The Bush administration announced Thursday that it was dropping a wide-ranging Clinton administration rule that had placed nearly a third of the country's national forestland off-limits to road building, logging and oil and gas development.
The move was denounced by Democrats and environmentalists and was likely to keep alive a battle over the future of 58.5 million acres of some of the country's most remote and pristine wild lands.
The administration is replacing the road ban started by President Clinton with a regulation that gives governors considerable influence over the fate of federal backcountry, most of which is in the West and Alaska.
The administration has been signaling its displeasure with the roadless rule for several years, and late last year proposed the policy that was formally announced Thursday.
States will have 18 months to petition the federal government to open the lands to roads and development or to keep them protected. The final decision will be up to the secretary of Agriculture.
The road ban, considered the most sweeping conservation move of the Clinton administration, set off a round of lawsuits still playing out in courts. Some Western governors and the timber industry condemned the prohibition, saying it had carved a huge wilderness area out of public lands that should be open to a variety of uses.
In announcing the new rule, which will take effect in a few days, administration officials said they hoped it would resolve conflicts by giving states a voice.
"The way [the Clinton rule] was done developed a substantial amount of ill will," said Agriculture Undersecretary Mark E. Rey, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service.
He predicted that in many states the rule would result in only minor changes to roadless protections, and said the Forest Service was not hatching grand road-building schemes.
"We don't have a large backlog of plans to construct new roads," Rey said. "There isn't a large number of forest engineers sitting at their desks today wearing out No. 2 pencils" planning them.
Rey said the Clinton prohibitions included more than 2 million acres where roads had been built and precluded fire prevention work near rural towns.
Environmentalists scoffed at that argument, saying most of the land near development -- where fire prevention measures were most needed -- was not federally owned.
