The Bush Administration has finally succeeded in making something vile and unnecessary go away.
Forest Service: No more environmental analysis of forest plans
Long-term management plans for national forests will no longer go through a formal environmental impact statement, the U.S. Forest Service announced Tuesday.
Based on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling and a new approach to forest planning, the Forest Service concluded that writing the plans has no effect on the environment, and any projects envisioned by them will still have to go through a formal analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act, said Fred Norbury, associate deputy chief for the national forest system.
“Our thinking was if a plan doesn’t cause anything to happen, and it doesn’t prohibit anything from happening, it really doesn’t have any environmental effects,” Norbury said from Washington, D.C.
Aha! Logic in government. Yes, it is a rare thing, but when searched for, it can be found!
But, of course, the AP had to find the whiniest left-wing eco-socialist and go talk to them
Conservation groups complained that applying what is called a categorical exclusion to forest plans, the Bush administration was continuing long-term efforts to undercut the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA, which requires agencies to take a hard look at environmental impacts of their projects and include the public in the decisions.
“NEPA is the primary law that enshrines democracy and openness in decisions,” Marty Hayden, legislative director for Earthjustice, said from Washington, D.C. “It is also the law that requires the government to take a hard look at the cumulative impacts of their actions on the forest and their plans for the forest going forward.â€
Bullshit. What groups like “EarthJustice†want is for NOTHING to happen. By tying the feds hands until they either give up, run out of budgetary funding or the anti-human groups can talk a court into stopping the action (I do often wonder why the gun rights groups aren’t this effective).
For example:
In 2005, the Bush administration changed the rules, making forest plans more broad-based, focusing on how to improve forest health and restore forests burned by wildfire, rather than individual projects, Norbury said.
About nine of the 125 national forests and national grasslands embark on a new plan every year, and about nine finish them, he said. Plans typically take five to seven years and cost $5 million to $7 million dollars, much of it spent on the environmental impact statement.
The new policy still comes under NEPA, Norbury said. Instead of an environmental impact statement or the lesser environmental analysis, the plans are now covered by a categorical exclusion, a provision of NEPA that says there are no adverse environmental impacts, so no analysis has to be done.
I had originally thought of calling this post “Cutting Through the Green Tape†, but after using the watermelon theory on eco-socialists, I figured that “Red Tape†would be quite accurate.
