I had forgotten how much the Bush gang loves the week before Christmas, when media interest is tepid, Americans’ attention is focused elsewhere, and they can pull stunts like these.
The Bush administration issued comprehensive new rules yesterday for managing the national forests, jettisoning some environmental protections that date to Ronald Reagan’s administration and putting in place the biggest change in forest-use policies in nearly three decades.
The regulations affect recreation, endangered-species protections and livestock grazing, among other things, on all 192 million acres of the country’s 155 national forests.
For 20 years, logging rules placed a higher emphasis on environmental concerns. Bush decided to scrap those rules.
The government will no longer require that its managers prepare an environmental impact analysis with each forest’s management plan, or use numerical counts to ensure there are “viable populations” of fish and wildlife. The changes will reduce the number of required scientific reports and ask federal officials to focus on a forest’s overall health, rather than the fate of individual species, when evaluating how best to protect local plants and animals.
The timing was not lost on congressional Dems.
“With Bush’s anti-environmental forest policy, you can’t blame him for trying to hide behind other news, but not even Scrooge would unveil these regulations,” [Rep. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), a member of the House Resources Committee who tried twice unsuccessfully to block the proposed rules] said. “These regulations, being offered two days before Christmas, cut the public out of the forest planning process, will inspire many more lawsuits and provide less protection for wildlife. It’s a radical overhaul of forest policy.”
But that’s not my favorite part.
Some have argued that Bush’s exploitation of our natural resources is driven by an anti-environmental animus. I think it’s far more likely that the administration was simply bought and paid for.
Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees the Forest Service, is a former lobbyist for the timber industry, which threw its political support overwhelmingly toward Republicans in the last election cycle, donating more than $1.7 million to GOP candidates and party committees and just $380,000 to Democrats, according to data compiled by Dwight L. Morris & Associates, a Virginia firm that tracks campaign contributions.
Contributors identifying themselves as working for the timber industry gave $268,552 to the Republican National Committee and another $163,321 to President Bush, records show.
Three of Bush’s elite fundraisers were also top timber executives: W. Henson Moore, chief of the American Forest and Paper Assn., the industry’s trade group; Otis B. Ingram III, president of a Georgia lumber company; and Peter Secchia, chairman of Universal Forest Products.
Among the first donors to Bush’s 2005 inaugural committee was International Paper Co., which donated $100,000 to help pay for the festivities.