Another Bush Blunder!!
Bush opens part of Alaskan forest to loggers
Wednesday, December 24, 2003 Posted: 9:51 AM EST (1451 GMT)
A 1990 photo of the Tongass National Forest on Prince
of Wales Island in Alaska. The patches of bare land show where clear-cutting
has occurred.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Reversing a Clinton-era policy, the Bush administration
on Tuesday opened 300,000 more acres of Alaska's Tongass National Forest,
the nation's largest, to possible logging or other development.
The administration will allow 3 percent of the forest's 9.3 million acres
that were put off-limits to road-building by former President Clinton, to
have roads built on them and perhaps opened to use by the timber industry.
The Tongass comprises 16.8 million acres.
"The people of Alaska benefit," said spokesman Bill Bradshaw of the U.S.
Forest Service, part of the Agriculture Department. "What's behind this is
the legal challenge by the state. The main point is that it brought a resolution
to the Alaska challenge."
The ruling builds on the Bush administration's decision in June to settle
a lawsuit filed by Alaska that challenged the road-building ban. As part
of the settlement, the administration agreed to exempt the Tongass and Chugach
national forests from its planned revisions to the roadless rule.
Mark Rey, the Agriculture Department's undersecretary in charge of forest
policy, said that as a practical matter, 95 percent of the roadless areas
in the two national forests would remain off-limits to development.
That's because the administration, while reversing the ban on road-building
in Alaska's forests that Clinton adopted just before he left office in 2001,
is reverting to an earlier Clinton plan in 1997 that set special management
rules for Alaskan forests.
"The bottom line is we've affirmed the 1997 Clinton Tongass plan, which affirms
protection for 95 percent of the roadless (area) on the Tongass ... based
on the best science available," Rey said.
John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA, accused the Bush
administration of "gutting the last pristine temperate rain forest" in the
United States. Tiernan Sittenfeld of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group,
an advocacy organization, called it "yet another holiday gift to the timber
industry."
But Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said the decision "paves the way for a
resumption of some wood harvest for the Tongass, enough to support the surviving
timber industry in southeast Alaska."
Agriculture Department officials, with approval from the White House Office
of Management and Budget, decided to exempt the acreage from the so-called
roadless rule, an often-challenged Clinton-era policy.
Imposed in January 2001, the rule had sought to block development of 58.5
million acres, or nearly one-third of the national forests.
The rule was struck down in July by a federal district judge in Wyoming and
currently is before the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Forest Service officials said their decision "maintains the balance for roadless
area protection" while providing opportunities for sustainable economic development.
"People in 32 communities within the Tongass National Forest depend on the
forest for subsistence and social and economic health," officials said in
a statement. "Most communities lack road and utility connections to other
communities."
In August, Alaska Gov. Frank Murkowski said the roadless rule, which effectively
has locked away portions of the Tongass and the 5.3 million-acre Chugach
national forests from major timber development, was "unlawful and unwise."
The Republican governor, a former senator, demanded that the Forest Service
exempt Alaska from the roadless rule on grounds it violates the Alaska National
Interest Lands Conservation Act, the Wilderness Act, the National Environmental
Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act.
Former Democrat Gov. Tony Knowles also had filed a federal lawsuit in 2001
challenging the rule. A federal judge in Idaho blocked the roadless ban in
May 2001, saying it needed to be amended, but that ruling was overturned
last year by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Environmentalists said they were alarmed by the decision, and that it would
mean the loss of protection for all 9.3 million acres of inventoried roadless
areas.
"Our public lands are under attack," said Cindy Shogan of the Alaska Wilderness
League. "The Bush administration won't be happy until the timber industry
has reduced the heart of America's rain forest to stumps."
But Ray Massey, a spokesman in Juneau for the Forest Service's Alaska region,
said those roadless areas still are protected by the 1997 Tongass Land Management
Plan, allowing for development in some places but not in others, based on
scientific reviews and other studies.
"They've just discounted what we consider to be one of the best land-management
plans ever done," Massey said about claims by environmentalists. "We've been
actively managing this place for 100 years."
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