Officials at Defenders of Wildlife, one of the nation's premiere environmental groups, are expressing increasing frustration over the failure of the U.S. Forest Service to release documents which may confirm that logging industry executives wielded the same kind of influence over proposed forest policy that the energy industry enjoyed with Vice President Cheney's secretive energy task force.
Early in its tenure, the Bush Administration began work on an overhaul of the National Forest Management Act, which governs 200 million acres of publicly owned forests. Seeking evidence that would shed light on the motivations behind the overhaul, Defenders of Wildlife and the Endangered Species Coalition filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in October, 2002.
Defenders charges that Mark Rey, a longtime timber trade association official who is now President Bush's undersecretary for natural resources and environment in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), has been deliberately dragging his feet in response to requests for the documents.
"Bush's NFMA overhaul is the biggest-ever rewrite of our nation's forest management policies," said Defenders President Rodger Schlickeisen. "These regulations govern every decision that is made about every acre of national forest, and the Bush reforms cater precisely and blatantly to requests that have been made for years by the logging industry." Schlickeisen says the rewritten policies diminish public and scientific input in the planning process, gut many key wildlife protections, and allow increased logging on public land.
"They reverse even the protections that were put in place by the Reagan administration, including basic [National Environmental Policy Act] reviews and biodiversity standards," he added.
Defenders was further irked that Rey's office seemed to come down with a sudden case of amnesia when it told the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that it had no records whatsoever -- no transcripts, memos, emails, or calendar records -- documenting meetings between the agency and industry groups (or anyone else, for that matter) during the process of revising the forest policies.
The court agreed with Defenders' claim that USDA did "not meet their burden of conducting a reasonable search and justifying non-disclosure of exempted information." The court requested that Rey's office do a further search for information and give a more reasonable explanation for why certain documents should be withheld.
"We're going to comply with the court order," said Rey, but he insisted that "there's no need to reach beyond that to broader theories of bad faith and conspiracy, because the court didn't find them and they don't exist."
Defenders' Schlickeisen has his doubts. Last month, Rey told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that substantial "modifications" are in the works, and the final draft is likely to be released in the next several months.
"They're probably consulting lawyers to try and make themselves least vulnerable to legal challenge," said Schlickeisen. "Because clearly if these new modifications are anything like what we've seen, they're illegal. And we've made it clear that we'll do what's necessary to prove it."
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CORRECTION
An article in BushGreenwatch on April 5 misstated the position to which Ann Klee has been nominated at the Environmental Protection Agency. She has been nominated for EPA general counsel; Stephen Johnson, a career employee of the agency, has been nominated for deputy administrator. Ann Klee is currently general counsel to Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton.
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SOURCES:
[1] Defenders of Wildlife press release.
This story was jointly produced by BushGreenwatch and Grist Magazine. For more on this story, visit Grist Magazine.
