After more than 400 meetings and a million or so written comments from the public, Clinton administration officials have repaired to the task of shaping the final version of their plan to protect national forest roadless areas.

Environmentalists showed signs of nerves as the summer wore on, wondering if the U.S. Forest Service leadership team charged with drafting a new rule for roadless area management will settle on terms that live up to the soaring rhetoric Clinton used when he unveiled the initiative.

The proposal has been billed as the centerpiece of Clinton’s environmental legacy and among the most important land conservation measures of the past century. At a news conference last October, Clinton pledged that his administration would “launch one of the largest land preservation efforts in America’s history to protect these priceless backcountry lands.”

Clinton also implied that logging in roadless areas would end, pointing out that national forests account for just 5 percent of timber harvested in the United States and that just 5 percent of logging in national forests takes place in roadless areas. “We can easily adjust our federal timber program to replace 5 percent of 5 percent,” Clinton said, “but we can never replace what we might destroy if we don’t protect these 40 million acres.”

When it released its first proposed version of the new rule, however, the Forest Service offered terms that conservationists roundly condemned as only a shadow of the grandiose vision articulated by Clinton.

The draft plan calls for allowing no new roads in national forest roadless areas of at least 5,000 acres. But a host of other environmentally dubious activities, including logging, livestock grazing and off-road vehicle use, would be allowed to continue.

Nor would the proposed rule apply to smaller roadless areas, or to the largest national forest of them all—the Tongass, which includes some of the wildest, most remote country remaining under Forest Service management.

Exclusion of the Tongass alone would greatly diminish the scope of the protection initiative. Prior to the rule, the Forest Service had anticipated building 806 miles of new logging roads in national forest roadless areas across the country through 2004. More than 63 percent of that—a total of 512 miles of road—are slated for the Tongass.

The draft rule calls for only modest reductions in roadless area logging. The Forest Service had planned to cut about 1.1 billion board feet of timber in roadless areas through 2004. The proposed rule would drop that total by about 300 million board feet.

Logging companies could continue cutting trees without the benefit of roads by using special equipment such as helicopters to haul logs and large machines called forwarders that can roll across rough, forested terrain.

But the timber industry and its congressional supporters say such high-tech options matter little. Logging without roads, they say, is simply too expensive to be feasible.

“I think people who say there will be a lot of logging are looking for ghosts,” said Mark Rey, an aide to Idaho Senator Larry Craig, who staunchly opposes the roadless initiative. “It won’t be economical.”

Conservationists point to the Forest Service’s long history of pushing through logging projects—even ones that lose millions of dollars—and say the agency will likely devise ways to get the cut out unless logging in roadless areas is expressly forbidden. One group, the California Wilderness Coalition, has calculated that more than a quarter of all logging in roadless areas in California over the past decade was done without building new roads. Another, the Oregon Natural Resources Council, says 88 percent of roadless areas in that state would be vulnerable to logging if the proposed rule is made final.

The Forest Service already has several timber sales in the works for roadless areas in the West. Those sales have drawn intense opposition from environmentalists who say they violate the intent of Clinton’s protection initiative. A few examples:

• Zephyr timber sale, Colorado. The Routt National Forest wants to cut 3.5 million board feet of timber that was knocked down by a windstorm three years ago. A portion of the Gold Creek Roadless Area would be cut using helicopters to haul the logs.

• North Lochsa Face project, Idaho. The Clearwater National Forest wants to cut more than 75 million board feet of timber, a portion of which would come from a roadless area that abuts the historic Lewis and Clark Trail.

• Double Cabin timber sale, Wyoming. The Shoshone National Forest plans to use forwarders to log 1.5 million board feet of timber in a roadless area that borders the Washakie Wilderness. Shoshone officials say the trees that would be logged are being killed by insects and disease.

• Orleans Mountain project, California. The Six Rivers National Forest is considering logging a portion of the Orleans Mountain C Roadless Area, next to the Trinity Alps Wilderness, which burned in a fire last year. Forest Service officials say they need to remove standing dead trees to prevent another fire in the future that could threaten local communities.

• Moose Creek project, Oregon. The Willamette National Forest wants to use helicopters to log a portion of the Moose Lake Roadless Area. In total, 22 million board feet of timber would be logged, not all of which is in the roadless area.

Whether logging plans such as these go forward depends in large part on the shape of the final rule.

Ken Rait of the Heritage Forests Campaign, which has spearheaded conservationists’ efforts to protect roadless areas, said he believes Clinton will ensure that the final rule fulfills the vision he initially set. Rait expects the final plan to include the Tongass and to protect roadless areas from logging.

“This has very much become a motherhood and apple pie issue,” Rait said, noting the abundance of comments and polls showing strong support for protecting roadless areas. “I am expecting that the administration is going to hit a grand slam with this thing.”

Opponents of the initiative aren’t impressed by the million-plus letters filed in support of strong protection—a total that eclipses the previous record for public responses to a proposed federal rule by four times.

“This is so clearly a political exercise that it no longer passes the laugh test,” Rey said. “The last time I looked, we didn’t equate good scientific management with plebiscites.” (In a less-than-encouraging sign for conservationists, a spokesman in the Forest Service’s Washington, D.C., headquarters responded this way when asked how much weight the agency would give the public comments: “They are analyzed for substance, and not necessarily how many are in favor or opposed.”)

However, in July, Rey’s boss, Senator Craig, withdrew a legislative rider aimed at derailing the roadless protection initiative. Although Craig said he did so in order to allow court challenges to the initiative to play out, conservationists surmised that Craig was unable to muster as many votes as he had thought he could—certainly not enough to override a Clinton veto.

Forest Service officials said the final rule may be released in November. Insiders say to expect an announcement sometime after the presidential election. What the next president does—Al Gore has said he supports a roadless area logging ban; George W. Bush supposedly opposes further roadless area protection—is anyone’s guess.