The Bush administration is tired of environmental rules. In a Christmas holiday blitz, the administration eliminated many national forest rules, including those that required reforesting cutover lands within five years; maintaining healthy populations of wildlife; disclosing environmental consequences of its forest plans to the public; complying with the Clean Water Act; implementing standards to protect the environment; shielding wilderness from overuse; and protecting archaeological treasures on national forest lands. I could go on, but you get the point.

These rules catalyzed a revolution in national forest management that began in 1976 when Senator Hubert Humphrey announced, “The days have ended when the forest may be viewed only as trees and trees viewed only as timber. The soil and the water, the grasses and the shrubs, the fish and the wildlife and the beauty that is the forest must become integral parts of resource managers’ thinking and actions.”

Humphrey was talking about the National Forest Management Act, passed by Congress in response to out-of-control clear-cut logging on the national forests that had accelerated in the 1960s. The act requires the U.S. Forest Service to write a comprehensive plan for each national forest.

Since 1982, these forest plans have been guided by rules written under the Reagan administration. For almost a quarter of a century, these rules have helped ensure that ancient forests, water quality, wildlife, soil productivity and scenery are better protected. The rules have been moderately effective. Since they were adopted, annual logging levels have dropped on national forests from 12 billion board feet to about 3 billion board feet. Clear-cutting has been almost eliminated, as has new logging road construction. Ancient forests have gained moderate levels of protection on most national forests.

The Bush clique is proving itself even more radical—and in a different way—than Reagan’s conservative revolutionaries. They have thrown out all of the Reagan-era protective rules and adopted in their place “rules” that don’t require anything. These new “rules” eliminate all the environmental muscle of their predecessor regulations.

No longer are there any limits on clear-cutting. No longer is there any protection for wildlife. No longer is there any protection for water quality, recreation or scenery. No longer is there to be any disclosure to the public of the effects a forest plan would have on the environment.

The Forest Service defends this new regime as streamlined, efficient and more flexible. The agency claims that under this scheme, forest plans will require only a couple of years to prepare, versus the half-dozen years earlier versions took to complete. But the earlier plans took so long to write because the Republican administrations of the 1980s kept telling forest planners to rewrite when the draft plans’ logging levels were not high enough. In fact, the most comprehensive forest plan of all, the Northwest Forest Plan, which covers seventeen national forests, took only two years to write—under a Democratic administration. And it was legal, too.

Let no one be fooled. These new “rules” are all about turning the clock back to when timber was king of the national forests. The clock isn’t the only thing that’s turning. So, too, is Senator Humphrey—in his grave.