How Bush Gets His Way On The Environment

As she ascends to a 4,500-ft.-high ridgeline overlooking the Kern River in the California Sierras, Ruby Johnson Jenkins says she smells trouble. Stretching out before her is a vast panorama of blackened slopes, a grim legacy of the fire last August that burned more than 150,000 acres of the Sequoia National Forest. But it isn't the charred timber that makes her wrinkle her nose. The ill odor, she says, is coming from Washington, specifically from President George W. Bush's controversial plan to increase logging in national forests in the name of reducing the risk of fires.

"There are two battles for this forest," says the sprightly Jenkins, 77, who has co-written three books on hiking the Sierras. "The first was the fire itself. Now there's the battle to save the trees." Not everything in the forest burned. Clumps of oaks still show green against the blackened slopes, and the fire stopped short of the ancient stands of sequoias. But among the Forest Service's restoration options is a plan to take out as much as 10 million board feet of timber from Sequoia National Monument. Although some ecologists say it's a necessary treatment for forests that will wither without resuscitation, from the mouths of Bush allies, it smells rotten to many environmentalists. "It seems as if they've been looking for an opportunity to log," says Jenkins, "and the fires have suddenly handed them a way to get around the usual restrictions."

If she is right, it is yet another example of how the Bush Administration has managed to get what it wants on the environment. For two years, the President has found ways to bypass restrictions on oil and gas drilling, mining, logging and coal-fired power generation. Within days of the Republican gains of last November's elections, the Administration stepped up what critics view as an all-out assault on the environment with a series of pronouncements: that snowmobiles could operate in Yellowstone National Park, oil drilling could expand in Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, the National Marine Fisheries Service would ease salmon protections in the Pacific Northwest, and Washington would soften rules on logging and energy conservation. Opponents predict a new wave of even bolder measures in the coming months that could affect water and air quality and renew efforts to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling. In response to the critics, White House spokesman Scott McClellan says, "There are a number of alarmist groups out there that are trying to promote fear in order to boost their own fund raising."