Today, the Bush Administration announced the latest in a series of rule changes that would gut the "Roadless Rule" on public lands. The Roadless Rule, developed by the Forest Service under President Clinton, protects more than 58 million acres of remote wildlands in National Forests across the United States. Under the newest Bush proposal, individual state governors would have to propose protection for each specific roadless area. Conservationists are denouncing the plan as a cynical effort to strip protections from roadless lands while claiming to save them.

This proposal is "a classic Bush Administration move," Scott Greacen, EPIC's National Forest Conservation Coordinator, said. "The label on the box says `protect roadless areas,' but if you read the ingredients, they're not protecting a single acre of our precious wildlands. It's clearly just more cynical anti-environmental policy, crafted to confuse and disempower the public."

The Bush Administration's persistent use of misleading rhetoric to advance its pro-logging positions, Greacen suggested, implies that the Administration does not want the public to understand its real policies. "The Roadless Rule was the single most popular conservation initiative in American history," Greacen said, "so naturally the Bush team has presented every new rollback as more protection. These lies are hurting the democratic process, they're damaging the Forest Service, and they're bad for the land."

Under the Clinton Administration, the Forest Service recognized the importance of ending the long-running struggles over the fate of our remaining roadless lands. By contrast, Greacen said, "This Bush anti-roadless plan will mean more lawsuits, more bitter fights, and most disturbingly, less protection for precious wild places that Americans have already overwhelmingly said they want to see protected."

In California, more than 4.4 million acres of "inventoried roadless" lands are at stake, including habitat for 65 species protected under the Endangered Species Act. More than a million of those acres are in the northwest corner of the state, which holds California's largest and wildest remaining roadless areas. The Klamath and Shasta-Trinity National Forests have been the focus of especially contentious disputes over logging in roadless areas and their proposed protection as designated Wilderness.

Greacen pointed to the proposed Whittler timber sale, now being proposed by the Klamath National Forest, as an example of the Forest Service's refusal to recognize and protect all roadless lands, not just those on the "inventoried" list. "There are a lot of wild, roadless acres in northwest California's national forests which the Forest Service has failed to properly recognize and manage," said Greacen. "Many of these areas are proposed for Wilderness designation, but all are irreplaceable and should be protected for future generations."

Residents and visitors to northwest California will also be hearing about the extremely controversial proposals to "salvage log" more than 12,000 acres of inventoried roadless lands in Southwest Oregon, where parts of the Biscuit fire burned in the summer of 2002. "The plan to sacrifice the roadless lands of Oregon's Siskiyous for narrow political gain foreshadows what this new policy will mean for California's Klamath mountains - needlessly destructive roads and logging in areas far more valuable for the clean water, wildlife, and recreation they provide," EPIC's Greacen said.

The proposed rule can be viewed at http://www.fs.fed.us. The proposal will be open for comment for two months.