----- Original Message -----
From: "michael perelman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
December 23, 2004
U.S. Agrees to Pay for Diverting Water to Aid Two Rare Fish
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This might not seem like much, but it could be a right-wing wet dream.
Anything is property. The gov't must pay if it wants to regulate it.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20752-2004Dec22.html
New Rules Issued for National Forests
Some Environmental Protections Eased
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 23, 2004; Page A01
The Bush administration issued comprehensive new rules yesterday for
managing the national forests, jettisoning some environmental protections
that date to Ronald Reagan's administration and putting in place the
biggest change in forest-use policies in nearly three decades.
The regulations affect recreation, endangered-species protections and
livestock grazing, among other things, on all 192 million acres of the
country's 155 national forests. Sally Collins, associate chief of the U.S.
Forest Service, said the changes will replace a bureaucratic planning
process with a more corporate management approach that will allow
officials to respond to changing ecological and social conditions.
The new rules give economic activity equal priority with preserving the
ecological health of the forests in making management decisions and in
potentially liberalizing caps on how much timber can be taken from a
forest. Forest Service officials estimated the changes will cut its
planning costs by 30 percent and will allow managers to finish what amount
to zoning requirements for forest users in two to three years, instead of
the nine or 10 years they sometimes take now.
The government will no longer require that its managers prepare an
environmental impact analysis with each forest's management plan, or use
numerical counts to ensure there are "viable populations" of fish and
wildlife. The changes will reduce the number of required scientific
reports and ask federal officials to focus on a forest's overall health,
rather than the fate of individual species, when evaluating how best to
protect local plants and animals.
"We're really in a new world," Collins said in an interview. "You've got
to have different plans for different places, and you've got to have more
dynamic plans."
Critics such as Rep. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), a member of the House Resources
Committee who tried twice unsuccessfully to block the proposed rules, said
the changes will promote logging and other commercial exploitation of the
national forests and relegate the public to the sidelines.
"With Bush's anti-environmental forest policy, you can't blame him for
trying to hide behind other news, but not even Scrooge would unveil these
regulations," Udall said. "These regulations, being offered two days
before Christmas, cut the public out of the forest planning process, will
inspire many more lawsuits and provide less protection for wildlife. It's
a radical overhaul of forest policy."
Collins said the administration sought to update the rules to address new
challenges, such as invasive species and forest fires, and to give the
public input on how to manage the forests rather than commenting on
individual projects.
The new rules would affect two national forests that encompass 1.6 million
acres of Virginia land: the George Washington National Forest, 70 miles
west of Washington, and the Jefferson National Forest in the southwestern
part of the state. Jefferson National's officials just completed their
management plan, and the George Washington forest is due to issue a new
one in 2008.
Three presidents, including George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, have tried
to change how the government drafts the 15-year management plans that
dictate how federal officials auction off timber, locate campsites,
allocate grazing rights and protect vulnerable species in each forest.
Because the plans can take five to nine years to complete, some activists
and timber industry representatives have complained they are out of date
when they become final.
Just before leaving office, Clinton finalized a set of regulations that
emphasized ecosystem health and wildlife protection over commercial
exploitation; President Bush reversed those rules just before Thanksgiving
2002. The final regulations issued yesterday, which will take effect when
they are published in the Federal Register next week, are nearly identical
to a proposal the administration outlined two years ago.
Rick Cables, who oversees 11 national forests spanning 22 million acres in
the Rocky Mountain region, said the regulations will save his deputies
time so they can devote more attention to such issues as use of off-road
vehicles and forest overgrowth.
"This planning rule just makes more efficient and effective use of our
field people's time and energy," Cables said. "In doing that, it makes it
easier for us to tackle the problems we have today."
Administration officials said they will balance this newfound flexibility
with regular audits of forest management decisions, but environmentalists
said only strict federal rules can guarantee a haven for animals that seek
refuge in the forests.
One-quarter of U.S. species at risk of extinction -- including more than
25 species of trout and salmon -- live in national forests, according to
the conservation group NatureServe. Large animals such as grizzly bears,
wolves and elk depend on the forests' large, undisturbed swaths of land
for habitat.
"The end result of all this is there will be more logging and less
conservation of wildlife," said Mike Leahy, natural resources counsel for
Defenders of Wildlife. "They're not going to provide enough land for these
species to hang on."
National forests are also an increasingly popular tourist destination for
tens of millions of Americans. The number of visitors to national forests
doubled over the past eight years, said Chris Wood, a Clinton
administration Forest Service official who is now vice president of the
conservation group Trout Unlimited.
But timber industry officials want access to the land, and they said they
need a less burdensome process so federal officials can make timely
decisions on proposed timber auctions.
Chris West, vice president of the American Forest Resource Council, called
the new rules "a step in the right direction" that will allow forest
managers to make "better, more informed and quicker decisions" about
timber sales.
"This will get the Forest Service caring about the land and caring about
the people, instead of caring about the process and serving the
bureaucracy," said West, who represents lumber and paper companies as well
as landowners in 13 western states.
