Environment Spoilers Using Sneaky Tactic

It’s an election year and politicians are working to convince voters and campaign contributors they can bring home the bacon.

In North Idaho, Eastern Washington and Oregon, publicly owned forests, grasslands and minerals are the bacon. Laws created by such luminaries as Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter to protect the environment - particularly the publicly owned parts - are now political bargaining chips in the purse of Congress.

Often, threats come in the form of riders, a stealth form of legislation which permits legislators to add or remove pet projects, legal safeguards and spending allocations without public debate.

One of the more infamous anti-environmental riders, crafted by Republican Sens. Slade Gorton of Washington and Larry Craig of Idaho, was the 1995 salvage rider exempting national forest timber sales from environmental laws. That rider not only nullified citizen outrage over logging of public lands, it lost millions of taxpayer dollars. The Colville National Forest Copper Butte sale lost over $250,000.

Demagoguery notwithstanding, behind the rider veil exists pork barrel spending while the Constitution is kept under lock and key. At present, a rider attached to a defense spending bill and promoted by Idaho Republican Sen. Dirk Kempthorne would allow use of southwestern Idaho’s Owyhee Canyon area as a military bombing range. Noise from low-flying jet aircraft could affect over 3 million acres of some of the wildest, remotest public desert canyons in North America.

Craig is trying to introduce a rider on the Senate floor that prevents the EPA from spending any Superfund money outside the 21-square-mile Silver Valley area without concurrence from Idaho’s governor.

For nearly five years Congress has funded the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project - or “Icebump.” Not only does Congress plan to cut its funding short of completion but a rider being pushed in the Senate would stop national forests in Eastern Oregon and Washington, Idaho and Western Montana from using Icebump’s ecosystem planning science when developing timber sales even if the cumulative environmental effects of those sales jeopardize salmon, bull trout, caribou or grizzly bears.

Another rider would impose funding limitations and exempt timing requirements for Forest Service revisions of national forest management plans, regardless of the best science. Colville, Okanogan and Idaho Panhandle national forests are currently managed under outdated plans, but Congress doesn’t care.

Last December, scientists from across the country sent President Clinton a letter supporting protection of all roadless areas. In late January, Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck announced a moratorium on new road construction in roadless areas. But Craig is pushing a rider to stop the moratorium before it gets started. Mind you, this is in the face of an unfunded $10 billion national forest road maintenance backlog.

Other riders would stall enactment of Clean Air Act provisions in wilderness and national parks, prevent modification of Columbia River Basin dams to protect salmon if those modifications impact commercial uses, and move national park boundaries to allow construction of superhighways.

After Teddy Roosevelt witnessed widespread clearcutting from the Midwest to the East Coast, he set aside a system of forests, mountains and grasslands to protect water quality and America’s remaining wilderness - a brilliant, visionary move that created an attractive backdrop, spurring economic prosperity in the Inland Northwest. Today, the rough riders of Congress are using back door legislating to undo 100 years of environmental law and further deprive Americans of their heritage of clean water and forests.