Judge rejects old-growth forest rollbacks
-
A fieldworker in Oregon's Roseburg District weighs a salamander, as part of the BLM's survey and manage program
Bureau of Land Management
A federal judge in Seattle has rejected the Bush
administration’s elimination of the Northwest Forest
Plan’s "survey and manage" rules. The rules required
government agencies to survey for hundreds of rare species in the
Pacific Northwest’s old-growth forests, logging only where
those species wouldn’t be disturbed.
In August,
Judge Marsha Pechman sided with conservationists, saying the Forest
Service and the Bureau of Land Management failed to address how
rare plants and animals would be protected in the absence of the
rules.
The ruling is likely to impact logging projects
from the Cascades to the coast, says one of the plaintiffs, Dave
Werntz, science director for Conservation Northwest: "It puts into
question all old-growth logging plans that have been developed
after the Bush administration eliminated wildlife protections (last
year)."
The Bush administration dropped the survey
requirements last March in the face of a timber industry lawsuit,
which argued that they were too strict and time-consuming (HCN,
9/27/04: Life After Old Growth).
Eliminating the rules
"took away a huge mechanism for environmentalists to stop
projects," says Ross Mickey of the American Forest Resource
Council, a timber industry trade group. But even so, he adds, only
a few small logging projects had proceeded without wildlife
surveys.
In May, a federal judge in Portland threw out a
similar Bush administration rollback of salmon protections on the
Columbia River (HCN, 6/13/05: For salmon, a crucial moment of
decision).
