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For Immediate Release
Environmental Protections and Public Input Removed from National Forest Management Planning
Washington, D.C. -- The Bush administration today finalized a rule change exempting forest management plans from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). This means forest managers will no longer have to consider the environmental impacts of their forest management plans and can fast-track plans through the public comment periods, eliminating opportunities for public input.
Arguably the most important decisions forest managers make about how to manage our national forests, the management plans evaluate and determine how much logging, drilling and recreation can occur on a forest, and where it can occur. Forest-wide management practices are also set in these plans, such as the width of streamside buffers designed to protect waterways and fish. Decisions about how to manage habitat and wildlife are made at this stage as well.
"The management plans for America's national forests are what sustain areas for use by the public and wildlife, as lands untouched by industry and as places to escape back to nature," said Rodger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders of Wildlife. "Proper planning is an opportunity for forest managers to determine which areas will remain road free and which will be opened up for resource extraction. With this new regulation, it will essentially be open season on national forests, and no one, not even the U.S. Forest Service or communities near the forests, will have an opportunity to consider or comment on impacts from the most basic management decisions until it's too late."
NEPA requires the Forest Service and other federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of significant decisions such as those made in forest management plans regarding road construction, resource extraction and recreational use. Fifteen-year forest plans for each national forest were mandated by Congress in 1976 as a reform effort to make forest managers plan for long-term forest use, to involve the public in their decision-making and to consider the overall environmental impacts of their forest management decisions.
"The Forest Service under the Bush administration has gone farther than any other agency in history in exempting significant federal actions from NEPA," said Schlickeisen. "Failing to consider the effects of decisions that govern every action on every acre of a national forest will be disastrous for public resources like water and wildlife."
The National Forest System consists of 192 million acres in 42 states, managed in 155 national forests.
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Defenders of Wildlife is a national, nonprofit membership organization dedicated to the protection of all native wild animals and plants in their natural communities.
