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Clinton Readies Forest Protection Initiative
By Tom Kenworthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 8, 1999; Page A1
The Clinton administration, determined to establish a significant
conservation legacy, will announce next week an initiative to protect as
much as 40 million acres of national forest land from commercial
development.
The move will take the form of a directive from President
Clinton to the U.S. Forest Service to prepare an environmental analysis of
how to best conserve the agency's inventory of "roadless" or undeveloped
areas in scores of national forests across 35 states, according to sources
inside and outside the administration. Much of the acreage is in the West,
concentrated in the Rocky Mountain states and California.
The scale of the proposal would make it one of the most
significant land preservation undertakings in U.S. history, extending
protection to an area equal in size to Virginia and West Virginia combined.
By comparison, the nation's total inventory of
congressionally designated wilderness parcels set aside over the past 35
years since passage of the Wilderness Act is a little more than 100 million
acres. The entire national forest system comprises 192 million acres.
"If done right, this would be a legacy to rival Teddy
Roosevelt's," said Nathaniel Lawrence, a senior attorney with the Natural
Resources Defense Council.
"This could be truly historic," agreed Ken Rait, director
of an environmental consortium known as the Heritage Forests Campaign.
"America's open spaces and wild places are shrinking day by day and this
would be an incredible and historic move to save these places for future
generations."
Forest protection advocates believe preservation can be
accomplished administratively without congressional approval, just as the
Clinton administration devised an overall resource protection plan for
national forests in the Pacific Northwest to protect endangered species.
"They are doing through a regulatory process what they
can't do legislatively," said Michael Klein, a spokesman for the American
Forest and Paper Association. "They don't have the votes, so they are doing
an end-run around Congress to jam this elitist policy down the throats of
the American people." The administration plan would involve preparation of
an environmental impact statement with different land management options,
selection of a "preferred alternative" and then issuance of a final record
of decision. The result would be subject to legal challenge, and could be
overturned by Congress.
"If the Clinton administration is seeking a legacy with
this announcement, it will be a legacy on the cheap because they haven't
done the heavy lifting to find a balance between competing views on
resource management," said Sen. Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska).
It is not clear what specific activities would be
permitted on the lands in question. But it is likely the administration
will aim to give the Forest Service's roadless areas significant protection
as wild lands. That designation would not prohibit as many kinds of
activities as would designating the forests wilderness areas in which
logging, mining, construction of structures and all motorized equipment are
banned.
"The obvious things to focus on are the most harmful
activities: road-building, logging, mining and off-road vehicles," said
Lawrence. "How much of that they bite off is an open question."
A White House official said yesterday that the timing for
announcing the proposal and some of the substantive details are still under
discussion.
"There are several options under consideration," said the
official. "There have been no final decisions." The Forest Service, under
chief Michael P. Dombeck, has been moving toward broad prohibitions on road
construction and logging in areas that are still roadless. In March, the
Forest Service imposed an 18-month moratorium on road construction across
33 million acres of forest while the agency develops new policies on
managing its vast network of roads, which totals 380,000 miles -- eight
times the length of the interstate highway system. And last February, in a
speech in Missoula, Mont., Dombeck said, "It is my expectation that in the
future we will rarely build new roads into roadless areas, and if we do, it
will be in order to accomplish broader ecological objectives."
The significance of the pending White House announcement
-- which could be made by Clinton next Wednesday during a visit to the
George Washington National Forest in Virginia, a senior White
House official said -- is that it puts the president's imprimatur on the
development of a conservation policy for roadless areas and sets that
policy review in motion.
Keeping wild forest parcels free of roads is considered
by many conservationists to be the key to protecting them. Transportation
corridors disrupt wildlife, facilitate logging and other commercial
activities, and degrade pristine areas through erosion and other effects.
Roadless areas also tend to be important refuges for imperiled animals such
as grizzly bears.
But the nation's remaining roadless areas also contain
some of the Forest Service's most commercially valuable timber stands. Any
attempt by the White House to take administrative action to close millions
of Forest Service acres to the timber industry will be strongly opposed by
the industry and its congressional allies.
Western Republicans from states, such as Idaho and
Montana, that have not yet resolved their Forest Service wilderness area
selections might also view the action as the creation of de facto
wilderness and a usurpation of congressional authority.
The political sensitivity of the issue is evident as
senior administration officials continue to debate how broad a net they
should cast. A key unresolved question, for example, is whether to include
the Tongass National Forest in Alaska in the environmental review.
At 17 million acres, the Tongass is the nation's largest
national forest, and in many ways its most controversial. The environmental
community believes that excluding it from the roadless areas review would
undermine the credibility of the entire proposal. But including it would
likely infuriate Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the chairman of the Senate
Appropriations Committee.
At the same time, excluding it could hand former New
Jersey senator Bill Bradley an environmental issue to use against Vice
President Gore as they compete for the Democratic presidential nomination,
because Bradley has a record of advocacy on behalf of the Tongass and has
recently been endorsed by one national environmental group.
Asked whether the Tongass will be included in the White
House initiative, a senior White House official said yesterday: "There's a
whole range of options there that we haven't worked out."
"These guys are getting cold feet on the Tongass," said
Matt Zencey, who heads up a pro-Tongass advocacy group, the Alaska
Rainforest Campaign. "It's another example of where people have had high
expectations for Gore and he doesn't meet them. It allows Bradley to run
to his left on the environment."
The Tongass was left out of the 18-month road moratorium,
as were about two dozen other forests that also have recently updated
their long-term management plans or are covered by the Clinton
administration's Pacific Northwest forest plan. It is expected that the
Pacific Northwest forests would be included in a proposed scientific
review.
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