The Bush Administration rewrote the rules and regulations that implement the laws that tell how national forest plans are to be done. The new regulations exempted the formation of new forest plans from NEPA (the most important forest decisions were regarded as not important enough to merit an environmental impact statement). The new rules reduced public participation and they also downgraded the standards for protecting wildlife.
Most folks I knew thought the new regs were clearly in conflict with the law, and a judge has set them aside. However, this leaves forest planning in kind of a limbo — another Bush Administration mess-up (can I say sort of like the Iraq failure, but applied to the national forests?).
Ralph Maughan
Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He has been a Western Watersheds Project Board Member off and on for many years, and also its President. For many years he produced Ralph Maughan's Wolf Report. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He and Jackie Johnson Maughan wrote three editions of "Hiking Idaho." He also wrote "Beyond the Tetons" and "Backpacking Wyoming's Teton and Washakie Wilderness." He created and is the administrator of The Wildlife News.
