Protect roadless areas

The Eugene Register Guard editorial board says Obama should halt the Justice Department appeals.

For eight years, the Bush administration worked overtime to kill a Clinton-era regulation that prohibited new roads — and by extension, logging, mining and oil and gas drilling — in 60 million acres of largely undeveloped national forests.

Last November’s election raised expectations that President Obama would move swiftly to save the rule and the forests it was supposed to protect. So far, that hasn’t happened.

Even though candidate Obama said he supported the roadless rule, President Obama so far has failed to intervene to save it. Meanwhile, Department of Agriculture holdovers from the Bush administration still are working behind the scenes to open the nation’s finite inventory of public roadless areas to the industrial interests that regard them as their personal savings account.

Like the Bush Justice Department, the Obama Justice Department is continuing efforts to overturn the roadless rule in holdover federal court cases. That seems curious in an administration in which the chief executive left no doubt while campaigning last year in Oregon that he enthusiastically embraced the 2001 rule.

In one of those cases, a lower federal court in 2006 upheld the rule, rejecting a Bush administration alternative that gave states authority over federal lands in their jurisdictions. Despite Obama’s backing for the rule as both a U.S. senator and a presidential candidate, the Justice Department is pursuing appeals in that and other cases.

Obama, who has made much of the need for a president to deal with more than one issue at a time, should divert his attention briefly from the economy and other mega-issues to make certain that his Justice Department not only lets the Clinton rule stand, but if necessary defends it in court aggressively.

Meanwhile, the president should direct the secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, to order an immediate halt to all new road-building in inventoried roadless areas.

Nearly a third of Congress, including members of Oregon’s congressional delegation and Gov. Ted Kulongoski, have urged the secretary to order such a time out. Yet road-building projects have continued in part because the administration has yet to fill many of the top agency posts; the leadership vacuum has allowed Bush administration projects to go unchallenged.

Last week’s nomination of Homer Lee Wilkes, a Mississippi state conservationist, as agriculture undersecretary in charge of the U.S. Forest Service provides a timely opportunity for the administration to clarify its position on the roadless rule.

Obama should keep firmly in mind the importance of roadless areas in the fight to limit climate change. Cutting forests is the world’s third-largest source of greenhouse emissions — larger than the emissions produced by either the United States or China.

Earlier this month, nearly 130 prominent scientists from across the country sent Obama a letter urging him to preserve roadless areas. “Now, as the realities of global climate change become ever more apparent, the critical need to preserve these last remaining, intact roadless areas within the national forests could not be more urgent,” they wrote.

Governor Kulongoski made the same point in a letter to the administration earlier this year:

“Our state’s inventoried roadless areas also are a critical piece of the national effort to fight climate change,” he wrote. “With its highly productive forests, Oregon’s potential for carbon storage is among the highest in the world.”

In addition to fully reinstating the roadless rule, Obama should urge Congress to approve a bipartisan measure, which he supported as a senator, that would give permanent protection to roadless forests.

As evidenced by the current tangle of litigation over the roadless rule, environmental regulations are vulnerable to endless legal challenges. Congress should approve a definitive law that would protect roadless areas, including the 2 million acres that lie within Oregon’s borders, for future generations.