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The Obama administration announced on Thursday that it is delaying a decision on policy that guides the construction of new roads and other development in areas of national forests for one year. An interim directive will guide land use in roadless areas in the meantime.

Delayed gratification for roadless advocates. The new directive, issued by Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, will require his approval for any U.S. Forest Service projects on public lands that have been declared off-limits for development under the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The administration will hold off on long-term decisions on the policy until 2010.

The so-called "Roadless Rule," which the Clinton administration put in place during its final days in office in 2000, prohibited new roads on 58.5 million acres of national forest land. This essentially meant all logging, mining, and other commercial activity were also off-limits. But on his first day in office, George Bush temporarily froze work on implementing the rule; he repeatedly attempted to throw it out over the course of the next 8 years and undermined it by exempting large areas of land from its protections. The rule has been caught up in legal wrangling ever since.

"This interim directive will provide consistency and clarity that will help protect our national forests until a long-term roadless policy reflecting President Obama's commitment is developed," said Vilsack in a statement announcing the temporary directive.

Vilsack will still be able to approve projects if he and the Forest Service determine them to be necessary. And if the administration does not reach a long-term decision on the rule within the next year, the temporary directive can be extended for another year. Today's announcement also doesn't include public lands in Idaho, which has instated its own version of the rule.

On the campaign trail, Obama promised to uphold the law, so today's news comes as a first step in fulfilling that promise, though most enviros would like to see the rule reinstated entirely.

"Secretary Vilsack's directive is a critical interim measure to ensure that we safeguard the diverse values of our national forests as the Obama administration considers more permanent protections," said Sierra Club Public Lands Protection Program director Athan Manuel in a statement.

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A federal judge on Tuesday limited the scope of President Clinton's popular "roadless rule" to federal lands in 10 Western states instead of the whole country, leaving some 13.6 million acres of roadless forests largely unprotected from road-building and other development. Tuesday's ruling is a compromise between throwing the rule out and keeping protections in place for most roadless forests in the U.S. Two federal appeals courts are expected to rule on the matter next year.

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An Idaho-specific plan meant to replace President Clinton's national roadless rule in the state was agreed to Friday by the Bush administration, timber interests, and a few environmental groups. If approved by the Secretary of Agriculture after a public-comment period, the revised rule would protect just 3.3 million acres of forestlands in the state, down from 9.3 million in Clinton's original roadless rule. Over 400,000 acres of current roadless areas in the state would be open to development with no restrictions, worrying environmental groups who are opposed to the plan that those areas could be mined and subjected to other destructive practices that were restricted under the original rule. Another 5.6 million acres of "roadless" forestlands could be subject to logging (and its attendant roads) if it's determined that logging could reduce fire risk to communities. Environmental groups Trout Unlimited and the Idaho Conservation League have backed the plan while the Wilderness Society and others have criticized the compromise, arguing that national forest lands protected by the original roadless rule "should be left roadless and undeveloped."

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The amount of old-growth forest designated as critical habitat for the northern spotted owl was slashed 23 percent, or 1.6 million acres, by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday. One might think that means that spotted owls are doing well for themselves, but no: the spotted owl population is dropping by 4 percent each year. Despite widespread efforts to protect their Northwest old-growth home, the birds continue to lose habitat to logging, wildfires, and the aggressive barred owl. A federal study released last month warned that the remaining spotted owls lack genetic diversity, which may send them even more quickly toward extinction. "I have not lost hope for spotted owls," says wildlife geneticist Susan Haig, "but I think we're at a pretty serious crossroads." The federal axing of critical-habitat acreage resulted from a settlement with the timber industry, which complained that the 5.3 million acres left as critical habitat is still too much.

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The Clinton-era "roadless rule" has been declared invalid by U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer. The rule, which prohibits development on 58.5 million acres of national forest, has had a long and rocky past. Brimmer first put the kibosh on it in 2003, and while an appeal was pending, the Bush administration switched it out for an alternative that required states to petition the feds for forest protection. The Bush rule was thrown out by a different district judge in 2006 and the Clinton rule reinstated -- until now. Ruling in favor of the state of Wyoming, Brimmer declared that the roadless rule violated two environmental laws and stymied forest managers from doing their jobs. "The Forest Service, in an attempt to bolster an outgoing president's environmental legacy, rammed through an environmental agenda that itself violates the country's well-established environmental laws," Brimmer wrote. (Wonder what he thinks of the Bush admin's attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act?) The roadless saga will continue: green group Earthjustice has promised to appeal.

