Rule changes undermine public lands

Change is happening in national forests. After battling for decades, conservationists and timber interests in areas across the West are working together from common ground. But this better way of managing public lands may be undermined by rule changes from the Bush administration that shortcut wildlife safeguards and shift authority from citizens to government officials.

Public lands are an original American institution. Our nation pioneered the concepts of national parks and other public lands. The core idea of public lands is that they are managed by and for the American public. We may not have always agreed on how these lands are used, but for a century the trends have been toward increasing the role of the public in decisions that affect our lands, the role of science in guiding policy and conservation and sustainability.

These trends have taken their best form in recent collaborative groups that include conservationists, local community leaders, logging contractors, labor and others.

My organization, the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance, is involved in three of these collaborations. For two years, a collaborative group working on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, in Washington's southern Cascades, has found ways to get past contentious old-forest logging by focusing on thinning out industrial tree plantations.

Tree plantations, which were densely planted after clearcut logging, are stark and barren when compared with natural young forests. Sunlight can barely penetrate their dense canopies and the forest floor often lacks much life. Selective logging -- or thinning -- can trigger a flush of new growth in the forest under story. More berries, truffles and insects in thinned stands fuel the diverse food chain that nourish the Pacific fisher, black bear and spotted owl. Thinning plantations improves habitat while providing jobs and logs. It's great to see our field staff working together with loggers and Forest Service managers designing timber sales that actually will improve wildlife habitat in forests.

A similar group is working in the Colville National Forest, the habitat link in northeastern Washington between the Cascades and the Rocky Mountains. The members have a similar goal of avoiding controversies over old-growth and roadless areas and concentrating efforts where the work is needed -- thinning to reduce the risk of fire around communities. Their goal is to thin a whopping 20,000 acres. Collaboration is also occurring along the eastern flanks of the Cascades on the Okanogan National Forest.

But on Dec. 22, the Bush administration snuck out new regulations under the National Forest Management Act. These changes will greatly reduce safeguards for wildlife populations, the role of science in policy-making and the public's role in planning the use of our lands.

The administration's spin is that the new rules will improve efficiency by providing more discretion to government managers. However, the most likely outcome of these rule changes will be less collaboration, more destructive logging and gridlock, increased threats to our water supply and a higher cost to taxpayers.

No one likes cumbersome bureaucratic process. There are constructive ways that Forest Service decisions could be streamlined to save time and money. But short-circuiting the voices of the public and good science on national forests is really a back-door way to return the campaign gifts that timber and mining corporations gave to Bush's re-election effort.

My sincere hope is that Northwest communities will be able to continue the progress we have made over the past few years in reaching collaborative decisions on the management of public lands. Where this is true, Bush's new rules will be just one more challenge for us to resolve together. It certainly isn't the kind of support these groups deserve from the federal government.

My biggest worry is the impact the rule changes will have in remote wild lands where collaboration is not yet occurring. There we will increasingly see a deaf ear turned to the conservation concerns of the U.S. public and more pristine acres lost to logging and drilling for oil and gas.

There is still hope that public outcry can reverse these rule changes. That is, if the Bush administration would listen.

Mitch Friedman is executive director of Northwest Ecosystem Alliance.

Add P-I Opinion headlines to