The Bush administration has intensified its campaign to open up the last of America’s nature areas to commercial exploitation, unveiling a plan to allow logging in forests under the federal government’s protection.
Environmentalists say the proposed legislation would affect a combined area of 78-million hectares of forest and grasslands — more than three times the size of Britain — and dismantle a generation of protective regulations.
The new forest management rules announced on Wednesday are seen as an attempt to roll back guidelines issued during the last days of President Clinton’s term.
But they also represent an underlying campaign to dismantle environmental legislation that has gathered pace since the Republican party’s victories in the mid-term elections earlier this month, environmentalists say.
The plan gives the local managers of some 155 federally protected nature areas the power to approve commercial exploitation of the lands entrusted to their care.
They would also no longer be compelled to conduct detailed scientific studies on the impact of commerce on animal life and the environment.
It also takes away one of the most effective tools of the environmental movement — postcard, email and letter campaigns — saying that such methods would no longer be officially registered as objections to forest management plans.
The plan was immediately condemned by America’s leading environmental organisations as a sop to the country’s timber companies and an attempt to dismantle 1970s-era legislation by stealth.
They also accused the White House of manipulating the timing of the announcement, on the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday.
”These new forest rules reflect the Bush administration’s belief that only timber companies belong in America’s national forests,” said Carl Pope, director of the Sierra Club, an environmental group. ”When the Bush administration rewrote the rules, they wrote the public out of the equation.”
Another leading environmentalist organisation, Defenders of Wildlife, said the proposals were identical to a wishlist drawn up by the American Forest and Paper Association.
The measures, which could become law within 90 days following public consultations, mark the latest attempt by the White House to exploit America’s national forests, and tame its environmentalist lobby.
Earlier, the administration sought to open up America’s forests for logging in the name of ”fire reduction” by felling ”excess trees” that could lead to wildfires. ”The Bush administration’s draft regulations are but the tip of an iceberg that threaten to demolish all of our nation’s forest protection laws,” said Randi Spivak, the director of the American Lands Alliance .
”In addition to rolling back the National Forest Management Act with these new planning regulations, we know the administration is trying to gut the National Environmental Policy Act and the Appeals Reform Act, both of which guarantee public involvement in land management decisions.”
The administration argues that the legislation on forests is cumbersome and that individual forestry officials need to be flexible in making development plans.
”Instead of trying to make a cookie-cutter approach where we say ‘this is good for all 155 national forests’, it would allow individuals to pursue the plan that best serves that locality,” said a spokesman for the US forest service. – Guardian Unlimited (C) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001