Destroying the Forest in Order to Save It

The Bush administration has a plan to address this summer's disastrous forest fire season out west that destroyed millions of acres of valuable timber and hundreds of homes: Relax environmental laws so the timber industry can clear out the national forests. No more trees, no more fires. Simple.

The plan is right out of industry's playbook, and no surprise. The undersecretary of agriculture in charge of the U.S. Forest Service is Mark Ray, former chief lobbyist for the American Forest and Paper Products Association. The hysteria over the worst fire season in recent memory has provided him and his friends on the other side of the government-industry revolving door the opening they've been waiting for.

The western forests are, as Interior Secretary Gale Norton says, a tinderbox waiting for a spark. The buildup of fuel is rightly blamed on the 75-year-old policy of putting out naturally occurring forest fires instead of just letting the cycle of fire and regeneration take its course.

Congress has earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars to remove the small trees and undergrowth that provides the tinder. But the timber companies don't want to cut brush. They want to carry out the big trees that ordinarily would survive a forest fire to re-seed the forest. The timber industry is not in business to protect the forests, after all. Trouble is, now that Mr. Bush has placed the foxes in charge of the henhouse, neither is the U.S. Forest Service.

Mr. Ray and his once and future employers want not just to enrich themselves by destroying the forests that belong to all Americans, but to subvert the National Environmental Policy Act, the foundation of the nation's environmental protection laws. The legislation the administration is advancing contains what is called "sufficiency language", which would suspend citizen participation and judicial review of the way the Forest Service sells timber out of the national forests. That would effectively neutralize those pesky environmentalists who have stopped or slowed the industry's despoilation of public lands.

Ironically, the man who opened the door to this resource grab was Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who cut a deal with timber interests in his home state of South Dakota and pushed through the Senate emergency legislation along the lines of that now favored by the administration. Who's sorry now? He can atone by leading the fight against this shameless boondoggle.