'Healthy Forests Initiative'
A Campaign of Severe Forest Policy Rollbacks

December 1, 2003


As massive fires raged in Southern California, the Bush Administration's attempts to establish the "Healthy Forests Initiative" were fueled by the flames.

Congress' passage of "healthy forests" legislation marks the triumph of a propaganda campaign to change the debate over public forest policy. Though sold as a compromise by politicians and press, the bill gives the Bush Administration--and the logging industry--pretty much what it asked for (see The Legislation sidebar). Thus, the law adds force to a radical program of forest policy changes already underway, and already sweeping in its implications.

The law conflicts with sound science and common sense, failing to provide increased protection from fire for human communities. However, in the Senate, all but 14 environmental votes abandoned forest defense in the furor over huge fires in Southern California. Those fires burned primarily in windswept, fire-adapted chaparral invaded by suburbs, miles from any National Forest. They devastated places where the "healthy forests" bill, tied to National Forests, could never and will never have any effect at all. Human tragedy, death, and property destruction were used as political props to pass a law that will pry open our remnant backcountry forests to industrial logging and development.

It is disturbing that the Administration's federal forest policy has been advanced by Democratic support. With Oregon's Wyden and Montana's Baucus, California's Senator Feinstein abandoned a commitment to stand firm for genuine protection, instead negotiating a "compromise" with industry's allies that gives the Bush Administration nearly everything it wanted from Congress. The Administration's forest policy initiatives are in effect a package of giveaways for industry and handcuffs for citizen activists.

The next few years will be a critical time in federal forest policy. Taken together, the law and the laundry list of unlegislated changes swept up in the "Healthy Forests Initiative" will make citizen advocacy on National Forest issues no easier and even more necessary. As environmental groups like EPIC document, debunk, and put on public display the Forest Service's actual plans for public lands, the Bush Administration and the timber industry may yet be held accountable in the court of public opinion.

The natural threats to the health of forest ecosystems are real, but our National Forests now face further threats from the timber industry and the Forest Service, acting under the Bush Administration's Healthy Forests Initiative. The legislation just passed is as disheartening as the deception used to pass it. Now it is more important than ever to monitor, and challenge when necessary, the Forest Service's management of our public lands. The timber industry and its allies have a great deal to lose, and they know they're on the wrong side of public opinion, science, and Mother Nature. It's up to us to make sure they're on the wrong side of history as well.

The Legislation
Like the even harsher version of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act passed in the House, the Senate bill was touted as a means to reduce wildfire threats to human communities. One of its principal sponsors, Oregon's Sen. Wyden, claimed that the bill was a "balanced, bipartisan compromise" that would provide the first legislative protection for old growth and "streamline the appeals process to eliminate its worst abuses."

Environmental analysts warn, however, that the law will lead to more cutting of mature and old-growth forests, further damage to wildlife habitat, greater risk of destructive fires, and little additional assistance to communities. They point out that the bill:

*Fails to provide increased protections or funding for homes or communities, or indeed any nonfederal land, at risk of wildfire, and defines "community protection" so broadly that it can justify back-country logging;

*Creates sham protections with obvious loopholes that would allow logging of old-growth trees, including a two-year window for the Forest Service to adjust its rules, and exemptions for insect and storm damage that mean virtually every stand of old growth could legally be cut;

* Fails to ensure that "fuel reduction" projects will actually target the unprofitable underbrush, very small trees, and logging slash that create the greatest risk of destructive fires, while allowing logging that will dry out forests and promote more underbrush;

* Provides no protections for roadless areas (already targeted by effective repeal of the Roadless Rule), regulations protecting "uninventoried areas," and policies protecting potential wilderness;

* Cuts the heart out of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by restricting the alternatives analysis to a few choices defined by the agency's agenda;

* Deprives the public of its right to participate in public lands-decisions by shielding many decisions from public review and restricting citizen input and appeals rights on many others;

* Interferes with the courts, setting a thumb on the scales of justice by instructing federal courts to give even greater weight to agency positions, and restricting the duration of injunctions on logging projects. No other industry is accorded this type of special treatment.

Changing the Rules: Regulatory and Judicial Angles
The Bush Administration is moving aggressively on every possible front to maximize timber production in our National Forests at the expense of environmental protection. The comprehensive campaign proceeds on political, regulatory, and judicial fronts, as well as legislatively.

Within hours of George W.'s oath of office, the Bush White House began chopping away at forest policy and public lands regulations enacted during the Clinton Administration, including the Roadless Area Conservation Rule and rules written by the Forest Service to interpret the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) and guide its management of National Forests.

Among the NFMA regulations targeted are the critical "viable populations" rule, key appeals provisions, and the planning regulations revised in 2000 which, had they gone into effect, would have made protecting ecosystem integrity the primary goal of National Forest management. (EPIC has recently joined a legal challenge to the Bush version of the planning rules.) The Administration has also introduced a series of new changes to rules implementing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), shielding from public review whole categories of actions taken in the name of "thinning," "fuel reduction," and "forest health," no matter what the likely environmental consequences.

Policies have been changed both overtly and, where necessary, by inviting lawsuits from former colleagues in industry, eliminating the public's input. A series of important policy issues, including the roadless rule, key protections for threatened and endangered species, and wilderness policy, have been excluded from public oversight in this way.

Then, in the fall of 2002, against the backdrop of the landscape-scale Biscuit Fire in Southwest Oregon and Northwest California, the Bush White House launched its effort to decimate the Northwest Forest Plan. Under the new management's vision, the still-evolving mechanism for ecosystem restoration in the public forests from Mendocino to the Canadian border will be retooled as a machine for producing timber and burying environmental dissent.


This article can be found online at www.wildcalifornia.org/publications/article-57