THE BUSH administration's new rules on management of national forests are not a surprise. They generally track a set of draft regulations the Forest Service issued two years ago. They are, nonetheless, a disappointment. The furor over the draft had offered the administration a chance to ameliorate the grave problems with its proposal. Instead, just before Christmas, it has gone ahead with a rule that will weaken environmental protection of forests and their wildlife.
The idea of streamlining the forest management planning process -- the purported goal of the regulation -- is reasonable. It takes up to seven years to produce the statutorily mandated 15-year management plans for the country's national forests -- an absurd period that guarantees that plans are out of date by the time they get finalized. But the administration's new rule does more than make the process more efficient. It also weakens the protections it should be ensuring.
On its way out of office, the Clinton administration rewrote the rules to ensure that conservation lay at the core of forest management. The Bush administration has replaced those rules with new ones that place economic use of federal forests on a par with preserving their ecology.

The new rules permit management plans to be changed without conducting environmental impact analyses – loosening the tether that binds policy to ecological consequences and reducing the public's ability to assess the impact of planning changes. Moreover, the new rule eliminates the requirement that the Forest Service ensure that "viable populations" of native species are maintained in national forests. Instead, the rules require, in a parody of bureaucratic vagueness, that plans "provide a framework to contribute to sustaining native ecological systems by providing ecological conditions to support diversity of native plant and animal species in the plan area." The administration even weakened the draft regulations' insistence that forest management decisions must be consistent with the best available science. The final rule demands only that local Forest Service officials "take into account the best available science."
Particularly in combination with the Bush administration's changes to the so-called roadless rule -- which will allow more development in previously off-limits areas of national forests -- these changes will facilitate logging of precious areas. They will return great discretion to local forest managers whose solicitude for timber interests led to the imposition of federal standards in the first place. And they send an unfortunate signal as to whose benefit that discretion ought to be exercised.