News

The Roanoke Times
May 23, 2007

Tammy Belinsky

Belinsky is senior staff attorney of WildLaw's Virginia Office in Copper Hill.

In Dennis LaBare's March 28 criticism ("People who love old growth forests too much") of Sherman Bamford's call to action in the planning process for the George Washington National Forest, LaBare revealed he knows nothing of the ecological, administrative and judicial landscapes of national forest management in Virginia.

LaBare may not be paid to share his radical rhetoric, but either he was coached from the west of the Mississippi where the law often is enforced, or he just emerged from a sheltered existence where he has been since the end of the last millennium.

Apparently LaBare has no interest in equal access to justice with his implication that there is something seemly about citizen enforcement of the law. Citizens, of course, would prefer that the government manage public assets lawfully. We could then spend our time enjoying the ecosystem services our forests provide. The administrative appeal process to which LaBare inaccurately refers offers only one bite at the apple and not two, and the Forest Service rarely, if ever, modifies its proposed actions to address legal errors and ecological concerns while it bends over backwards to accommodate extraction interests.

The fact is, the courts in the Western District of Virginia that have jurisdiction over Forest Service decision-making have never ruled against the Forest Service in the mere handful of cases that have been filed, and therefore no legal fees have ever been sought by the party who brought the suit.

Bamford is both correct and justified in sounding the alarm. On the same day LaBare's criticisms were published, it was reported that 236 parcels of national forest lands throughout the United States were leased for oil and gas well development and the regulatory programs that would have given oversight have already been dismantled. This is just the latest extractive assault on our national forests, for which balance in their management was abandoned with the election of the current administration.

Loggers who work on the George Washington National Forest have said they would like to be involved in work in the woods that results in growing better trees, but the soil quality is too poor. Rather than manage the forest to improve soil quality, the Forest Service has been gradually liquidating the last of the big trees and converting these to pulp and invasive-species plantations -- all at the expense of our native ecosystems.

Bamford also urged participating in forest planning because the Bush administration rewrote the rules to create plans with bottomless management discretion while private contractors line up to assume management of our National Forests as the administration dismantles the principles of public service. Since the publication of LaBare's response to Bamford, a federal court ruled that the new planning regulations are indeed unlawful.

This is not a time to hit the snooze alarm. There is no law this administration will not break to assure it leaves our public assets in the hands of extraction interests whose visions are of only horizontal trees in the forests for the future.