As many Americans zoned out for Christmas, the Bush administration announced new rules for "better management" of our national forests and grasslands. The change was a nicely packaged gift to those who strive to profit from our pristine national treasures.

The timing of the announcement was surely not coincidental, but it was emblematic: A rule designed, in part, to restrict public participation in forest management was revealed at a moment most likely to reduce public outrage.

The Dec. 22 announcement included the usual official pronouncements about the wisdom of the rule change, which was purported to promote "healthier forests, cleaner air and water and more abundant wildlife," among other things.

"The new rule will improve the way we work with the public by making forest planning more open, understandable and timely," said Forest Service Associate Chief Sally Collins. "It will enable Forest Service experts to respond more rapidly to changing conditions, such as wildfires, and emerging threats, such as invasive species."

Those assurances are as solid as sawdust.

Each of America's 155 national forests and 20 national grasslands is required by law to write and obey a "forest plan," which controls everything from the number of acres available for logging to the number of miles of road that must be closed. Forest plans are crafted and then revised over the course of five to seven years. The plans are products of democracy and compromise.

Consider the Arapaho & Roosevelt National Forests and Pawnee National Grassland, which encompasses 1.5 million acres of prairie and pines from Wyoming to south of Idaho Springs. The forest plan was just revised, as the Bush administration noted last month, at a cost of $5.5 million. The revision took seven years.

Under the president's proposed rules, forest-plan revisions could be finished in only two to three years. This would obviously save time and some money (though not as much as some suggest). But there would be concomitant costs.

The Bush administration proposal would eliminate the requirement for structured forms of public comment, reduce independent scientific oversight of the plans, and nix certain wildlife protections established during the Reagan administration.

The Bush proposal would let regional forest managers determine how much and what kind of scientific review and public comment to include. With good reason, conservationists worry that the rules leave the forest-planning process open for exploitation by loggers and miners.

"These rules give the managers of our public lands total and unfettered discretion to reject science, ignore public input and send our national forests to the sawmill," said Bryan Bird, forest program coordinator at Forest Guardians, a nonprofit group.

The discretion may not be "total and unfettered," but it is wide and troubling.

And how much money would the change save? Not as much as some think. The feds released a cost-benefit analysis of the existing rules vs. the proposed rules. The annual cost of revising forest plans is about $115 million. The Bush plan would save a little more than 3 percent, about $4 million annually.

Though the overall expenditure changes little, however, the Bush plan assumes that public comment and other "collaboration" would decline by 60 percent and that scientific review would be cut by 75 percent. Meanwhile, the government assumes higher costs in ill-defined "monitoring and evaluation."

It is possible that the more flexible rules — which the public has 60 days to comment on — will be used for the ultimate benefit of the environment. Believing that such progress is likely is akin to thinking that a newly unleashed fox provides "better management" for the henhouse.

© 2005 Daily Camera

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