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Forest Service Turns Off the Sunshine

December 20, 2006

Let’s say you live in a fine residential neighborhood of well-kept properties and a public park with a stream running through it.

The city fathers get a notion into their heads that land near the neighborhood must be rezoned for intensive commercial development. But they refuse to discuss the impacts of the zone change on traffic, noise, the stream’s water quality, or anything else that affects the neighborhood. After all, it’s only a plan, see? You’ll just have to wait until the big-box stores apply for their building permits before the city will let you in on what the change means for your property.

In most communities, the locals would storm the city council meeting to disabuse the haughty burghers of such obtuse attitudes.

Unfortunately, the Forest Service is not as accessible to its citizen overseers as local governments are. Earnest words to the contrary, the agency’s default setting when it comes to dealing with citizens is, step aside, we’re the experts and we know what’s best.

Therefore, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when the Forest Service announced a policy change that management plans for America’s 193 million acres of national forests and grasslands will no longer be accompanied by environmental analysis. Instead, analysis will be restricted to projects as they come over the transom.

Forest management plans are akin to local zoning maps. They determine what activities will take place and where. Any fool knows that plans, in and of themselves, create no impacts. By showing how land will be managed, however, plans set a course that will create reasonably predictable impacts that the public is entitled to know about ahead of time.

So, under the new regime, if a forest management plan proposes expanding off-road vehicle trails, there will be no analysis on how increased motorized recreation will affect water, wildlife populations, sport fisheries, archaeological resources, scenic beauty, or other types of recreation.

There will be no analysis of alternatives to the proposed trail network. There will be no study of the cumulative impacts of the trail network over time. There will be no opportunity for citizens to offer ideas that the agency is legally obligated to consider.

The Forest Service says not to worry, that it will provide public involvement opportunities that are less formal and presumably, more kumbaya friendly.

Even if the Forest Service means what it says, however, that assurance misses the mark. As irritating and as cumbersome as they can be, formalized environmental analysis requirements and complementary rules for public participation are safeguards, a kind of contract between the public and its property managers. They are designed to ensure that citizens have a chance to be heard and that their ideas will be considered fairly. They are a line of defense against the Forest Service falling prey to arrogant insularity and/or getting overly cozy with grabby commercial interests that usually want more from the land than it can give.

The bottom line is that environmental analysis requirements, as imperfect as they are, hold the Forest Service accountable. Democracy functions better when public servants are forced, sometimes kicking and screaming, to let sunshine illuminate the murky corners of bureaucracy.