Another victory for environmental groups in federal court

While Democrats and Republicans argue about climate change in Congress, a battle of another kind is unfolding in the federal courts.

Many will recall the long and hot summer of 2002 that set an unprecedented record of wildfires in the American West. The only solution was to design a new management strategy that would thin out forests and reduce wildfire fuel (the underbrush and small trees on forest floors). Hence, the Bush administration announced “a new initiative to allow more logging in national forests,” a move that would “curb the threat of wildfires”. The plan was to make it easier for loggers to thin out backcountry forests by easing regulatory restrictions and making it harder for environmentalists to stop or delay work. In effect, argued the environmentalists, the scheme did “little more than put the logging industry in charge of protecting the nation's wilderness areas”.

The dispute surrounding the new management rules, which were enacted in 2005, has been an ongoing process. Yet, the environmentalists won a significant victory in court on Friday when Federal Judge Phyllis Hamilton ruled that the administration’s rewriting of the rules were illegal. Hamilton said “the government did not adequately assess the policy's impact on wildlife and the environment and did not give sufficient public notice of the "paradigm shift" that the rule put in place”.

The victory, however, is far from complete. Evidence suggests that the Forest Service intends to appeal Judge Hamilton’s ruling, which would start a whole new round of litigation.