courtesy of the High Country News
by Judith Lewis Mernit
If you had come upon the U.S. Forest Service’s new draft planning rule in the second week of February and, unable to contain your curiosity, given it a hasty read, you might have come away impressed. Since 1982, the forest planning rule has provided the blueprint for managing 155 national forests and 20 national grasslands; every individual plan derives from it. And unlike two forest rule proposals from the previous administration, this current draft seems realistically up to that task. It suggests responding to new threats with the fluid wisdom of emerging science, not the dogma of sclerotic bureaucracy. It encourages adapting policies to the 21st-century pressures of climate change and disease. It recommends involving the public as deeply as possible in forest planning.
The draft also upholds certain accepted goals of forest management from the 1982 rule, such as maintaining healthy wildlife populations and preserving the diversity of forest plant life. What it doesn’t do, however, is clearly obligate local forest managers to meet those goals. “I liken it to an airplane,” says Michael Francis, forest program director at The Wilderness Society, just one of many environmental groups that praise the general drift of the rule but consider its safeguards inadequate. “The Forest Service bought the plane, got it up in the air and course-corrected, so it’s headed in the right direction. But it turns out they forgot the landing gear.”
Teklanika Nature Photography 