Court strikes down 2005 change to forest roadless rule

A federal court Wednesday reinstated protection for tens of millions of acres of federal forests in Oregon and across the West. But the ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals does not end the uncertainty of the long-debated "roadless rule" for national forests. The Roadless Area Conservation Rule, put forward in 2001 by the Clinton administration, banned road construction or logging in 58.5 million acres of largely undeveloped forest lands, nearly a third of the total area managed by the Forest Service. Almost immediately, the rule was challenged in court. The Bush administration chose not to defend it and in 2005 replaced it with the State Petitions Rule, which left it to the states to decide which roadless areas in their boundaries should be protected. On Wednesday, a panel of three judges determined the Bush rule illegal, and the judges reinstated the Clinton era rule except in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska and in Idaho, which created its own plan for its roadless forests. "The Forest Service's use of a categorical exemption to repeal the nationwide protections of the Roadless Rule and to invite States to pursue varying rules for roadless area management was unreasonable," said the ruling, which upheld a lower court's decision. The Forest Service, the judges said, failed to comply with national environmental laws and wrongly asserted that the change to the roadless rule wouldn't affect endangered species or their habitat...Oregonian