Thursday, September 21, 2006

A federal judge Wednesday restored a sweeping Clinton administration ban against logging, road building and other development on nearly 50 million acres of roadless national forests, including 2 million acres in Oregon.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte in San Francisco ruled the Bush administration acted illegally when it repealed the 2001 Clinton directive, reopening some lands to commercial use.

Bush officials replaced the Clinton rule last year with a new version requiring governors to petition if they wanted roadless lands in their states protected. But Laporte threw that out Wednesday, saying Bush officials had chosen to avoid environmental assessments in "a clear error of judgment."

The decision deals a blow to the administration, which had argued its approach showed more respect for state concerns. It is a victory for Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski and Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, other states and environmental groups. They sued to reinstate the original 2001 safeguards, which applied to about a quarter of all national forests.

"We're back to where this thing should have been in the first place," Kulongoski said Wednesday.

He said the ruling should clear the way for the state to work more closely with the U.S. Forest Service to help overgrown forests at risk of catastrophic wildfires. The roadless land debate, with the state on one side and the federal government on the other, has been a distraction from that crucial goal, he said.

"There's more politics than there is forest management," Kulongoski said.

Roadless lands are typically remote and rugged, without valuable timber or mineral reserves to invite development. But their protection has turned into a long-running political and legal feud over some of the last undisturbed public lands nationwide.

Laporte did not restore protections, however, to 9.3 million acres of the timber-rich Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which President Bush had exempted from the roadless protections in 2003.

Appeal possible

The Bush administration has not decided whether to appeal Laporte's ruling, said David Tenny, deputy undersecretary of agriculture. But he predicted the ruling may well spawn further lawsuits.

In her Wednesday decree, Laporte ordered a halt to logging and other activities that would have been prohibited under the 2001 Clinton protections.

But Tenny said logging would continue on roadless lands burned by the 2002 Biscuit fire in southwest Oregon. The cutting in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forests already has survived other court challenges in its own right, including some involving the roadless debate. Two timber sales are under way there, with one nearly complete.

Environmental attorneys and Kulongoski, who sought a court order to halt that cutting, said it should cease immediately.

"They're going to have to stop," the governor said.

He said the Biscuit logging does not make economic sense.

"It was just a statement by some people who wanted to raise this issue again and say, 'We got into the roadless,' " he said. "Now they're told they shouldn't have been in the first place."

Oregon concerns

Laporte, in her ruling, cited concerns by Oregon officials that the loss of roadless protections would leave forests vulnerable to logging and road construction.

She ruled that the Bush administration violated the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act by undoing the roadless protections without examining the environmental fallout or effects on protected species.

The Bush administration's actions stretched federal rules "well past the breaking point," the judge said. She said its rationale for not assessing the environmental impacts of its move "ignores relevant factors and is infected with a clear error of judgment."

But Tenny said the administration sought a new approach that addressed the issue on a state-by-state basis instead of imposing the sort of nationwide rule that Clinton did.

"The best place to do good environmental analysis is local," he said. "The question of roadless is as much a question about how we govern as it is about what's happening on the ground."

Industry leaders

Timber industry leaders backed the administration's approach and said Wednesday that many roadless lands must be thinned to reduce the risk of wildfires like those burning this summer.

"If we set these areas off-limits to any management, then we're just dooming them to being destroyed by catastrophic events," said Chris West of the American Forest Resource Council in Portland.

He said Kulongoski and other state officials in California and New Mexico who sued to reverse the Bush administration's actions were driven by politics. He said they would have been better off working with the government.

Six governors have submitted petitions to protect roadless lands under the Bush approach overturned by the judge Wednesday. It's unclear how those petitions will be handled now, Tenny said.

But either way, he said, the process of developing those petitions improved communication with the states.

Kulongoski began work on a petition seeking renewed protection of roadless forests in Oregon, as required by the Bush administration rule. He said Wednesday that will continue until he learns whether the administration will contest Laporte's ruling tossing out its rule.

Michael Milstein: 503-294-7689; michaelmilstein@news.oregonian.com