‘Roadless Rule’ Revived

Ding dong! The witch is dead! Environmentalists are whistling a happy tune after yesterday’s federal appeals court decision to reinstate Clinton-era protections of 58 million acres of national wilderness that were repealed during the Bush administration.
The decision revives the “roadless rule,” which originally barred the building of roads and harvesting of timber in lands designated as “inventoried roadless lands.” Those lands are a subset of federally protected wilderness areas, which total about 107 million acres nationally.
In 2001, the U.S. Forest Service decided to allow the building of roads and felling of trees in the inventoried roadless lands, which include 4.4 million acres in California. Some 465,000 of those acres are in the Los Padres National Forest south of Monterey.
The ruling rested on a concept familiar to most Californians: the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), or the federal version of the state’s Environmental Impact Report. The 9th Circuit Court ruled in favor of California Attorney General Jerry Brown and three other Western state A.G.s—from Oregon, Washington and New Mexico—who argued that the Bush administration failed to conduct environmental reviews of the effects of the repeal under the National Environmental Protection Act (the source of the EIS) and the Endangered Species Act.