What could possibly be left of the environment for the Bush administration to degrade on its way out the door? Leave it to the Forest Service not to see the forest or the trees.
The Washington Post last week reported that the administration plans to issue yet another "midnight" ruling. This one would let timber companies pave over national forest logging roads so pine tree woods can become residential subdivisions with names like "Pine Woods."
The ruling would most immediately benefit the nation's largest private landowner, 8-million-acre-owning Plum Creek Timber. The Forest Service, directed by former timber industry lobbyist Mark Rey, had long been working on a paving deal with Plum Creek behind closed doors. It has been held up by outraged local officials who were not consulted over the impact of development on resources and by environmentalists gravely concerned about wildlife endangerments.
"We have 40 years of Forest Service history that has been reversed in the last three months," Patrick O'Herren, rural initiatives director for Missoula County, Montana, told the Post last July. Plum Creek is the biggest private landowner in Montana, with 1.2 million acres, much of it not far from either Missoula or Kalispell in the western part of the state. Much of that land's mountain wilderness, complete with glaciers and grizzlies, is so pristine that the Post said parts of it are "as Lewis and Clark found it."
The chicanery caught the attention of Barack Obama, who campaigned in Montana in hopes of putting a reliable red state into play (he did, losing to John McCain by just 3 percentage points). Obama issued a July statement saying, "At a time when Montana's sportsmen are finding it increasingly hard to access lands, it is outrageous that the Bush administration would exacerbate the problem by encouraging prime hunting and fishing lands to be carved up and closed off. We should be working to conserve these lands permanently so that future generations of Americans can enjoy them to hunt, fish, hike, and camp."
In October, a Government Accountability Office examination of the proposed deal between the government and Plum Creek found that it raised many perplexing questions relating to the 1964 National Forest Roads and Trails Act, few of which the Bush administration answered adequately. The act originally was meant to allow roads and trails in lands administered by the Forest Service for timber harvesting and recreation. The GAO said the Department of Agriculture "cannot convey a greater property interest than the statute allows," and that the rule change on behalf of residential development was so broadly interpreted that it "could have a nationwide impact." The GAO was particularly critical of the backdoor dealing, saying the Bush administration's approach "deprived it of the opportunity to obtain the public's views on a matter of intense public interest."
The idea of the 1964 roads act being abused to pave the way for McMansions should be overturned when Obama takes office.
