Environmental Disaster (The Hidden Kristof)

In his Monday column, "Staining the Land Forever" (fully available to Times Select subscribers), Nicholas Kristof reminds us of the piss-poor (one could also say disastrous) environmental record of BushCo Admin LLC:

Last month, a federal judge blocked an administration scheme to harvest timber in California’s Giant Sequoia National Monument, criticizing it as “incomprehensible.” But step back and you see that the administration’s approach is entirely comprehensible: it’s a systematic effort to increase the private exploitation of federal lands even if that means losing their character forever. A few examples:

¶Last year, Mr. Bush formally repealed President Clinton’s “Roadless Area Conservation Rule,” which had provided broad protections for 58 million acres of national forest lands without roads.

¶Mr. Bush has also used his “healthy forest” initiative as a way to promote logging over wilderness. He is right that forests are too vulnerable to fires today, but dispatching commercial logging crews is not the solution for most areas.

¶In some parts of the country, Mr. Bush in effect has adopted a “no more wilderness” policy. In 2003, the administration announced that millions of acres of land in Utah and elsewhere in the West would never again be considered for designation as wilderness.

¶The administration has offered oil and gas leases on 70,000 acres of proposed wilderness in Colorado and 190,000 acres in Utah. Once oil or gas development occurs, the land is lost — no longer eligible to be included in the wilderness system.

¶Mr. Bush is trying to turn vast, pristine parts of Alaska into oil wells; some oil and mineral development is essential, but the past bipartisan sense of balance is lost. Mr. Bush is pushing to drill in many Alaskan lands that had been protected by past Republican presidents.
[...]
Many of these efforts took shape under Gale Norton when she was interior secretary. Now that Ms. Norton has been replaced by Dirk Kempthorne, we have a chance to pause and take a deep breath. Mr. Kempthorne seems more measured than Ms. Norton, and let’s hope he’ll take as his model Gifford Pinchot, the legendary Republican politician who founded our system of national forests and coined the word “conservation” as it applies to wilderness.
[...]
So that’s why I mourn for our wild lands. In 100 years, Mr. Bush’s mistakes in Iraq may not matter anymore, but our wilderness heritage lost on his watch can never be restored.

[ posted with ecto | ]