Conscious Choice: Bush's Assault on Our National Forests

March 2003

Bush's Assault on Our National Forests

by Dave Aftandilian

Ever since President George W. Bush took office, he has worked to eliminate environmental protections for our national forests and to make it easier for private industry to log, drill, mine, and otherwise abuse these precious public lands. He started by refusing to implement a Clinton-era plan to protect pristine roadless areas, and then used the tragic wildfires last summer as an excuse to push his so-called "Healthy Forests" legislative initiative — an initiative that would have opened millions of acres of public lands to logging under the guise of "fire reduction projects." After Congress rejected his plans, the Bush administration decided to circumvent the law entirely, proposing a series of administrative changes to the way the Forest Service operates that would essentially transform our national forests from protected wildlands to industrial tree plantations.

Why does Bush continue to insist on ravaging our public lands, when the vast majority of Americans want those lands protected instead? Because the Bush administration exists of, by, and for polluters and extractive industries. For instance, during the 2000 election cycle, the forest products industry gave 82 percent of their contributions to Republicans, including Bush. Further, the top official in charge of forest policy for Bush’s Department of Agriculture is Mark Rey, a former timber- industry lobbyist who helped draft the disastrous 1995 Salvage Rider. (Like Bush’s "Healthy Forests" initiative, the Salvage Rider used summer forest fires as an excuse to allow "salvage" logging — often including perfectly healthy trees — while completely ignoring environmental laws, administrative appeals, and legal challenges.)

Small wonder, then, that the legislation proposed under last summer’s "Healthy Forests" plan, as well as the related administrative rule changes requested by the Forest Service more recently, bear a strong resemblance to the American Forest and Paper Association’s "wish list" of rule changes — or that the timber industry praised the administrative changes immediately after they were proposed. As a St. Petersburg Times editorial put it last December, "that should be a clue as to which of the competing interests the new proposal favors."

Timber Feeding Frenzy

Last summer was one of the worst fire years on record in the West. Nearly six million acres burned, doing millions of dollars worth of damage. Why were the fires so devastating? Primarily because the Forest Service had been suppressing forest fires since the 1930s. Although they began to reverse this policy in the 1970s, by then a critical mass of underbrush and small trees had built up in much of the national forests. Normally this tinder would have been burned off in small, naturally occurring forest fires, but after decades of fire suppression, it had become an inferno just waiting for a spark to set it off. Years of drought provided that spark, reducing the moisture content of living trees in the forests below that of kiln-dried lumber. (In a recent article in the journal Science, climate scientists concluded that human-caused global warming is probably partially responsible for this prolonged drought.)

Timber industry officials blamed environmentalists, claiming that they had blocked logging sales that would have reduced fire risk. However, Congress’s General Accounting Office found that of 1,671 fire prevention logging plans proposed by the Forest Service, less than 1 percent had been appealed by anyone, and none had gone to court. Furthermore, both the Forest Service and private scientists have discovered in numerous studies that logging and associated road building actually increase the risk of forest fires.

Timber companies remove the largest trees, which are both the most commercially valuable and the most resistant to normal fires. They leave behind limbs and debris stripped from these trees, as well as highly flammable smaller trees. Without the canopy of the large trees to shade the ground, this unwanted "slash" quickly becomes dry tinder at the ready. Researchers for the 1996 federal Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Report concluded that "Timber harvest, through its effects on forest structure, local microclimate and fuels accumulation, has increased fire severity more than any other activity."

The Bush administration and timber industry officials also claim that logging is necessary to protect homes from forest fires. Yet according to the nation’s premier fire research laboratory, the Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Montana, the only logging ("thinning") needed to protect houses — even in the driest, most flammable forests — is within a "red zone" of 150 to 200 feet around the house.

If logging actually increases the risk of forest fires, why on earth does the Bush administration want to encourage logging on our public lands, especially in wild areas far from homes in need of protection? William H. Meadows, president of the Wilderness Society, has an answer: "Sadly, the truth is that the President’s proposal is nothing more than a Trojan horse, designed to promote unhealthy logging of our forests instead of focusing efforts on saving homes and lives."

