The Bush administration opened up undeveloped areas of the largest U.S. national forest to logging on Tuesday, scrapping a Clinton-era rule aimed at protecting the wilderness.
The U.S. Forest Service announced that it will exempt the Tongass National Forest in southeastern Alaska from a national rule prohibiting timber cutting in roadless areas. The decision means about 300,000 acres of dense, old-growth rain forest will be available for logging.
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Environmentalists portrayed the policy change as a violation of public trust. They said the road-building likely to accompany the new logging could affect 2.5 million acres of the forest.
"The Bush administration has turned its back on the public, good science and the law in its effort to clearcut the Tongass," Tom Waldo, a Juneau-based attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice, said in a news release.
"This is obviously a Christmas present from the Bush administration to the timber industry, which wants the right to clearcut in America's greatest temperate rainforest."
Here's a picture of the area, and Earthjustice's coverage of the administration's wilderness bushwhacking on behalf of the timber industry.
See also this New York Times editorial blasting the move as a "holiday gift to Senator Ted Stevens and Gov. Frank Murkowski, both of whom have lobbied for the resumption of the clear-cutting that has already stripped the nation's only temperate rain forest of a half million acres of old-growth trees."
There is not a single issue on which these people can make the right decision untainted by political posturing. Like King Midas in reverse — everything they touch, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the federal budget to energy and environmental policy, turns to shit.
