Three mad hatters--Steve Pearce (R-NM), Rob Bishop (R-UT), and Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) are gathering--or trying to gather--cosponsors for what they're callling the Wilderness & Roadless Area Release Act, a law that would open national forest roadless areas and Bureau of Land Management wilderness study areas to development. This would put a bit more than 70 million of wild lands at risk.

Specifically, it would repeal the Roadless Area Conservation Rule and rescind Interior Secretarial Order 3310 issued by Secretary Ken Salazar last December that overturned a Bush era policy and reinstated BLM's wilderness study areas program.

Tongass National Forest. Courtesy ourforests.org.

The Roadless Area Conservation Rule, adopted at the end of the Clinton administration, banned most logging and road-building on the last 58.5 million unspoiled and unprotected acres on the national forests. It was immediately challenged by states, timber companies and other interests in nine lawsuits, one of which is still awaiting final resolution.

In Alaska, the state and the Forest Service cut a back-room deal: The state sued and the government caved, excluding environmental groups and Native Alaskan organizations from the process. This was called “The Tongass Exemption,” and it removed the Tongass National Forest—the biggest and wildest in the system by far—from the Roadless Rule.

And there it sat for most of 10 years. Environmental groups, via Earthjustice litigation, were able to block every new attempt to cut trees in roadless areas, but the exemption hung like an ugly shroud over everything—until last Friday (March 4), when Judge John Sedwick threw it out and reinstated the rule for the Tongass.

About three years ago I visited a friend who works for Henry Waxman, the Southern California congressman who was such a magnificent thorn in the side of the Bush administration. My friend proudly took me to lunch in the cafeteria. This was soon after the Democrats reclaimed the House and voted in Nancy Pelosi as Speaker.

One of Ms. Pelosi's early acts was to green up the cafeteria: compostable paper cups and napkins and such, healthful food, other modern and eco-friendly items and touches. You could still get pizza, but the array of fresh vegetables, salad fixin's and fresh fruits was quite extraordinary for a cafeteria and the food was surprisingly tasty.

No more.The new Republican leaders have ditched the biodegradable food containers and restocked the place with foam cups.

Rep. John Boehner

You've probably read news stories, or seen reports on TV, or heard reports on the radio about how House Speaker Boehner has allowed dozens of amendments to come to the House floor to be voted on, congratulating himself on his transparency (is that his liver I see in there?) and openness. In response to this invitation, house members came forward with an astonishing variety of bills, one worse than the next.

To wit: Bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases. Prevent the EPA from regulating cement kilns, a major source of mercury emissions. Prohibit the government from contributing money to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (winner of the Nobel prize). Stop the EPA from regulating coal ash. Stop the EPA from regulating mountaintop-removal coal mining. Eliminate the president's authority to create national monuments. Stop the Forest Service from regulating use of off-road vehicles in the national forests.

On Feb. 8, a federal judge in Washington State sided with conservationists, energy efficiency boosters and the state's building code council, upholding new standards for energy conservation in new home construction. The homebuilders’ association had challenged the new standards, which went into effect this past Jan. 1, claiming they were in conflict with federal law.

Specifically, the homebuilders argued that the Washington regulations required new homes to have more efficient furnaces, water heaters, and others appliances than required by federal law. The state building code council and the energy conservation groups argued that the regulations simply require that new homes be 15 percent more energy efficient than the previous code mandated, and they offer a broad smorgasbord of ways to reduce energy use.

This is an old song. Whenever states try to take bold steps in the right direction, especially as regards the environment, some industry group will cry foul and argue that the new initiative violates federal requirements, or that there must be uniform national standards—anything that will keep the old, inefficient (but profitable) system in place.

Thanks to an email from my old friend George Alderson, I nearly dropped my teeth the other day.

You may remember. In the gallery of baddies service in the G.W. Bush administration, the one most reviled by the environmental movement—or certainly one of the most reviled—was Mark Rey, Under Secretary of the Department of Agricuture, whose main job was to oversee the Forest Service. In that role, Mr. Rey guided the administration's efforts to thwart the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, a rule put in place at the end of the Clinton administration to protect nearly 60 million acres of near-wilderness quality lands on the national forests.

Well, it turns out that Mr. Rey has been lobbying on behalf of the Idaho Conservation League, Trout Unlimited, and Wildlaw, the latter being a pro-wilderness organization headquartered in Alabama.

Mr. Rey's duties seem to focus on keeping certain national forest lands closed to off-road vehicles.

Everyone is in favor of bikes and biking, or almost everybody. Riding a bike is good for your health, keeps you fit and slender, gives you that important aerobic exercise, plus it’s fun. And it saves gasoline, thus reducing dependency on foreign (and domestic!) oil. And it helps in a small way in the fight against global climate disruption (aka global warming or climate change, take your pick). What’s not to like?

One notable exception is the new Speaker of the House, Mr. Boehner, who is quoted in Grist  thusly, “I think there's a place for infrastructure, but what kind of infrastructure? Infrastructure to widen highways, to ease congestion for American families? . . . But if we're talking about . . . bike paths, Americans are not going to look very kindly on this.”

The Russian River. Photo: Ingrid Taylar / Flickr

Coho and chinook salmon, along with their steelhead cousins, are making some promising headway in California's North Coast streams. The San Francisco Chronicle carried a front-page story on Dec. 19 describing a higher-than-expected return of spawning coho in Lagunitas Creek. The same trend holds true for the Garcia and several other streams.

This is not a coincidence. Government agencies and private individuals have spent vast amounts of time and money restoring logged-over and over-grazed watersheds, and those efforts are paying off.

Imagine the dismay, then, when the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors approved a plan to dredge up to 350,000 tons of gravel a year for 15 years from a six-and-a-half mile stretch of the Russian River.

A company called Verdant Power has just received permission to install up to 30 turbines in the eastern channel of the East River in New York to harvest the power of the natural currents and feed electricity into the grid for use mainly in New York City. The plan has been underway for 10 years, and stage three—the scaling-up to commercial scale—has just been approved.

Red rock in Utah.

One of the more frustrating tactics used repeatedly by the Bush administration in environmental matters was something we called “sue and settle.” These were cases filed against the government by states, industrial interests, or others seeking, for example, to open up wild lands to development.

The defendant—the government—would then capitulate to the demands of the plaintiffs and do it in such a way that the public, frequently represented by environmental groups that were in turn represented by Earthjustice and similar organizations, was boxed out of the process. These were closed-door settlements without permitting intervenors to participate.