The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER
December 23, 2004
Correction Appended
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."
Correction: December 24, 2004, Friday:
Because of an editing error, a front-page article yesterday about new rules
for managing the national forests referred incorrectly in some copies to a
representative of Earthjustice who criticized the plan. The representative
is a man, Martin Hayden. The article also misstated his title and, because
of another editing error, described Earthjustice incorrectly. Mr. Hayden is
the organization's legislative director but is not a lawyer. Earthjustice is
an environmental law firm, not affiliated with the Sierra Club.