End Run Against Environment

The Interior Department’s annual appropriations bill, $13 billion this year, is hardly the vehicle to rewrite federal wilderness and public lands law. Yet that is exactly what some extremists in Congress are bent on doing. The bill has been loaded with some two dozen riders that undercut the nation’s environmental protection laws or carve out loopholes for monied special interests.

A final vote could come later this week, and Congress should move immediately to put a stop to this dangerous game, remove the riders and send President Clinton a clean appropriations bill.

Riders on appropriations bills have been common since the beginning of the Republic. In recent congresses members disgruntled with federal environmental policy or anxious to curry favor with influential donors have offered riders to strike at the heart of environmental legislation.

How else to explain a proposal that would encourage the Bureau of Land Management to waive normal environmental reviews in allowing grazing on some public lands? Or another that would put off long-overdue reform in mining laws?

Among the potentially most damaging anti-environmental riders this year are mandates to force the Forest Service to increase the amount of timber cut and sold from the Tongass National Forest in Alaska by 140% over last year’s harvest. That could lead to destructive clear-cutting.

Other riders would delay urgent habitat protection work across the country, permit road building into wilderness forests and wetlands and allocate taxpayer funds for an access road through Utah wilderness that would primarily increase property values at a ski resort planned nearby.

Individually, these end runs around federal environment law are destructive enough. Cumulatively, they represent a cynical effort by a wealthy few to dodge sensible laws most Americans strongly and consistently support.