Minus four

Okay, this will be enough negativity going into Christmas Day. But having decorated our tree tonight - our first actual tree together - trees deserve a mention.

Taking traditional advantage of using the holiday season to slip through regulatory changes you hope no one will notice,

[t]he Bush administration issued broad new rules Wednesday overhauling the guidelines for managing the nation's 155 national forests and making it easier for regional forest managers to decide whether to allow logging, drilling or off-road vehicles.

The long-awaited rules relax longstanding provisions on environmental reviews and the protection of wildlife on 191 million acres of national forest and grasslands. They also cut back on requirements for public participation in forest planning decisions.

Officials give the usual song and dance about efficiency and flexibility and all the rest of the standard crap, arguing the changes will improve response to "threats like intensifying wildfires and invasive species." But even the New York Times knows what's really involved:

The rules give the nation's regional forest managers and the Forest Service increased autonomy to decide whether to allow logging roads or cellphone towers, mining activity or new ski areas.

If the real purpose was to be able to react more quickly to serious and immediate challenges, the regulations could have been written that way, perhaps creating a regulatory version of the "fast tracking" some legislation gets, allowing a streamlined process if it could be shown that the usual process is too slow for an emerging situation that requires rapid response. Instead, the new regulations would allow forest managers to dispense with environmental reviews and public input altogether if they on their own authority decided it wasn't necessary. And get this part:

The new rules incorporate an approach that has gained favor in private industries from electronics to medical device manufacturing. The practice, used by companies like Apple Computer, allows businesses to set their own environmental goals and practices and then subjects them to an outside audit that judges their success.

Well, no wonder industries like it! A company gets to set its own standards and then have someone check to see if it's meeting them. And if it turns out it isn't, what happens? Do the auditors have the authority to impose any sanctions? Why can't the company simply ignore the findings - or, in a better PR approach, quietly change its standards so that they pass and then declare they are cleaner than clean?

Adding insult (to our intelligence) to injury (to the forests),

[t]he auditors the Forest Service chooses could range from other Forest Service employees to outsiders, said Sally Collins, an associate chief at the Forest Service. She said the auditors could come from an environmental group or an industry group like timber "or a ski area, local citizens or a private contractor."

So the Forest Service will not only get to set its own environmental standards, it will get to choose who judges if it has met them! Talk about your heads-I-win-tails-you-lose scenario.

Fortunately, at least some in Congress are ticked off enough about this to make something of a stink about it. In the face of administration obstructionism of good sense, they may well fail. But the efforts matters - because, as always, even in failure, the manner of failing matters.