National forests will no longer have to conduct a full-blown environmental impact statement when they write new forest plans under a final rule the Forest Service will publish this week after a two-year delay.

The Forest Service announced it has completed a review that determined the writing of management plans and amendments has no effect on the environment, qualifying individual plans for categorical exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Until recently, categorical exclusions were used for small projects such as expanding a campground or administrative building, but the Bush administration has expanded the use to small timber and salvage logging projects, and now, management plans for the first time.

The incoming chairman of the House Resources Committee and environmentalists objected to the rule, saying removing the NEPA study will limit the public's ability to comment and influence Forest Service actions.

"The Forest Service should be taken to the woodshed," said Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.). "The result of this new regulation is that the people will have even less ability to know about, let alone weigh in on, management of their U.S. forest lands." Last week, Rahall and Rep. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) ranking member of the Forests Subcommittee, wrote a letter www.eenews.net/features/documents/2006/12/12/document_pm_02.pdf asking the Agriculture Department to withdraw the proposed rule.

"This is a fairly significant departure from past practice," acknowledged Fred Norbury, associate deputy chief of the national forest system. The categorical exclusion proposal was shelved for nearly two years as the White House Council on Environmental Quality, USDA and Forest Service debated whether it was was legal and going too far, sources say.

Norbury said the agency's experience since 1976 has shown that preparing an environmental impact statement (EIS) for forest plans is a waste of time. "We started out doing plans in the '70s under the assumption a plan is 15 years worth of projects, you can do an EIS and be done with it. What we discovered very quickly is that didn't work," he said. "Even though we've done these plans, when it came time to doing the project we still needed to do NEPA analysis."

Using categorical exclusions will allow forest plans to be completed in two to three years, while current plans can take over five years. The Forest Service will still conduct NEPA studies at the project level

"It's about time that the administration finally got this finished," said Chris West, vice president of the American Forest Resources Council. "It puts in place a process that will focus public comment and analysis where it belongs -- at the project level where the actions will have the impact on the environment."

Doug Crandall, Republican staff director for the House Forests Subcommittee, said environmentalists prefer the status quo because it allows them to file process lawsuits against an EIS. "The environmental groups want to be able to win lawsuits and the planning process lets them do that easily," he said.

The final rule to be published in the Federal Register later this week was altered to ensure categorical exclusions are used appropriately. "What we tried to do is be crystal clear about exactly what kind of plan qualified for categorical exclusions," Norbury said.

Plans that make a final decision on what is and is not allowed will not be eligible. "The plan that will qualify is a plan consistent with the new vision for a plan in the forest planning rule," Norbury said. Forest planning rule Once published, the categorical exclusion plan will complete the Forest Service's effort to rewrite the forest planning rule. The planning rule without the categorical rule component was finalized in early January 2005 and immediately challenged by environmental groups. A federal judge in San Francisco heard arguments in the case Nov. 1 and is considering motions for summary judgement (Greenwire www.eenews.net/Greenwire/2006/10/31/archive/14/ , Oct. 31).

The forest planning rule governs how the 155 national forests and 20 national grasslands develop their individual forest plans, the document that governs activities from timber harvests to recreation and protecting endangered plants and animals.

Critics feel the Forest Service is attempting to devalue forest plans. "We feel they have emasculated forest plans," said Mike Leahy, an attorney at Defenders of Wildlife.

"Forest plans were an effort by Congress to reform the Forest Service by making them think long term and include the public in their decisions and consider the overall environmental impacts of their decisions," Leahy said. "By exempting forest plans from NEPA, the Forest Service is basically thumbing their nose at Congress' attempt to hold them accountable and consider their impacts on non-timber resources."

Leahy added that forest plans make fundamental decisions because they allocate certain areas to be managed for logging or mining and allow for certain amounts of motorized recreation, drilling and logging. "Those decisions have an impact on the environment and the whole idea of studying that on a forest-wide level is you consider the forest-wide and cumulative impacts," Leahy said. "Those broad-level decisions can't be analyzed at the site-specific level."

However, West noted that federal courts, especially in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, have told the Forest Service to conduct detailed cumulative effects analysis at the project level in recent years.

Forcing forest managers to use a 15-year-old EIS as a basis for individual projects is not a sound strategy, especially because fires, insect infestations and drought can quickly change the landscape, Crandall said. "The people who want to get stuff done on the ground ... need a process that gives them guidance but is flexible," he said.

In developing the categorical exclusion rule, Norbury said the Forest Service relied partially upon a 1998 Supreme Court decision, Ohio Forests Assn. v. Sierra Club, that told the agency a forest plan is not a final action.

"If a plan is not causing anything to happen, or prohibiting anything from happening, it's not really causing any changes to the environment," Norbury said. "So the rationale for writing the EIS for the forest disappears."

The forest planning rule "improves" the process and allows public involvement at every juncture, the Forest Service said in a statement today. "The Forest Service first collaborates with communities to identify how forests should improve in the future. The public participates throughout the process as plans are refined and finalized," the agency said.

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