White House reshapes environmental policy

by The Associated Press

The Bush administration is quietly reshaping environmental policy to enhance logging and other development by settling a series of lawsuits, many of them filed by industry groups.

As a result of settlements, the administration has announced plans to remove wilderness protections for millions of acres in Utah, has agreed to review protections for endangered species such as salmon and the northern spotted owl, has reversed a Clinton-era ban on snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks and has softened rules on logging.

Critics call it "sue and settle," leaving few fingerprints as officials move to roll back environmental protections.

“I don't know if it's a policy, but it's definitely a pattern,” said Kristen Boyles, a lawyer for the environmental group Earthjustice who has frequently battled the Bush administration in court. Boyles referred to the settlements as “sweetheart” deals.

In early April the Interior Department announced that in response to a lawsuit it intends to halt all reviews of its Western land holdings for new wilderness protection and to withdraw that protected status from some 3 million acres in Utah. That settlement still must be approved by a federal judge.

Mark Rey, the Agriculture undersecretary who directs forest policy, said officials are doing nothing the Clinton administration didn't do in the 1990s.

“I understand why they're unhappy” Rey said of critics,”but their unhappiness needs to be measured in balance to the situation they enjoyed when people who agreed with them more often than not were in this position.”

Rey said the Clinton administration encouraged friendly suits from environmentalists to block logging in Northwest forests, prevent road-building and stop development on vast wilderness areas controlled by the Bureau of Land Management.

Environmentalists deny that claim.

Each of the settlements the Bush administration agrees to is presented to a judge and will be subject to public comment. Rey said they will be judged on their merits.

“Nobody gets frozen out of our actions because the public ultimately is going to get a chance to comment. If they are dissatisfied, they will get their own opportunity to sue,” Rey said.

But environmental groups call the comment period a formality, which rarely produces any substantive change in the settlement.

Chris West of the American Forest Resource Council, a Portland, Ore.-based timber group which has filed several of the lawsuits, denied any collusion in the litigation.

He said Bush is “just trying to put some balance into how these forests are managed,” noting that logging in the Northwest has dropped in the past decade to less than a third of the volume recommended by the Northwest Forest Plan.