Three Western states sue Bush over roadless rule
SAN FRANCISCO – California, New Mexico and Oregon sued the Bush administration Tuesday over the government’s decision to allow road building, logging and other commercial ventures on more than 90,000 square miles of the nation’s remaining pristine forests.
In the lawsuit, attorneys general for the three states challenged the U.S. Forest Service’s repeal of the Clinton administration’s “roadless rule” that banned development on 58.5 million acres of national forest land, mostly in western states.
“The Bush administration is putting at risk some of the last, most pristine portions of America’s national forests,” California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said. “Road building simply paves the way for logging, mining and other kinds of resource extraction.”
In January 2001, just eight days before he left office, President Clinton put almost one-third of the nation’s 192 million acres of national forest land off-limits to road construction, winning praise from conservation groups and criticism from the timber industry.
Those roadless areas included more than 6,800 square miles in California, about 2,500 square miles in New Mexico and nearly 3,000 square miles in Oregon.
But in May, the Bush administration replaced the regulation with a new policy requiring states to work with the Forest Service to decide how to manage individual forests. Governors were given 18 months either to petition the agency to keep their states’ forests protected or to open the undeveloped areas to roads and development.
Mark Rey, the Agriculture Department’s undersecretary for natural resources and environment, called Tuesday’s lawsuit “unfortunate and unnecessary.”
“The quickest way to provide permanent protection is through the development of state-specific rules, not by resuscitating the 2001 rule,” Rey said.
He pointed out that the Clinton-era rule has been struck down in federal court. In 2003, a federal judge in Wyoming ruled that the executive branch had overstepped its authority by effectively creating wilderness areas on U.S. Forest Service land. In July, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed environmentalists’ appeal of that ruling, saying the new Bush rule made the issue moot.
In Tuesday’s lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, the states allege that the Bush administration’s repeal of the roadless rule violated federal law because the government didn’t conduct a complete analysis of the new regulation’s environmental impact.
“The federal government acknowledges that road-building and timber harvest will result in decreased water quality, increased sediment and pollutants, yet they refuse to protect our state’s few remaining pristine areas,” New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid said.
Environmentalists praised Tuesday’s challenge to the Bush administration. They said remote roadless forests contain some of the country’s best drinking water, wildlife habitat and recreational areas.
“Whether it’s the Sierra in California or the Cascades in Oregon, I think we owe it to our children and grandchildren to keep chain saws and bulldozers out of these places,” said Steven Pedery, wildlands advocate for the Oregon Natural Resources Council.
But Chris West, vice president of the American Forest Resource Council, said the lawsuit was politically motivated, pointing out that the three attorneys general were Democrats.
“It’s just ironic that the states are given all the opportunity in the new rule to determine what’s in the interest of the lands within their states and they don’t want to take that on,” West said. “This is all about politics and not about protecting wildlife, watersheds and forests.”
Elliot Marks, a natural resources policy adviser to Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, said Washington did not the join the suit because officials learned of it too late to review it. But he said Gregoire supports restoration of the 2001 Clinton rule.
Gregoire said last month she would work to protect most, if not all, roadless areas protected by the Clinton rule.