Rewriting the Rules

Since late November, the Bush administration has proposed a series of administrative rule changes that would drastically alter the way our national forests are managed. For instance, they want to completely revise how the Forest Service carries out the National Forest Management Act (NFMA). Until now, this law required that whenever the agency adopted, revised, or significantly amended a management plan for a national forest, it had to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement and submit that statement to public comment. Under the proposed Bush rules, "A new plan, plan amendment, or plan revision may be categorically excluded from documentation in an Environmental Assessment or Environmental Impact Statement."

The new NFMA rules would also eliminate the requirement that forest plans must maintain viable populations of native species in their forests. Worse still, the new rules would reverse the Clinton administration policy that "The first priority for stewardship of the national forests and grasslands is to maintain or restore ecological sustainability." Instead, national forests would be "generally available for a variety of uses," including livestock grazing, timber harvest, oil drilling, and mining. Furthermore, "Rather than determine the suitability of all lands for all uses, a plan should assume that all lands are potentially suitable for a variety of uses." In other words, economic exploitation of our national forests can take precedence over anything else, including the value of those lands for hiking, wildlife habitat, and provision of clean drinking water (nearly 80 percent of our rivers originate in national forests and provide clean drinking water worth billions of dollars each year).

The Bush administration also wants to make it much more difficult for public citizens to comment on not just forest management plans, but also on routine timber sales. The new rules would allow projects under appeal to be carried out anyway not just during emergencies, but also for economic reasons, such as "salvage logging." They would exempt "relatively small" timber sales from appeal, as well as projects of any size approved by Department of Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman or Under Secretary Mark Rey; limit issues that can be appealed to those specifically raised during previous public comment periods; and only consider "substantive" comments from the public.

And finally, the administration also wants to exempt "hazardous fuels reduction projects" from environmental impact statements and environmental assessments. The "categorical exclusion" proposed for these projects would also severely limit the public’s ability to comment on them, or suggest alternatives. Perhaps worst of all, this exemption would apply to projects of any size. In essence, any logging could proceed without any consideration of its potential environmental impacts if it was labeled a "hazardous fuels reduction project."

What You Can Do

First, you can write the Forest Service to let them know what you think of their proposed changes to the national forest management plans; comments on that set of rules are due by March 6. You can send comments to USDA FS Planning Rule, Content Analysis Team, P.O. Box 8359, Missoula, MT 59807, or e-mail planning_rule@fs.fed.us. Tell them you’re writing regarding the changes to forest management plans announced in 67 Fed. Reg. 72770-72815.

Although the official public comment period ended in mid-January, you can also still write the managers of the Shawnee National Forest regarding the new forest management plan they’re working on. The Shawnee is Illinois’s only national forest, covering 270,000 acres in far southern Illinois. The Bush administration wants to give local forest managers more of a say in how the forests are run, so if we can convince the Shawnee’s managers that environmental protection should be their most important goal, the new forest plan might well reflect that priority.

At a minimum, commercial logging and other resource extraction should be prohibited in the Shawnee, and the recovery of endangered and threatened species should be a chief goal of the plan. The Illinois Sierra Club is also spearheading an effort to convince the Forest Service to designate three outstanding areas in the Shawnee as wilderness, worthy of the highest levels of legal protection: Camp Hutchins, Ripple Hollow, and Burke Branch. You can read more on their Web site (see below).

We can also contact our elected officials and ask them to protect our national forests by law. Congressman Jim Leach (R-IA) is currently seeking cosponsors for reintroducing the National Forest Protection and Restoration Act in the House. Over 112 members of the last session of Congress endorsed the bill, which would end commercial logging in the national forests. According to the General Accounting Office, the Forest Service’s logging program lost more than $2 billion between 1992 and 1997. This bill would use the money saved by not logging to restore the forests and to retrain timber workers for other careers; those workers would also be given strong preference for jobs doing the restoration work. Congressman Leach is hoping to introduce the bill this month or next.

Finally, we can all help by reusing paper, buying recycled paper goods, and using wood products salvaged from old buildings, or products made from recycled plastics, instead of new-cut wood. Currently only 3 percent of U.S. wood and paper products come from our national forests. If we can reduce our demand enough, that three percent can stay in our national forests, where it belongs, as green and growing trees.

Dave Aftandilian regularly writes about the environment and music with a special interest in the interface between nature and culture.

Resources

Shawnee National Forest Protection

Sierra Club

U.S. Forest Service

The Wilderness Society

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