Judge overturns Bush plan on roadless forests

A federal judge on Wednesday overturned the Bush administration's rules on road construction in untouched areas of national forests and reinstated a Clinton-era ban on new roads in nearly a third of federal forests.

U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Laporte sided with states and environmentalists who sued the U.S. Forest Service after it reversed Clinton's "Roadless Rule" that prohibited logging, mining and other development on 58.5 million acres of forest land in 38 states and Puerto Rico.

In May 2005, the Bush administration replaced the Clinton rule with a voluntary state-by-state petition process that the plaintiffs claimed violated federal environmental laws.

The National Forests around here are still filled with dead trees from the bark beetle. We need new roads to get the loggers in and the dead trees out.

Exactly. For that and a variety of other reasons the "roadless" forest policies are not stewardship of the land at all. They are non-stewardship which is, in essence, a willful abdication of responsibility. When the forests go up in flames the enviro-wackos consider it an "act of God" in the context that "that is the natural process."

That view completely ignores man, his reason and his abilities as part of any so-called "natural process." That ignores cause and effect which is the only rational explanation as to why a forest ends up being ripe for a super fire in the first place.

It is a mindset of neurotically compartmentalizing the world into artificial mental subsets of reality ie "nature" as one subset and "man" as another viewed as separate unconnected entities. That view is neurotic because it is a self-created view of reality not the reality of what actually is.

It would take at least 30 years of consecutively elected conservative Presidents to replace all of the idiots appointed by Clinton and Carter.

As you noted, Laporte isn't even an Article III district judge. She is a magistrate appointed to a 8 year term by the district judges in the Northern District of California. Magistrates spend most of their time setting bail in criminal cases.

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