Read the Fine Print on Forest Initiatives

In the final stretch of the impeachment trial, when the White House was eager to remind liberals that, bottom line, Bill Clinton is their guy, came a couple of headline-grabbing environmental initiatives. First, on Feb. 3, Mike Dombeck, chief of the U.S. Forest Service, used the occasion of a speech at the University of Montana to announce that President Clinton was issuing an executive order banning all new mining claims along the Rocky Mountain Front. The front is a 100-mile stretch of terrain from Helena, Mont., north and west to the Canadian border.

To the casual eye, the executive order looked like big news, heartening to greens. The terrain in question is one of the most important wildlife areas in the country, providing particularly important habitat to the grizzly bear. It has even been called the American Serengeti. Dombeck’s order got a clamorous reception from environmental reporters and editorial writers, who lost no time in declaring that this was evidence of a new, nature-friendly outlook at the Forest Service, previously regarded as being the servant of U.S. timber and mining companies.

Then, on Feb. 11, on the very eve of the impeachment vote, Dombeck unleashed a second initiative. He said that Clinton was signing another executive order that would place a moratorium on the construction of any new logging roads in virgin stretches of the national forests. In all, some 33 million acres would remain safe from the bulldozers.

Most Americans probably don’t know that the Forest Service has ranked for decades as one of the world’s biggest construction enterprises. There are already more than 430,000 miles of roads in the national forests, roughly eight times as much as is contained in the Interstate system. Where there’s a forest road, sooner rather than later there’s a chainsaw.

Dombeck’s second bulletin once again put the Clinton administration on the front page for its bold pro-environment stance. The New York Times’ environmental reporter went so far as to hail the order as “decisively shifting forest policy toward conservation.”

But with Clinton’s environmental initiatives, as with his grand jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky affair, it’s necessary to parse every line, scrutinize every clause. So far as the mining initiative is concerned, Clinton’s executive order would indeed have been a bold new step had it applied to the west side of the Rockies, where gold and silver companies have been gouging enormous pits in public lands and leaving a toxic desert of cyanide-riddled waste. But the order is confined to the Rocky Mountain Front, where there’s nothing much to mine except limestone.

The biggest threat on the Rocky Mountain Front right now is one of the Clinton administration’s own doing. In the summer of 1996, the administration paid Noranda, a Canadian mining giant, $40 million for its claim near Yellowstone. As some predicted at the time, this set a terrible precedent whereby companies could engage in a kind of enviro hostage-taking: Stake a claim of dubious worth, bellow the word “takings,” and wait for the government to pony up. Any smart prospector could figure out where such sensitive areas are, stake claims costing as little as $2.50 an acre under the 1872 Mining Act and wait for the manna to fall.

Almost immediately after Clinton announced his Noranda deal from the photogenic vantage point of a Yellowstone meadow in July 1996, a Wyoming company staked 120 mining claims along the Rocky Mountain Front. So Dombeck’s mining ban along the the front is a sad footnote to a piece of Clintonesque folly nearly three years ago. Among those urging the virtues of this executive order on Clinton was one of the mining industry’s dearest friends, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), whose family has huge mining interests on the west side of the Rockies.

And, alas, under similar scrutiny, the ban on new forest roads is less than impressive. The executive order specifically exempts the most lucrative timberlands in the national forest system. These are the coastal forests of Northern California and Oregon and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in the Sierra Nevada; forests in the Cascade Range running through Oregon and Washington and those on the Olympic peninsula; and, finally, the 16 million acre Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Altogether, about 20 million acres of roadless public forest land are exempted from the executive order, and these are arguably the most ecologically important forest lands of all.

These 20 million acres are now scheduled for imminent predation by the timber companies, courtesy of Dombeck and his Forest Service. The fate of the Tongass augurs to be particularly grim. The Forest Service plans to double the amount of logging in this pristine rain forest from the trees cut on Clinton’s say-so in 1996, a rate more than three times what the Tongass’ own federal biologist calls sustainable. The Tongass alone could see more than 1,100 miles of new road built into it.

Overall, national green leaders were highly complimentary to Dombeck. And two Republican senators from the Northwest, Ted Stevens of Alaska and Slade Gorton of Washington, scarcely green in philosophical and political outlook, may have been expressing their appreciation when they broke Republican ranks and voted for acquittal on the perjury count in Clinton’s impeachment.

It remained for Rep. Merrill Cook, a Republican from Utah, to strike a note of realism: “The policy is a deep disappointment. It fails to protect thousands of acres in my state from unnecessary, harmful and costly road construction. It hurts our environment and wastes hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, which I think is unconscionable. It also continues the shameful practice of using taxpayer dollars to subsidize wealthy corporations.”