Forest Service wants to streamline environmental rules

Forest Service wants to streamline environmental rules

December 6, 2001

By Katherine Pfleger
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON — Two Forest Service chiefs, current and former, told a congressional panel Tuesday that a variety of conflicting environmental regulations are preventing the agency from getting its land management work done swiftly.

At a hearing of the House Resources forests subcommittee, the chiefs — Dale Bosworth and Jack Ward Thomas, who served during President Clinton’s first term — said they feel that the agency suffers from "analysis paralysis" created by Congress’ laws and thousands of pages of regulations written by agencies to implement them.

Among those laws are the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act.

The chiefs said the conflicts lead to slow and costly decisions on how to manage the 192 million acres of Forest Service lands for timber, recreation and conservation uses.

"Too little value returns to the public or the resources that we are supposed to be managing and protecting," Bosworth said. "Resolving this ’analysis paralysis’ is really my No. 1 priority."

Bosworth said he wasn’t necessarily pushing for new laws to fix the old ones. The work, instead, could be done by changing agency regulations, particularly if Congress supports the effort.

But Thomas said he thinks Congress must act. "I am calling for legislative change. I don’t think you can fix this piecemeal," Thomas said. "You need someone to look at these things very carefully."

He also put some of the blame for the paralysis on the lawmakers: "You guys have done a lousy job of telling the Forest Service what you expect of them," said Thomas, now a forestry professor at the University of Montana.

As chief, Thomas assembled a task force that in 1995 reported a series of negative land management effects stemming from existing laws and regulations. He said then-Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman stuck the report in a drawer.

Bosworth has assembled a group to update the work of Thomas’ task force and provide recommendations early next year. He expects some changes may require legislation.

Elsewhere, the Bush administration has made noises that some forest regulations need to be reviewed and updated. Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees the Forest Service, said at a forests subcommittee hearing last month that the government has learned significantly since some major forest legislation was passed in the 1970s.

"We are using language in a sense that is an artifact of another era," Rey said, comparing the legislation to a slide rule rather than a computer.

Meanwhile, environmentalists generally are skeptical of potential efforts by the Republican administration to tinker with environmental laws.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Nathaniel Lawrence, Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney, said in testimony that the Forest Service needs to simplify how it manages lands. Rather than offering legislative fixes, he suggested the agency focus on less controversial projects, such as efforts to reduce wildfire fuels around forest communities.

Congress also should provide the agencies funding for vigorous environmental review, he added. "It should prohibit the agency from wasting resources, time and credibility conducting extensive and controversial ... projects far away from communities," Lawrence said.