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Defenders Magazine
Defenders in Action: Court Reinstates Forest Protections
The latest attempt by the Bush administration to turn back the clock on forest safeguards failed when the U.S. District Court in San Francisco ruled in March that removing national forest land protections established in the 1980s was illegal.
The Bush administration in 2005 gutted forest rules established under President Reagan in 1982 in an attempt to eliminate protections for fish, wildlife and the environment on 192 million acres in 42 states. The new approach favored logging and drilling on federal land.
“Basic environmental protections, such as maintaining wildlife populations on public forests, were not too stringent for earlier Republican administrations, including the Reagan and Bush I administrations,” says Mike Leahy, staff attorney for Defenders of Wildlife. “But this Bush administration found even the most basic wildlife protections in national forests onerous and quickly eliminated them.”
The court ruled that when the Bush administration modified the regulations, it failed to consider the impacts on wildlife and the environment, and it did not offer the public an opportunity to comment on some of the most significant changes.
“The Bush administration reversed decades of progress in managing national forests without evaluating the consequences,” says Leahy. “This administration would be better off embracing environmental protections than constantly getting tripped up by the courts when they try to run from them.”
The ruling is just the latest reversal of Bush’s anti-conservation forest policies. Last September, a federal district court overruled an attempt by the administration to eliminate protections adopted by the Clinton administration for the 58.5 million acres of roadless areas in national forests.
