Red Lodge Clearinghouse

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco April 11, lambastes the agency's latest attempt to prepare a new planning rule, calling it no different than a failed attempt to develop a rule in 2005.

Last week, the Bush administration released its final planning rule for the development of new management plans for almost 200 million acres of national forests. The rule determines how managers of 155 national forests and 20 national grasslands develop their individual plans governing a wide range of activities, including timber harvests, recreation and the protection of endangered species.

The rule incorporates many elements of a 2005 proposal that was blocked by a federal judge in San Francisco last year. The judge ruled that the Forest Service had removed environmental protections without providing for adequate public comment or considering the effects on endangered species. The agency had also attempted to change the standards in 2000, but a federal appeals court found the Forest Service in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.

The new planning rule, the preferred alternative from a draft environmental impact statement released earlier this year, is intended to significantly expand the role of the public during plan development and to allow plans to better adjust to changing conditions like drought and climate change.

The rule also requires the evaluation of each ecosystem as a whole, eliminating the "species viability requirement" that mandated evaluation of each species. Species-specific studies will now occur only when the Forest Service determines that the "ecosystem diversity" provisions of the plan require examination of a particular species.

'Head in the sand'

Forest Service officials said the new rule allows the agency to adapt plans to changing conditions, but members of the coalition said it only weakens environmental protections.

"The elimination of mandatory standards that protected our national forests for decades will of course result in increased environmental harm to fish, wildlife and other natural resources in the National Forest System," said Center for Biological Diversity attorney Marc Fink in a statement. "The courts have recognized this, the general public can see this, but the Forest Service has chosen once again to keep its head in the sand."

The groups are asking the court to throw out the final planning rule and reinstate the 1982 rule that set specific, mandatory requirements for the development of forest plans and site-specific projections.

The other coalition members are: Citizens for Better Forestry, Environmental Protection Information Center, WildWest Institute, Gifford Pinchot Task Force, Idaho Sporting Congress, Friends of the Clearwater, Utah Environmental Congress, Cascadia Wildlands Project, Klamath Siskiyou Wildlands Center, Wild South, The Lands Council, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics and Oregon Wild.

Click here to view the lawsuit.

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