By Andy Stahl
Forest Magazine, Winter 2007

Five years ago, Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark “former timber industry lobbyist” Rey promised to open undeveloped wildlands to everyone from timber companies to off–road vehicle users. His “new environmental ethic for the West,” as he described it in a 2000 Berkeley speech, was to be based upon a shotgun wedding uniting rural commodity interests (which he said had been subjected to “a quiet, brutal war of attrition”) and urban hikers and rock climbers. He hoped to convince the latter contingent that they had been locked out of their national forests “by large advocacy groups adept in adversarial proceedings.”

Rey’s immediate goal was the repeal of President Clinton’s 2001 Roadless Rule, which barred new road building and logging in the 30 percent of national forest acreage that had been too remote to justify road building for the previous hundred years. U.S. Forest Service engineers had proposed a moratorium on building new roads in 1998, when budget shortfalls prevented proper maintenance of existing logging roads. With an estimated $8 billion backlog of potentially dangerous bridges and decaying roads on their hands, the engineers saw no reason to add to their headaches by building more roads into untracked wilderness.

Faced with a petition supporting roadless area protection, sponsored by Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics and signed by more than 500 Forest Service managers and scientists, former Chief Mike Dombeck temporarily suspended road building in wildlands in 1999. A full environmental impact statement and more than 600 public meetings later, President Clinton permanently protected the 58 million acres of undeveloped national forests from new roads and logging, which according to Rey, left “many in Congress dumbfounded, the Forest Service paralyzed, and citizens angry and without a voice.”

Rey’s solution? He wrote a new rule that erased Clinton’s wildland protections and handed over to state governors the responsibility to decide the fate of undeveloped national forests. But along the way, Rey eschewed involving the public in order to protect them from the “inflexibility of a distant bureaucracy.” In contrast to Clinton’s extensive rule–making process, Rey held no public hearings—not even in red states. And he completed no environmental reviews.

So it should have come as no surprise to Mr. Rey that on September 19, 2006, his rule felt the “whip of an injunction” and the “lash of a judicial ruling,” phrases that he himself had used to describe the frightening effect that environmental law enforcement has allegedly wreaked on rural communities. Federal Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte ruled that Rey ignored the National Environmental Policy Act when he refused to look at the environmental consequences of rolling back Clinton’s roadless rule. She also found that Rey violated the Endangered Species Act when he refused to consider the consequences of removing the rule on imperiled species that live in these wildlands.

In 2001, Rey invoked the West’s “people who want to be free to wander the meadows, climb the rock cliffs, and snowboard in the glory of the Sierra and Rockies” to support his anti–wildlands agenda. But he will be remembered as an undersecretary who failed to repeal the Roadless Rule.