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Article Last Updated:
Saturday, December 07, 2002 - 12:18:27 AM MST


Cutting down the forest for the trees

Just over the Vermont line from Rowe is a vast lowland forest called Lamb
Brook, filled with giant beech and maple trees that provide food for bears and
shelter for migratory songbirds. A few years ago, the U.S. Forest Service
proposed to open up this part of the Green Mountain National Forest to logging,
but an immense popular outcry and a successful lawsuit in federal court by a
local environmental group, Green Mountain Forest Watch, saved Lamb Brook. For a
little while, anyway.
Anyone who's taken a driving trip out west has seen the way the national
forests are managed there, whole hillsides scalped to the bare earth for mile
after mile and replanted as tree farms. In Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine,
the hillsides are greener. The difference lies in citizen participation. The
National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires decisions on the national
forests, including the writing of the "forest plans" that govern their use, to
be open to citizens. Out west, the timber industry dominates the process. Here,
more people live near the forests and prefer to use them for recreation.

Now, a seemingly innocuous rules change proposed by the Bush administration
would take away the rights of citizens to intervene in timber sales and hand
the timber industry a mandate to clear-cut the national forests. The U.S.
Department of Agriculture official in charge of the Forest Service is Mark Rey,
a former timber industry lobbyist. He has found a loophole in NEPA that exempts
decisions with no environmental impact, like painting the outhouses at rest
areas, from public review. Rey's clever idea was to expand that loophole to the
writing of forest plans, so they could be rewritten to favor logging over
environmental protection and citizens would have no right to object.

There has been a tremendous outcry from environmental groups, which would be
completely frozen out, and even from the Forest Service's own scientists, whose
recommendations are being ignored. Sadly, there's little anyone can do. As a
rules change, the measure doesn't have to go through Congress. There will be a
90-day comment period, after which the Bush administration is free to ignore
the comments.

This is no reason not to comment. The administration ended its bid to lower
arsenic standards in drinking water after a huge public outcry, so write
everyone from the supervisor of the Green Mountain National Forest to the White
House. And go see Lamb Brook while you still can. Heading north out of
Heartwellville, the hard-to-spot trailhead is on the north side of Route 100.