Lawmakers’ Legal Shortcuts Lead To Disaster

Environmental laws aren’t cool nowadays. I know this because I listened to Rush Limbaugh for a few minutes this week.

Rush and I disagree on many environmental issues because of a very basic way of looking at life.

I fish, hike, paddle and hunt on weekends. Rush does not.

That’s why Limbaugh can vigorously defend the conservative zealots who have tried to undo many of the basic environmental protections that have been won over the years against torrential corporate opposition.

Environmental laws that protect our rivers, wetlands and wildlife get in the way of business.

Laws that protect our environment slow the cash flow and infringe on our personal freedoms.

Catching fish isn’t considered a right or a freedom.

Neither is drinking clean water.

The current Republican-dominated Congress tried to gut the endangered species act and give grazing an even greater priority on public lands.

The conservatives approved the now-infamous salvage logging rider based on a trumped-up “forest health emergency.” The law allows timber companies to skirt environmental procedures so they can get logs out quickly.

Like most Americans, I support a congressman’s honest commitment to reducing the federal deficit. But many of these shortcuts around environmental laws are geared to short-term profits for corporations at the long-term expense of natural resources.

This is good conservative thinking at its worst.

Indeed, the salvage rider, which was tagged onto an appropriations bill, likely will cost taxpayers millions of dollars in subsidies so the forest industry can build more unneeded roads.

In many cases, the urgency for passing the salvage rider had little to do with the health of forests after drought readied the woods for a nasty fire season.

The “emergency” had more to do with the political climate.

Get it while you can.

Bulldoze, cut and run before the public catches on.

There IS an emergency in the forest, but it has nothing to do with dying trees.

Fishermen simply don’t have the timber companies’ advertising budget to convince the public that the emergency is in the streams.

Water is being fouled. Fisheries are being lost.

The Panhandle National Forests currently are planning timber sales in the already badly overcut Coeur d’Alene River watershed under the salvage rider.

Conservationists have won appeals to stop some of these timber sales. But now that the Forest Service can dance around environmental procedures, the sales can go on.

The Coeur d’Alene’s native cutthroat trout have taken a severe beating in the past 40 years. Looks like the drubbing will continue.

Some fishermen have already written off the Coeur d’Alene. What to worry? We’ve got the world-class fishing in the St. Joe River, they say.

But all’s not well there, either.

Studies indicate that the St. Joe is already beginning to suffer from the insidious effects of logging high in its watershed.

Moreover, Panhandle National Forests officials recently said they would ignore the environmental analysis required by law before authorizing a $1 million project to repair a landslide on the St. Joe River Road.

The quick action is required to keep logging trucks rolling as fast as possible through the fragile St. Joe watershed.

Under pressure from anglers and environmentalists, the agency’s northern region officials in Missoula shrugged the responsibility for this delicate decision on the region’s best native trout fishery to that stalwart sentinel of environmental justice - the Federal Highway Administration. With lightning speed, the road-building agency recommended a “categorical exclusion” of environmental procedures so the project could commence.

Is anyone surprised?

Highway officials reasoned that the hillside is unstable and could slide again, causing even more damage to the road and river.

The project will use 55,000 cubic yards of fill to stabilize the slope and smother a half-acre wetland along the river.

This is how virtually all of our once-abundant wildlife resources have been lost - a dam on this salmon stream, an orchard on that mule deer winter range, just one more little road into an elk sanctuary, a tiny bit of dredging on a spawning channel, a couple of small clearcuts above a tributary to a sparkling clear cutthroat stream.

Currently there are more than 8,600 miles of maintained road on the Idaho Panhandle National Forests.

There is only one St. Joe River.

Landslides will continue to occur along the river because the road along its shores in many places was ill-conceived in the first place.

Without a little guidance from anglers, government agencies will continue to pour big money into fixing a basically flawed idea.

The dangerous unstable portions of the road should be closed.

People have four or five good access routes to the St. Joe. But if we continue to trash the river a riffle at a time, what’s the use?

The demand in the future will not be on trout streams bordered with roads. The demand clearly is for roadless segments.

That’s where the remaining fish will be.

Pumping more money into the decimation of natural resources is like a bad welfare program.

Ironically, Rush and his conservative cronies are all for it.

, DataTimes MEMO: You can contact Rich Landers by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5508.

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