Bush administration sued over forest decision
By Terence Chea, Associated Press
October 7, 2005
A coalition of 20 environmental groups sued the Bush administration Thursday to block road construction, logging and industrial development on more than 90,000 square miles of the nation’s last untouched forests.
California redwoods |
In the lawsuit, the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, Greenpeace and other groups challenge the U.S. Forest Service decision earlier this year to repeal President Clinton’s 2001 “roadless rule” that protected 58.5 million acres of undeveloped national forest.
“These are the last wild areas of North America, and there is overwhelming public support for their protection from development,” said Kristen Boyles, a staff attorney for Oakland-based Earthjustice, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs. “Repealing these protections have significant impacts.”
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, comes about a month after the attorneys general for California, New Mexico and Oregon brought a similar legal challenge. Both lawsuits allege that the Bush administration violated federal law by not studying the environmental impacts of repealing the Clinton rule.
The U.S. Forest Service would not comment because the litigation is pending, said spokeswoman Heidi Valetkevitch.
Just before he left office in January 2001, Clinton issued the Roadless Area Conservation Rule that banned development and road building on almost one-third of the nation’s 192 million acres of national forest land. The move was praised by environmentalists, but criticized by timber interests.
The Bush administration repealed the rule in May and issued a new policy that required states to work with Forest Service officials to devise management plans for individual forests. Governors were given 18 months either to petition the agency to maintain protections or to allow roads and development for their states’ forests.
Administration officials and timber industry representatives point out that the Clinton rule was struck down in 2003 by a federal judge who said the executive branch had overstepped its authority when it issued the regulation. In July, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed environmentalists’ appeal of that ruling, saying the new Bush rule made the issue moot.
Chris West, vice president of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber-industry group, called the latest lawsuit “a sad case of the abuse of courts for political ends.”
West said the environmental groups should participate in the process of determining how individual forests are managed instead of fighting the new regulations. He also said allowing road construction in undeveloped forests would help prevent catastrophic forest fires.
“If we let Mother Nature run rampant, we’re going to get these 100,000-acre fires, and it will take centuries for those areas to recover,” West said.
Environmentalists say roadless forests must be protected because they are some of the most pristine places in the United States, with clean drinking water, unspoiled habitat for fish and wildlife and unrivaled hiking and fishing.
“Because they haven’t been logged, mined or roaded, they’re still in their natural condition,” said Doug Heiken of the Oregon Natural Resources Council. “We should pass on that natural legacy to future generations in as good a condition as we inherited them.”
ARTICLE CONTENT COPYRIGHT the Associated Press. THIS CONTENT IS INTENDED SOLELY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES.
mongabay.com users agree to the following as a condition for use of this material:
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of environmental issues. This constitutes ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
If you are the copyright owner and would like this content removed from mongabay.com, please contact me.