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The U.S. Forest Service has released new regulations for forest management that are remarkably similar to regulations that a federal judge struck down last year. Under the new rules, species' sustainability will not be evaluated individually; instead, the focus will be on overall habitat. A coalition of green groups have sued, saying the rules loosen protections for wildlife. Says one Earthjustice lawyer, "This is a parting gift from the Bush administration to the timber industry."

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California sued the U.S. Forest Service this week, claiming that it violated federal environmental laws and ignored state policies prohibiting road building in roadless areas of national forests. At stake are over 500,000 acres in four national forests in the state that the Bush administration plans to open up to road building, as well as 52,000 acres slated for oil drilling. The state is seeking an injunction to halt the plan. "Today in the face of threats, we are forced to once again stand up for California's forests," said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R). "Despite repeated attempts to ensure that the United States Forest Service honor its written assurances that California's roadless areas would be protected they have failed to do so."

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The U.S. Forest Service turned in a court-ordered environmental analysis of a fish-killing flame retardant 2 1/2 years late, and only after the agency's top official was threatened with incarceration for contempt of court. But the USFS did ultimately conduct the environmental review of ammonium phosphate -- which was dropped on an Oregon fire in 2002 and subsequently killed 20,000 fish -- so U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy elected Wednesday not to send Agriculture Undersecretary and USFS overseer Mark Rey to the slammer. Nonetheless, said Molloy, the agency's lack of action was "shameful," "unreasonable," and showed a "systematic disregard of the rule of law." Ah, just another day in the Bush administration.

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The Bush administration unveiled a new management plan on Friday for the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which encompasses nearly 17 million acres of coastal rainforest. The Tongass is the largest national forest in the U.S., a rallying point for enviros who want to protect all remaining roadless areas in national forests. The new plan, to be in effect for 10 to 15 years, would allow a maximum of 267 million board feet of timber to be cut in the forest each year. But the area's beleaguered timber industry hasn't come close to meeting that level for years; last year, only an estimated 19 million board feet were logged. The new plan would allow development on about 3.6 million acres of the Tongass, including about 2.4 million acres that are now roadless and untouched, and about 663,000 acres that the government says would be suitable for logging over the next 100 years. Some of the acres would be open to logging right away, but most of the roadless areas wouldn't be opened until the timber industry met benchmarks for significant growth, which many experts think is highly unlikely. Still, many enviros were angry that the plan allows the possibility of logging in roadless areas.

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Mark Rey, the undersecretary of agriculture in charge of the U.S. Forest Service, has been threatened with jail time or house arrest for his agency's attempts to continue using a flame retardant on forest fires that's toxic to fish. In 2002, fire retardant was dropped on a blaze in central Oregon, killing about 20,000 fish. Soon after, green group Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics sued. As a result, in 2005, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy found that the Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act when it failed to properly conduct public reviews of the fire retardant chemical. Then this Friday, the same judge noted that the agency still hadn't completed the reviews, ruling, "The Forest Service, throughout these proceedings, evidenced a strategy of circumventing, rather than complying with the law." Rey and the Forest Service have one more chance to explain themselves at a hearing late next month, but if the judge isn't convinced of the agency's progress in complying with the law, Rey could see jail time or the agency could be ordered to use only water on fires until review of the retardant is complete.

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The Bush administration has backed off of an appeal of a March 2007 ruling that overturned controversial management rules for national forests. The struck-down rules allowed national forest managers to approve logging, mining, cell-phone towers, and other commercial projects without undergoing environmental reviews and were found to violate the Endangered Species Act. The Bush administration had been in the process of appealing the ruling but then decided it was quicker and cheaper to comply with it and conduct an environmental impact study of the 2005 rules. While the decision not to pursue the appeal is a small victory for environmentalists, as always, the victory is widely expected to be short-lived. New management rules that are strikingly similar to the ones that were slapped down have been in the works since shortly after the 2007 ruling and could be issued in a few weeks.

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