Bush Administration Bows Out of Forests Suit

The Associated Press

Wednesday 09 January 2008

Forest Service will issue impact statement.

Grants Pass, Oregon - The Bush administration will press ahead with rule revisions to the primary law governing logging on national forests, which forced deep cutbacks in timber harvest to protect the spotted owl.

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey said Tuesday from Washington, D.C., that the administration decided it was quicker and cheaper to comply with a federal district court's ruling in March that ordered forestry officials to produce an environmental impact statement on the 2005 rules, which would have eased restrictions on logging.

The administration filed a motion Monday to withdraw its appeal of the ruling.

Marc Fink, attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the issue likely would land in court again. A draft environmental impact statement posted on the Forest Service Web site has found the rules would have no negative impact on threatened species, a conclusion environmentalists dispute.

"They haven't cured anything," Fink said from Duluth, Minn. "They're coming back with the same regulations."

A March 30 ruling by U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in San Francisco tossed out the U.S. Forest Service's 2005 version of rules implementing the National Forest Management Act for failing to do an environmental impact statement and for other issues. That forced drastic cutbacks in logging on Northwest national forests.

The district court ruling was based on the National Forest Management Act, a 1984 law that requires the Forest Service to maintain viable populations of so-called indicator species, such as the spotted owl, which depends on old-growth forests in the Northwest.

Dave Tenny, a former Bush administration forestry official who is now vice president of the American Forest & Paper Association, said the new rules gave forest managers greater flexibility to plan strategically for long-term goals that benefit species, rather than evaluating a list of projects on how they will help or harm a species. The association had intervened in the lawsuit, on the side of the Forest Service.

Rey said the decision to issue an environmental impact statement came down shortly after the March 30 ruling, and did not indicate that the administration thought it would lose in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

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