Kicking Tongass, Taking Names

[G_j]

http://alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17538
By Amanda Griscom, Grist Magazine
January 12, 2004

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While environmentalists enjoyed a surprising victory over the holidays, the Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. issued a preliminary injunction to block the Bush administration's efforts to rewrite the act's New Source Review rule, it was in all likelihood more a symbolic than a practical victory.


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Judith Enck, a policy advisor to New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, the man spearheading these cases against the administration, said she was well aware that this victory may not, practically speaking, have any positive implications as long as the Bush administration is running the show. But, she said, the attorneys general are thinking longer-term: "This effort will preserve the tool so it can be used in the future ? assuming that down the road another administration will come along that actually wants to enforce the Clean Air Act."

Holiday Treats for Pollutocrats

And that's not the only grim news from over the holidays. While the American public stuffed stockings, lit menorahs, and guzzled champagne, EPA Administrator Michael Leavitt and Interior Secretary Gale Norton were hard at work pushing some major regulatory changes through their agencies' pipelines. Two in particular are of note:

Late in the day on Dec. 23, the U.S. Forest Service announced that it is exempting 9 million acres in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska from the so-called roadless rule enacted by the Clinton administration. The decision would open 300,000 acres of dense, old-growth woodland in the largest U.S. national forest to logging and road building, and expose a total of more than a million acres to damage from development.
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Then, on New Year's Eve, the Bush administration said it would not stop companies from using treated sewage as fertilizer on farmland and abandoned mines, despite a petition from more than 70 groups including the Center for Food Safety and the National Farmers Union that alleges the sludge has sickened, and in some cases killed, people and livestock.
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