We lost another one to the business-friendly Bush Administration when the so-called "Healthy Forest Restoration Act" was passed in 2003.  Under the guise of fire prevention, it opens up our national forests to tremendous increases in logging.

Background
The year 2002 was a terrible year for fires in the west, followed by more fires in 2003.  Tremendous acreages of National Forests burned, and many private homes in or near the forests were also destroyed.  The devastation set off the usual "someone must be to blame for this" charges and countercharges.  Environmentalist were accused of having appealed and slowed up so many timber sales that the Forest Service was unable to do its job of managing the forests properly.

Forgotten was were the facts that the West has been enduring drought conditions for four years,  that previous logging and fire suppression policies had left the forests overstocked with young trees (so-called "dog hair" forest) and fuel loads, and that less than 1% of forest service projects had been appealed nationwide.

[The Forest Service even produced a report purporting to show that 48% of timber sales had been appealed.  Upon research using the Freedom of Information Act it turned out that the report had been cooked up at administration request in a matter of hours, mostly by telephone and email, so there was no documentation to support the charge, which in fact proved to be false when the figures were finally gathered.]

The Bush administration and pro-logging Congressmen and Senators leaped on this issue as an excuse to speed up the logging process by short circuiting the normal reviews and procedures under the National Environmental Policy Act, and restricting the normal rights to appeal timber projects.  The "Healthy Forest Restoration Act, HR1904"  permits clearcuts up to 1000 acres and prescribed burns up to 4500 acres without environmental review or public input, all in the name of reducing fire hazard.  It is part of the trend in the Bush Administration to reduce or bypass environmental regulations, public input and appeals, not just for forests, but for all environmental rules and regulations.

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