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Defenders in Action: Administration Takes Axe to Forest Protections -- Again
Wild animals and plants are jeopardized by new plans for managing the nation's forests released late last year by the Bush administration, according to Defenders of Wildlife and others in the conservation community.
The plans could open millions of acres of national forests to logging and mining with little or no attention paid to the impacts on wildlife. In response, Defenders and others filed a lawsuit in mid-February to halt the new rules.
"The nation's forests and the people who own them deserve better than this," says Rodger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders. "We are hopeful the courts will send these rules back to the industry lobbyists who wrote them, stamped ‘illegal.'"
The new rules, issued on December 22, will affect the way that the federal government implements the National Forest Management Act. The changes eliminate limits on the size of forest clear-cuts, cut standards for stream buffers protecting waterways and fish from logging, and abolish requirements that the U.S. Forest Service maintain and monitor wildlife populations on federal forest land (see Defenders, Winter 2005).
During the public comment period, nearly 200,000 citizens, including at least 325 noted scientists, urged the withdrawal of the proposal, but they were ultimately ignored.
"The new regulations jeopardize important wildlife habitat and will put more species at risk of endangerment and extinction," says Schlickeisen. "They toss aside decades of bipartisan consensus on forest protection and fly in the face of the recommendations of hundreds of scientists."
