Continuing a Christmastide tradition, the Bush administration picked last Wednesday to announce its latest gutting of national forest policy -- no doubt hoping that whatever headlines ensued would be little noticed amid holiday distractions.

A year ago, Christmas Eve saw the rollout of bitterly contested new rules opening roadless areas of the Tongass National Forest to expanded logging. This year the U.S. Forest Service chose Dec. 22 to announce its rewrite of the rules by which every national forest is managed -- the chief aim being to reverse the trend away from timber production as the primary goal.

One change eliminates the requirement of an environmental impact review in preparing a forest's 15-year management plan. Individual logging or mining projects would still be subject to scrutiny, but this is somewhat beside the point.

The management plans are the equivalent of community zoning ordinances, and it's at this decisionmaking stage that forest managers set their overall vision for the lands entrusted to them. Imagine a suburb that made case-by-case rulings on runoff from strip malls without first establishing the environmental goals of its comprehensive plan.

More important, the environmental review is the best opportunity for the public to gets its views reflected in the planning process -- again, not unlike a zoning ordinance. This change tells hunters, anglers, hikers, conservationists and all the other national forest constituencies that they'll be able to challenge individual timber sales on environmental grounds, but not the master plan itself.

The new rules also eliminate a firm requirement that endangered species be protected in the forest plans; instead, each local manager need only meet a vague requirement of ensuring overall health and diversity within the forest. Dropping this so-called "viability clause," probably the most potent among the Forest Service's wildlife-protection requirements, is aimed at ensuring that supporters of, say, a spotted owl will never again be able to stymie the sale of another fragment of our fading old-growth forests.

There is some question whether the new rules violate the law they are intended to implement -- the National Forest Management Act of 1976, which stands with the clean air, clean water and endangered species laws of that time as a pillar of America's commitment to environmental stewardship. Certainly they reverse the last 25 years of fine-tuning -- including some reforms put forward by President Ronald Reagan and his timber-friendly Interior secretary, James Watt.

The Forest Service claims that these changes are only about streamlining the planning process and saving on overhead, and that forest management may not change much in the end. If that were true, its leaders would be seeking more publicity, not less, for their brilliance.

In fact, the new approach represents a delegation of national forest policy to local managers, while specifically discarding requirements that they treat logging as just one among many important uses of national forests. Not incidentally, it also represents a wholesale trashing of very different streamlining proposals that the Clinton administration had nearly completed when Bush took office in 2000.

The president and his advisers know most Americans want their forests managed to provide for wildlife, resource conservation and quiet recreation -- and maybe some logging, as long as it doesn't threaten other uses. But these new rules can't be sold as anything but another giveaway to the timber companies, whose executives and shareholders are no doubt enjoying an especially merry Christmastide.

© 2004 Star Tribune

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