WASHINGTON -- December 23 -- For the second year in a row, the Bush Administration has announced a harmful new forest policy on the eve of the Christmas holiday. Last December 23, the administration announced it was opening up pristine parts of the Tongass National Forest to new logging and development. Today, it is releasing what are expected to be damaging new regulatory changes to the rules that guide sound forest management.

According to the Forest Service, the final regulations will be very similar to how they looked in draft form. If that is the case, important wildlife, clean water, and other environmental protections will be undermined, threatening forests the American people want preserved and protected for future generations. Additionally, this rule will sharply limit the opportunity for meaningful participation by citizens in local forest planning.

"These are America's forests and should be managed for all of us," said Rodger Schlickeisen, executive director for Defenders of Wildlife. "These rules reject sound science, ignore the importance of public input, and tilt the playing field sharply toward the logging companies."

The new rules for long-term forest planning will likely reduce protections for forest wildlife and eliminate requirements that forest plans comply with the National Environmental Policy Act. The final rules will change enforcement of the 1976 National Forest Management Act, and are expected to conform closely to a timber industry "wish list" presented shortly after the presidential inauguration.

"We fully expect that the new forest rules will reflect the Bush administration's belief that logging companies should be the primary beneficiary of our National Forests," said Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director. "Americans want to protect the places where they hike, hunt and fish, but when the Bush administration rewrote the rules, they wrote the public out of the equation."

The new forest planning rules are likely to:

• eliminate analysis of forest plans under the National Environment
  Policy Act (NEPA), which requires federal government agencies to assess potential environmental impacts of their actions, and examine alternatives;
  
• scrap wildlife protections established under President Ronald Reagan;
  
• severely limit opportunities for public input into forest management
  
• decisions; and;
  
• scale back the role of independent scientists in forest management,
  in favor of administration scientists.

"Today's new rules could roll back 20 years of forest protections -- even many put in place by Ronald Reagan," said Mike Anderson of The Wilderness Society. "Taken together with the Administration's plan to curtail roadless protection for national forests, these changes will threaten many of our last-remaining roadless areas and old-growth forests."

The Bush administration's rules will likely track very closely to testimony presented by the American Forest & Paper Association on May 10, 2000 before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. An analysis of the wish-list is available at http://www.defenders.org/forests/forest/new/wishlist.html

"Why are federal bureaucrats making new regulations that are going to destroy places the public holds dear?" said Chuck Pezeshki, director of Clearwater Biodiverity Project. "It is the quality of life for our children that will suffer as a result."

As requested by industry, the new regulations will likely scrap requirements that forests maintain viable wildlife populations, make independent scientific review of plans discretionary, create a presumption that all national forest lands are open to industrial or timber uses unless explicitly prohibited, and leave monitoring of logging impacts at the discretion of individual forest supervisors.

"It's time for the administration to reverse its present course and start following the best available science instead of thinking only about the profits of industry," said Gene Karpinski, U.S. PIRG Executive Director. "Without major revisions by the committee of scientists these regulations will harm wildlife, clean water and recreational opportunities for all Americans."

Unified Forest Defense Campaign (UFDC) is a coalition of national and regional conservation organizations working to protect and restore federal forests. The UFDC includes Defenders of Wildlife, NRDC, The Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society, Earthjustice, National Environmental Trust, U.S. PIRG, American Lands Alliance, Northwest Old Growth Campaign, National Forest Protection Alliance, Alaska Rainforest Campaign, Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness.

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