed in such a way. The Bush administration says the number is closer to 50 percent, though that includes some logging plans that have little to do with fire prevention. Joe Walsh, a spokesman for the Forest Service, said the agency did not know how many of the projects in the forests most in need of fire treatment had been blocked by appeal. Democrats, who had been largely united in opposing plans to suspend laws, broke ranks earlier this summer when Senator Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota and the majority leader, attached a measure to a spending bill that exempted some projects in his home state from environmental reviews. Mr. Bush seized on Senator Daschle's move when he announced the Healthy Forests Initiative last month in Oregon. "There's so many regulations, and so much red tape," Mr. Bush said. "My attitude is, if it's good enough for that part of South Dakota, it's good enough for Oregon." Other Democrats then started to look at projects in their home states for possible exemption from the review laws. But Senator Daschle's move, environmentalists say, applied to just 8,000 acres in the Black Hills National Forest - not 10 million acres as the president wants. 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