SAN FRANCISCO – A coalition of 20 environmental groups sued the Bush administration on Thursday to block road construction, logging and industrial development on more than 90,000 square miles of the nation’s last untouched forests.
In the lawsuit, the Sierra Club, National Audubon Society, Greenpeace and other groups challenge the U.S. Forest Service decision earlier this year to repeal President Clinton’s 2001 “roadless rule” that protected 58.5 million acres of undeveloped national forest.
“These are the last wild areas of North America, and there is overwhelming public support for their protection from development,” said Kristen Boyles, a staff attorney for Oakland-based Earthjustice, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs. “Repealing these protections have significant impacts.”
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, comes about a month after the attorneys general for California, New Mexico and Oregon brought a similar legal challenge. Both lawsuits allege the Bush administration violated federal law by not studying the environmental impacts of repealing the Clinton rule.
The Forest Service would not comment because the litigation is pending, spokeswoman Heidi Valetkevitch said.
Just before he left office in January 2001, Clinton issued the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which banned development and road building on almost one-third of the nation’s 192 million acres of national forest. The move was praised by environmentalists but criticized by timber interests.
The Bush administration repealed the rule in May and issued a new policy that required states to work with Forest Service officials to devise management plans for individual forests. Governors were given 18 months either to petition the agency to maintain protections or allow roads and development in their states’ forests.
Administration officials and timber industry representatives point out that the Clinton rule was struck down in 2003 by a federal judge who said the executive branch had overstepped its authority when it issued the regulation. In July, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed environmentalists’ appeal of that ruling, saying the new Bush rule made the issue moot.
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