|
Ease logging { August 22 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/22/politics/22FORE.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/22/politics/22FORE.html
August 22, 2002
Bush, Citing Fires, Will Seek to Ease Laws on Logging
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 — President Bush will ask Congress to relax environmental laws so the timber industry can step up logging across millions of acres of national forest land increasingly prone to devastating wildfires, senior administration officials said today.
The plan is to be made public on Thursday, when Mr. Bush travels to southern Oregon. But after published reports today on the general thrust of the decision, environmentalists and some Democrats quickly condemned what they called a White House effort to promote rejuvenated logging in the name of fire prevention.
With two of the last three summers having been among the worst fire years on record, Congress has already thrown its support and hundreds of millions of dollars behind a plan to remove more brush, small trees and undergrowth from public lands to make them less susceptible to blazes.
But with support from Western Republican governors and senators, Mr. Bush now appears to want to go further.
As described by Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton and other administration and Congressional officials, Mr. Bush would give loggers greater leeway to cut larger, more commercially valuable trees as well as worthless brush, and would deny environmentalists legal tools they have used to block such logging.
"The idea is to expedite the process and not to have the much-needed treatment process delayed," a senior administration official said.
In particular, the officials said, Mr. Bush is likely to ask Congress to waive provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act, which dates from 1970, to streamline approval of what proponents call a necessary forest thinning.
"With dense forests and severe drought, much of the West is a tinderbox waiting for a spark," Ms. Norton said in an article that appeared today on the op-ed page of USA Today and offered a preview of the Bush plan. The plan was also described today in The Los Angeles Times.
Already this summer, the fires in the West have burned an area larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. Out of 470 million acres of federally managed forests, some 190 million acres are now considered at risk of catastrophic fire.
In recent weeks, Democrats and Republicans have become increasingly outspoken in calling for more aggressive efforts at thinning forests.
"Without active management, we will be asking ourselves in a few short years where our forests have gone," 15 Western senators, including Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Larry E. Craig, Republican of Idaho, warned earlier this month in a statement.
Still, no consensus exists about how much thinning makes sense. In general, environmental leaders have advocated limited efforts, aimed at small trees and brush near homes and populated areas. They argue that since tinder-dry underbrush and saplings are what fuel fires, it makes no sense to cut the less-fire-prone big trees deep in the forests.
The timber industry has recommended something far reaching, extending deep into wildlands and including large trees as well as small ones, to make the operations more commercially viable.
In their previews today of Mr. Bush's plan, administration officials used language that most reflected the industry view, with references to cost-effectiveness, to managing forest ecosystems and to the importance, as Ms. Norton put it, of "regulatory changes to produce faster decisions on forest-thinning projects."
The indication that Mr. Bush would ask Congress to ease existing laws in the name of fire-protection angered environmental leaders. Allen Mattison, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, warned that Mr. Bush's plan might "open the door to runaway logging" in areas that are now protected.
In response, administration officials said the White House plan would maintain strong safeguards, including prohibitions on the logging of old-growth forests. They said whatever new logging it permitted would be intended to produce safer, more fire-resistant forests.
Administration officials and some lawmakers have complained that the National Environmental Policy Act, which governs how the federal government must assess forest management plans, allows cases to be tied up in court for years.
In June, the head of the Forest Service told Congress that the agency spent about 40 percent of its time collecting documents and overseeing planning reviews, leaving it unable to properly manage the 192 million acres of forest it oversees.
Environmental leaders have vigorously defended the safeguards, saying they are vital to prevent logging from running amok. But their position may have been weakened by a precedent set this year by Senator Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota and the majority leader. Mr. Daschle inserted language into an emergency bill that allowed for bypassing the federal law to speed a forest-thinning program in his home state.
Mr. Daschle has said he acted only after environmentalists and timber industry leaders in South Dakota agreed to a compromise on the issue. Still, Republicans, including Senator Craig, have suggested that the White House proposal might well mimic the exception that Senator Daschle won for his home state.
Through a spokesman, Senator Craig, the ranking minority member on the Senate forest subcommittee, praised the administration for "trying to cut some of the red tape as we try to get a handle on forest management in this country."
By contrast, Representative Jay Inslee of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the House forest subcommittee, said the Forest Service and the administration should worry more about focusing its thinning programs on areas "where they do the most good, which is to protect human life and property."
"They're interested not so much in streamlining the process," Mr. Inslee said in a telephone interview, "but in streamlining the ability of their special-interest friends to take a national asset and turn it into private profit."
Senator Feinstein said today that she would not comment on Mr. Bush's plan until it was made public. But a spokesman said she "does feel that we need to move more aggressively to protect our forests, and one of the problems has been the extended process we need to go through in order to thin and do other projects that would deal with the tremendous overgrowth we now have."
A model for the White House plan emerged as part of a deal reached this spring between the administration and two Western governors, Dirk Kempthorne of Idaho, a Republican, and John Kitzhaber of Oregon, a Democrat.
Those talks, brokered by Ms. Norton and Ann M. Veneman, the agriculture secretary, produced a 10-year plan for the thinning of forest lands considered a particularly high fire risk, and they called for regulatory changes to produce faster decisions on high-priority projects.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
|
|
