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Defenders in Action: National Forest Wildlife Rules Gutted
If a tree falls in a national forest and there is no wildlife around to hear it, does it still make a sound? The Bush administration’s recent weakening of rules governing federal forests may soon provide an answer to that question. This fall, the administration uprooted a Reagan-era policy that called on forest managers to maintain “viable populations” of wildlife in the 192-million-acre national forest system. Defenders and its allies quickly responded by filing a lawsuit to challenge the action.
The original regulation required that fish and wildlife populations be maintained and monitored and that logging clear-cuts be limited to guard against damage to water and soil. Under the new plan, the Forest Service could allow logging, mining, drilling and other activities even if they threaten local populations of elk, moose, trout and other species, and even if the federal agency has no data on wildlife populations in the area. The rule also lifts other long-standing protections, such as national and regional limits on the size of clear-cuts.
“Maintaining wildlife on public lands seems pretty basic—all recent administrations committed to do it through sensible and relatively simple rules adopted by President Reagan,” said Mike Leahy, Defenders’ natural resources counsel. “It’s too much for the Bush administration, however, which is going out of its way to eliminate the federal commitment to keep wildlife species on national forests.”
The announcement of this attack on wildlife protections follows an earlier and much broader proposal to gut the rules for implementing the National Forest Management Act—the law that governs all activities on the nation’s system of national forests. That proposal included plans to eliminate wildlife protections, environmental reviews of forest plans and other mandatory standards, and drew criticism from Congress, scientists, the press and the conservation community.
Taken together, the administration’s efforts to undermine forestry regulations seem to beg a new question: If there are no trees and no wildlife left in the forest, can you still call it a forest?
