National Forests

The Bush administration appears poised to push through a change in U.S. Forest Service agreements that would make it far easier for mountain forests to be converted to housing subdivisions. Mark Rey, the former timber lobbyist who heads the Forest Service, last week signaled his intent to formalize the controversial change before the Jan. 20 inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama.

By ordering a yearlong "time out" on new roads in national forests, President Obama has done both the politically prudent thing and the wise one. His move will forestall large-scale road building in 58 million pristine acres of forests, but by giving the Agriculture secretary authority to allow limited roads, it also will provide needed flexibility that the so-called roadless rule precluded.

The Obama administration waded into a nearly decadelong debate over roadless areas in national forests Thursday, announcing what amounts to a timeout from most new logging and development in pristine areas across the West. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack issued the yearlong order, which shifts decisions about development in roadless areas away from U.S. Forest Service officials and requires that he approve all new projects.

The Environmental Protection Agency is focusing on the effect of hazardous waste recycling plants on minorities and low-income communities. The move hearkens back to a Clinton-era executive order that required federal agencies to consider the effect of their policies on disadvantaged communities. Although the Bush administration largely ignored the mandate, Obama-appointed EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson has promised to analyze those effects.

The annual marijuana eradication campaign hit a new record this summer, uprooting 4.4 million plants, a 52% increase over last summer, state and federal officials plan to announce today. "The number of marijuana plants eradicated has increased due to the number of plants being cultivated and law enforcement's ability to detect and access the remote areas where the plants are grown," said Michelle Gregory of the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement. The program has increased its seizures since 1996, when voters approved the use of medical marijuana.

A judge Wednesday tossed out the federal government's plans to open vast tracts of forests in Southern California to new road building. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled that the U.S. Forest Service failed to adequately consider the plan's effects on the landscape and wildlife in the Angeles, Cleveland, Los Padres and San Bernardino national forests. Environmental groups and the state of California sued the Bush administration in 2008 over the plan, which covers 1 million acres.

In a victory for environmentalists, the government agreed to pay a timber company $475,000 not to cut trees in an Oregon national forest where dozens of anti-logging protesters have been arrested. "We think this is a creative solution that will contribute to solving a contentious situation," Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said in announcing the deal. Environmentalists had filed a lawsuit seeking to block logging of the Warner Creek salvage sale in western Oregon. But the U.S.

If California naturalist Aldo Leopold were alive, he probably would wonder how some members of Congress had come to find themselves in league with extreme opponents of forestry. These are the people who, claiming to be naturalists, object even to the removal of brush and deadfall on the forest floor rather than viewing it as the best way to save forests from the increasing danger of intense wildfires. Leopold, who died in 1948, was an extraordinary thinker and innovator.

Controlled fires need to be lit periodically in endangered national forests in the Southwest to stop the escalation of forest fires, U.S. Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas says. "We must restore fire to fire-adapted ecosystems on a large scale," Thomas told a congressional hearing on this year's devastating forest fires in Arizona and New Mexico.

Looking to ease the most contentious environmental issue facing him this campaign year, President Clinton on Saturday called for repeal of a controversial provision in federal logging law that has allowed timber companies to charge back into old forests that had been put off limits. The president made his remarks as he flew here from Long Beach. They reflected an effort to put himself back in the good graces of an important constituency deeply angered by an earlier decision.