National Forests, a New Administration, and Climate Change
One important environmental challenge facing soon-to-be-President Obama is how to reinvigorate the National Forest System’s environmental protections. The system encompasses 192 million acres of land, which – to the constant amazement of those of us on the East Coast – represents about 8 percent of the total land area of the United States (roughly equivalent to the size of Texas), and about 25 percent of the country’s total forested lands.
Late in the 19th Century, amid concerns that excessive logging was damaging watersheds and depleting future timber supplies, Congress authorized setting aside areas of federal forest lands as “reserves.” President Theodore Roosevelt transformed the early system of reserves, giving it many of the characteristics it retains today – renaming them National Forests, increasing their total size to about 194 million acres, and assigning their management by the Forest Service to the Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Legislation in the 1960s and 1970s recognized the importance of a wide range of uses of the national forests, including recreation, wilderness, and fish and wildlife habitat. However, from their inception, the national forests have been viewed as lands to be managed for “multiple uses” – including extractive uses such as timber harvesting and mining. Balancing these …
Climate change is such an unprecedented challenge that sometimes it can seem overwhelming to think through its full range of impacts, let alone develop policy solutions to address them. Yet as policymakers delve into the details of the many ways in which climate change will impact global societies and the environment, the most promising solutions frequently turn out to have a distinctly familiar ring. Often, they are measures that have long been recommended for reasons that, although intensified by climate change, also stand alone.
Take, for example, one of the principal threats to public health posed by climate change. A little while ago, the Washington Post focused on the increases in waterborne diseases that warmer waters and heavier rainfalls caused by global warming will herald. “Rainfalls will be heavier, triggering sewage overflows, contaminating drinking water and endangering beachgoers. Higher lake and ocean temperatures will cause bacteria, parasites …
One recurrent theme of the Bush Administration’s regulatory approach has been the weakening of protective regulations – not just by weakening standards, but by erecting bureaucratic barriers to progress. In mid-August, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) provided another example of the later approach, proposing changes to rules implementing the Endangered Species Act (ESA)—changes that would result in less protection for the endangered and threatened species the ESA charges the FWS with protecting.
The changes would affect the rules that implement Section 7 of the Act, which requires federal agencies “in consultation with and with the assistance of” FWS and its counterpart wildlife agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), to “insure that any action authorized, funded, or carried out by such agency . . . is not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of any endangered species . . . or result in the destruction or adverse modification of …
