Confuse, Deny, Duck

A sampler of headlines from around the nation last week:

Clinton Road Ban in Forests Survives

Bush to Ease Forest Road Ban

Administration Pursues Delicate Compromise

White House Reignites Battle on Forest Roads

Well, mission accomplished. After a pugnacious start, President Bush has found a more compassionate way to go about undoing protections on public lands: Confuse matters and then get on with it.

Obfuscation is nothing new in politics.

But for those optimists who thought this administration might be better than the last one in leveling with America, the recent double-talk on public forest lands, national monuments and parks shows otherwise.

George W. Bush has decided to dissemble just the way Bill Clinton did: When the going gets tough, tell people what they want to hear even if it’s not quite the truth.

At stake are large tracts of the West, those parts we share. Our public lands.

Late in his term, Clinton took sides in the tiresome dispute over management of these lands.

He imposed conservation regulations on forests, parks and monuments that favored the sensibilities of urban and preservationist voters--those who feel that the United States is growing squeezed, those who are rattled by the constant roar of machines.

Clinton’s decisions infuriated timber interests, energy developers and those who enjoy motorized recreation, along with Western politicians. But they haven’t suffered long.

Let’s connect the dots: The polls show Bush is out of step with the nation on the environment.

His earlier repeal of Clinton directives went down badly. But Bush still believes that he is right and conservationists are wrong.

What to do? Make way for development without exactly saying so.

Confuse things. Don’t bother repealing protections, undermine them. Make your opponents call you a liar. Deny it.

That’s what occurred with three recent announcements. The Bush administration indicated that, after study, it would uphold Clinton protective regulations on public lands. “Uphold” is a strong word. But it didn’t really apply.

Just beneath the surface of these announcements were enough buts, howevers and on-the-other-hands to incrementally gut Clinton’s public lands protections.

Are we dwelling on the obvious here? Maybe. But as the confusion of recent news headlines suggests, it’s difficult to summarize the actions of a president who claims to be doing one thing while intending to do another.

“It’s really a very clever tactic. He cloaks himself in environmental regulations while allowing them to be dismantled through the backdoor,” says Joel Reynolds, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The most far-reaching of Bush’s decisions concerns about one-third of America’s national forests, some 58.5 million acres. Located chiefly in Western states, these forests and mountains add up to an area about the size of Idaho.

They comprise the largest share of lands not already divided among private ownership, tree farming, military bases, parklands and energy and mineral extraction.

In other words, most of what remains up for grabs in the United States.

Last week, the Bush administration said it would uphold a ban on building roads into these forests--protection offered by Clinton to block large-scale exploitation.

Except: The Bush administration added that it would permit each national forest to consider local sentiments and alter plans accordingly.

Local sentiments? Well, they’re the voices of logging and mining and recreational concessionaires.

The administration went even further and said it would rewrite the basic rules governing overall forest policy.

The result seems likely, if not certain, to roll back forest management to where it was before Clinton’s initiatives.

The Bush administration said local officials and interests did not get a fair say in assembling Clinton’s protections.

Actually, they did. What they didn’t get, in the end, was their way.

Now Bush, the same president who was satisfied when the House gave his tax cut plan a single hearing, says that 599 additional hearings on the roadless ban were not enough.

He says the opinions of 1.6 million Americans, more than 50-to-1 in favor of protections, need to be augmented by closed-door negotiations in far-off Boise and Missoula and Laramie.

National monuments face a similar rollback in protections. The new administration “upheld” Clinton’s expansion of the monument system.

Except: Again, Bush officials said they would survey local interests on how to manage or alter the protections afforded.

In Yellowstone and Teton national parks, the administration similarly said it would “uphold” Clinton’s ban on snowmobiles, which have turned the park into a winter playground for noisy machines.

Except: Once more, the administration said it hoped to reach agreement with snowmobilers for “limited recreational use” of the park in winter, which sounds pretty much like what they are allowed now.

For the short run, by sowing confusion, the Bush administration may have bought itself some relief from mounting public resentment.

But like fuzzy math, fuzzy English won’t add up in the end. Protection means protection, not something else.