Dubya Administration Sells Out Our Public Lands to the Lowest Bidder

[JoseCuervo]

In the Northwest: Administration serves up environment on a platter

By JOEL CONNELLY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

In what has become an annual gathering of friends -- some would call them fiends -- top Bush administration environmental officials are hobnobbing with industry lobbyists this week at the Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa in Phoenix.

The keynote speaker at a three-day conference, co-sponsored by the Western Business Roundtable and Business-Industry Political Action Committee, is U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton. Placer Dome Inc., the Vancouver, B.C.-based gold-mining giant, is sponsoring the dinner at which Norton is speaking.

Truthfully, the Bush folk have earned a midwinter respite in the Valley of the Sun.

The Christmas-New Year's season is their busiest time of year to roll out far-reaching administrative rollbacks of environmental protections.

By putting all their eggs in the anti-Bush basket, national conservation groups had a rotten 2004 election. They didn't topple the president, and they lost friends in Congress.

Still, polls show strong public support for clean air, clean water and protection of wild critters. The administration has responded, in part, with a strategy of stealth. Announcements are timed to the time of year when we're filled with good cheer and turkey.

In a political version of the gift of the Magi, the administration brought three gifts of value to its friends over the period of the Nativity.

National forests: Supplanting rules dating back to the Reagan years, the administration adopted sweeping new regulations that relax wildlife protections and limit public input on mining, logging and other development in the 191 million-acre national forest system.

The regulations, announced Dec. 22, eliminate a requirement that federal land managers maintain "viable populations" of native wildlife and fish in national forests. The requirement was a primary legal impetus to preserve old-growth forests and to the Northwest forest plan.

As well, new rules allow national forest supervisors to skip preparing an environmental impact statement outlining different options for managing a national forest.

Killing wolves: New rules, unveiled Sunday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, make it easier for ranchers in Idaho and Montana to shoot wolves allegedly to protect livestock and domestic animals.

Under previous rules, physical evidence of an actual attack -- a carcass or bite marks -- was required as justification for a wolf kill. The new rules simply say the landowner has to believe a wolf was on the prowl.

Wolves have staged a dramatic recovery since being reintroduced in the northern Rockies. Still, ranchers and stock grower groups -- as well as the Cro-Magnon congressional delegation from Idaho -- fought the reintroduction of Canis lupus.

Mining the Okanogan: The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, acting Dec. 21, issued mining patents to a company that wants to build a controversial gold mine on Buckhorn Mountain in Okanogan County.

The deal transfers ownership of about 154 acres of Okanogan National Forest to Crown Resources, at a rock-bottom price of $24,969. The Denver-based company is being acquired by Kinross Gold Corp., a firm based in Toronto.
Crown Resources wants to build an underground mine, instead of the open pit blocked in the late 1990s when the Clinton administration refused to issue permits. Ore would be processed at a Kinross mill at Republic.

Opponents have argued, for more than a decade, that the project constitutes a giveaway of public land.

The mine figured in the 2000 election defeat of Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash. Gorton had used a spending bill, financing U.S. military action in Kosovo, to offer an amendment overturning a Clinton administration decision that threatened to kill the project.

Environmental protection was once a bipartisan cause, as we in Washington well know.

President Nixon signed into law the 1972 National Environmental Policy Act. The act was, in part, a collaboration between Sen. Henry Jackson, D-Wash., and a pair of former Seattle lawyers working in the White House -- John Ehrlichman and Egil "Bud" Krogh.

Three decades later, however, the Bush administration is moving to sharply limit applications of the landmark law. :BLEEP:

Hitherto, an environmental impact statement was required when a national forest plan got significantly amended or revised -- say, by increasing the proposed timber cut and land earmarked for logging.

Under the new rules, in Bushspeak, forest plans under revision "may be categorically excluded from NEPA documentation."

In plain English, this severely limits the public's voice in determining how more than 20 percent of this state's land gets managed. People will get less access to information about impacts of the Forest Service's management proposals. The agency will not be required to examine alternatives to a proposed plan or publish information about comparative advantages (and liabilities) of various options.

The Bush plan also blurs requirements on such matters as limiting the size of clearcuts, requiring streamside buffers and disclosing when Forest Service plans may result in below-cost (i.e. taxpayer subsidized) timber sales.

If you are a "resource" lobbyist headed for the Arizona Biltmore, there'll be reason to lift cups at the "Wild West Saloon Night."

Friends will be on hand, including Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, chairman of the Senate's public lands and forests subcommittee, and House Resources Committee Chairman Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif. Pombo is the guy who single-handedly killed bipartisan legislation to create a Wild Sky Wilderness in the Washington Cascades.

Still, a major challenge follows the stealth gains of this holiday season.

How will the administration and its industry allies finesse the very public issue of whether to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling?

 

[Moosie]

Someone Read the Cut and Paste stuff again to me please.......

All I got out of it is We can Shoot Wolves now

 

[JoseCuervo]

There are a couple of things to be concerned with, if you don't have time to read the whole article.

One, the excluding Public Comment is always a scary thing. A government that won't listen to the People sounds quite a bit like what Iraq had....

Second, no longer requiring "viable populations" is the same as allowing wildlife to go extinct. Obviously Dubya is no friend of hunters.

 

[ELKCHSR]

Not listening to the general public is some thing that has been going on for a long long time, it seems to me that some reserve down south of here was just written into being with out the publics consent during the Klinton administration...
That is no friend to free enterprise and the American way.
It's about time we had a president that had more in mind than kowtowing to a few noisy whiney liberal groups.
I see no problem with easing up some of the rules that have been placed into being and are way to over bearing to be of use to any one, and in some ways detrimental to those things sought to be protected.
The wolves (No matter how some feel about it) will need to be put on the target shooters list sooner or later, whether there are tags issued or the taxpayer’s food the bill.
I don't believe for a second that they will be totally exterminated by any stretch of the imagination, they are way to prolific.
We need to see more people pull their head out of their a.... err, the sand and look at reality with the brain God gave them and not with their wishy washy unfounded emotions.