Back to Business: Bill's Green Sleight of Thumb

In the final stretch of the impeachment trial, when the White House was eager to remind liberals that, bottom line, Bill Clinton is their guy, came a couple of headline-grabbing environmental initiatives. First, on February 3, Mike Dombeck, Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, used the occasion of a speech at the University of Montana to announce that President Clinton was issuing an executive order banning all new mining claims along the Rocky Mountain Front. The Front is a 100-mile stretch of terrain from Helena, Montana, north and west to the Canadian border.

To the casual eye, the executive order advertised by Dombeck looked like big news, heartening to greens. The terrain in question is one of the important wildlife areas in the country, providing particularly important habitat to the grizzly. It has even been called the American Serengeti. And indeed the order got a clamorous reception from environmental reporters and editorial writers, who lost no time in declaring that this was evidence of a whole new, nature-friendly outlook at the U.S. Forest Service, previously regarded as being the servant of U.S. timber and mining companies.

Then, on February 11, on the very eve of the impeachment vote, Dombeck unleashed a second initiative. He said that Clinton was signing another executive order that would place a moratorium on the construction of any new logging roads in virgin stretches of the national forests. In all, some 33 million acres would remain safe from the bulldozers.

Most Americans probably don't know that the U.S. Forest Service has ranked for decades as one of the world's biggest construction enterprises. There are already more than 430,000 miles of roads in the nation's forests, roughly eight times as many as is contained in the Interstate system. Where there's a forest road, sooner rather than later, there's a chainsaw.

Dombeck's second bulletin once again put the Clinton Administration on the front page for its bold pro-environment stance. The New York Times' environmental reporter went so far as to hail the order as "decisively shifting forest policy towards conservation."

But with Clinton's environmental initiatives, as with his grand jury testimony in the Lewinsky affair, it's necessary to parse every line, scrutinize every clause.

So far as the mining initiative is concerned, Clinton's executive order would indeed have been a bold new step if it had applied to the west side of the Rockies, where gold and silver companies have been gouging enormous pits in public lands and leaving a toxic desert of cyanide-riddled waste. But the order is confined to the Rocky Mountain Front, where there's nothing much to mine except limestone.

The biggest threat to the Rocky Mountain Front right now is one of the Clinton Administration's own doing. In the summer of 1996, the administration paid the Noranda Company, a Canadian mining giant, $40 million for its claim near Yellowstone National Park. As some predicted at the time, this set a terrible precedent whereby companies could engage in a kind of enviro hostage-taking: stake a claim of dubious worth, bellow the word "takings" and wait for the government to pony up. Any smart prospector would find that sensitive area, stake a claim costing as little as $2.50 an acre under the 1872 Mining Act, and wait for the manna to fall.

Almost immediately after Clinton announced his Noranda deal from the photogenic vantage point of a Yellowstone meadow in July of 1996, a Wyoming company staked 120 mining claims along the Rocky Mountain Front. So Dombeck's mining ban along the Front is a sad footnote to a piece of Clintonesque folly nearly three years ago. Among those urging the virtues of this executive order on Clinton was one of the mining industry's dearest friends in Congress, Senator Max Baucus, whose family has huge mining interests on the west side of the Rockies.

And alas, under similar scrutiny, the ban on new forest roads is less than impressive. For one thing, the executive order specifically exempts the most lucrative timber lands in the national forest system. These are the coastal forests of northern California and Oregon, the Shasta-Trinity national forest in the Sierra Nevada, forests in the Cascade range running through Oregon and Washington, those on the Olympic Peninsula, and, finally, the 16 million acre Tongass national forest in Alaska. Altogether, about 20 million acres of roadless public forest land are exempted from the executive order, and these are arguably the most ecologically important forest lands of all.

These 20 million acres are now scheduled for imminent predation by the timber companies, courtesy of Dombeck and his Forest Service. The fate of the Tongass augurs to be particularly grim. The Forest Service plans to double the amount of logging in this pristine rainforest above the amount cut on Clinton's say-so in 1996--a rate more than three times what the Tongass's own federal biologists call sustainable. The Tongass alone could see more than 1,100 miles of new road built into it.

There are other staggering trade-offs. For example, at the very moment Dombeck was announcing the road ban, his Service was proposing a huge increase in logging in the Idaho Panhandle national forest, covering 25,000 acres and requiring 183 new miles of road to haul out the timber. Dombeck is seeking special exemptions to allow the timber to be sold before environmental review is completed.

Overall, national green leaders were highly complimentary to Dombeck. Those two Republican senators from the Northwest, Ted Stevens of Alaska and Slade Gorton of Washington, may have been expressing their appreciation when they broke Republican ranks and voted for acquittal on the perjury count in Clinton's impeachment trial. It remained for Rep. Merrill Cook of Utah, a Republican, to strike a note of realism: "This policy is a deep disappointment. It fails to protect thousands of acres in my state from unnecessary, harmful, and costly road construction. It hurts our environment and wastes hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars which I think is unconscionable. It also continues the shameful practice of using taxpayer dollars to subsidize wealthy corporations."