Don't We Kill Enough Trees With Governmental Paperwork?

Selling The Forests: President Bush Proposes Auctioning Off About 300,000 Acres 41 States

A great example of the Bush/GOP concern for our environment, natural resources, and natrual wildlife habitat... forget global warming, greenhouse gases, climate change and acid rain, what about a place for a squirrel to pee?

It's rarely a good idea to sell off assets to pay normal operating expenses. It's an even worse idea when the assets are chunks of national forest. But that's exactly what the Bush administration wants to do.

Washington has long sent money to isolated local communities surrounded by national forests. The communities cannot tax federal property, so the money helps pay for schools. The grants were calculated as a percentage of timber sales. When the annual harvest declined, partly as a result of court rulings in favor of various endangered species, the money was taken from general revenues.

President Bush's 2007 budget proposes to raise the money by auctioning off about 300,000 acres of federal forest in 41 states, at an anticipated price of $800 million. The administration recently sent a bill to Congress that would give the Forest Service the authority to conduct the sales. The bill has many defects, especially a provision that would sharply limit the public's opportunity to comment on the sales, short of embarking on expensive litigation. But its most glaring defect is its underlying strategy of trading long-term assets for short-term gain.

Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina, which would lose 9,828 acres, or nearly 1 percent of its national forest acreage, put the matter eloquently in a letter to Mark Rey, the under secretary of agriculture who helped concoct this scheme. The plan, he said, would blatantly contradict North Carolina's efforts to preserve open space for future generations by removing priceless resources "from public access for all time in order to provide temporary funding."

This page has objected on many occasions to the administration's efforts to roll back protections for the national forests, chiefly its decision to rescind President Bill Clinton's "roadless rule," which would have shielded nearly 60 million acres of national forest from further commercial intrusions. Though it involves much less acreage, the proposal to sell forest land reflects the same insensitivity to environmental values, not to mention misplaced budget priorities. In addition to the forest sale, the administration also proposes to sell a half-million acres managed by the Interior Department, not for any purposes related to stewardship of the public lands, but simply to reduce a national deficit already bloated by tax cuts.

Congress should reject both ideas out of hand.