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Source: Daily Environment Report: News Archive > 2011 > February > 02/08/2011 > News > Natural Resources: OMB Completes Review of Proposed Rule On Land Management Plans for U.S. Forests
Natural Resources
OMB Completes Review of Proposed Rule On Land Management Plans for U.S. Forests
The White House Office of Management and Budget completed its review Feb. 4 of the proposed new forest planning rule, a replacement for successive rules that have been judged out of date, impractical from the start, or not in compliance with federal law.
Federal agencies typically issue proposed rules a short time after OMB releases them. Officials with the U.S. Forest Service, part of the Department of Agriculture, did not respond Feb. 7 to inquiries about when the Forest Service would release its proposed rule. The service has said in the past that it would issue the proposed rule and a draft environmental impact statement together in the first quarter of 2011.
The rule will govern land management plans for all 155 federal forests and 20 federal grasslands, covering 193 million acres of land. The rulemaking effort became necessary after a federal judge decided in 2009 that a 2008 forest planning rule violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act through its lack of an environmental impact statement and consultations with biologists (132 DEN A-5, 7/13/10).
Because the Forest Service had concluded that a 2000 forest planning rule was unworkable, the nullification of the 2008 rule forced the service to fall back on the 1982 rule, though the service has said that rule is in need of updating.
Since publishing a notice of intent in December 2009 on the plan for a new rule, the service has received more than 26,000 written comments and hosted more than 40 public meetings.
Multiple Uses, Restoration
Among companies that engage in logging or processing of logged trees, the hope is that the planning rule will focus on the practical details of forest management and the multiple-use and sustained-yield mandates of the National Forest Management Act of 1976. “Multiple use” can include logging, mining, grazing, recreation, and other purposes, including wildlife habitat protection.
The companies' fear is that the rule will focus on the “policy du jour” expressed in phrases such as “forest restoration,” said Ann Forest Burns, vice president of the American Forest Resource Council, an industry group. During workshops in preparation for the proposed rule, the Forest Service at times seemed more focused on the fashionable ideas than on the practical details, she told BNA Feb. 7.
Environmental advocacy groups see forest restoration as a needed policy to remedy many years of mismanagement and encroaching development and the challenges of climate change.
Several of the advocacy groups sent a coordinated set of letters in December to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to ask for a rule that would, as the letters put it, “safeguard healthy fish and wildlife populations and their habitats, and secure safe, clean water by creating management standards to protect and restore streams, rivers, and watersheds.”
The groups called it one of the most important environmental actions that the Obama administration will take.
“The course set by these critical rules will determine the future of our forests, wildlife and watersheds for generations to come,” the letters said.
By Alan Kovski
The website of the U.S. Forest Service blog about the new forest planning rule, with links to background information, is at http://planningrule.blogs.usda.gov/2010/08/25/a-new-phase-in-the-planning-rule-development-process/.
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