Bush's one last blow to environment
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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.
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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.
Bush's assault on science and the environment is his second-worst war. In his waning weeks, he has freed federal agencies from consulting with government scientists to evaluate the environmental impact of projects. In a further attack on the Endangered Species Act, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne proudly announced he would protect polar bears, but decoupled the protection from the problem - the greenhouse gas melting of arctic ice. In perfect Bushspeak, Kempthorne said, "We do not believe the science is there to make the causal link."
In a final decoupling from sanity itself, the administration will let people carry concealed weapons in national parks, wildlife refuges, and forests, and eliminated the 100-foot buffer zone protecting rivers and streams from coal-mining waste. Now the government wants to let developers pave forest roads.
Back in 1803, Lewis and Clark said their expedition of the West was to be "a tribute to general science," by collecting "the best possible information." They would be appalled at an administration that leaves as it came in eight years ago, avoiding all possible information, trashing all available science, and leaving the Obama administration a toxic dump of regulations to reverse.
Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.
