From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

What could possibly be left of the environment for the Bush administration to degrade on its way out the door? Leave it to the Forest Service not to see the forest or the trees.

The Washington Post this week reported that the administration plans to issue yet another “midnight” ruling. This one would let timber companies pave over national forest logging roads so pine tree woods can become residential subdivisions with names like “Pine Woods.”

The ruling would most immediately benefit the nation’s largest private landowner, 8-million-acre-owning Plum Creek Timber. The Forest Service, directed by former timber industry lobbyist Mark Rey, had long been working on a paving deal with Plum Creek behind closed doors. It has been held up by outraged local officials who were not consulted over the impact of development on resources and by environmentalists gravely concerned about wildlife endangerments.

“We have 40 years of Forest Service history that has been reversed in the last three months,” Patrick O’Herren, rural initiatives director for Missoula County, Montana, told the Post last July. Plum Creek is the biggest private landowner in Montana, with 1.2 million acres, much of it not far from either Missoula or Kalispell in the western part of the state. Much of that land’s mountain wilderness, complete with glaciers and grizzlies, is so pristine that the Post said parts of it are “as Lewis and Clark found it.”

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