California sued the Bush administration on Tuesday over its plans to expand significantly the amount of logging allowed in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
The state’s Democratic attorney general said he had followed through on a threat made in November to sue over the plan announced a year ago that would allow four times more wood to be harvested from the Sierra Nevada than in 2001.
“With no basis in science and no new facts, the Bush administration has jettisoned the product of more than 10 years of study, public participation and consensus building,” Attorney General Bill Lockyer said in a statement.
“What the Forest Service disingenuously calls a fine-tuning is really a complete overhaul that will make our communities less safe from fires at the same time it damages treasured forests,” he said.
Environmental groups filed a similar lawsuit on Monday.
U.S. government officials say the expansion of logging to 700,000 acres over the next 20 years will curb wildfires.
By allowing timber companies to log more commercially desirable trees, the new regulations will also encourage the clearing out of smaller trees and brush that can increase fire dangers, a Forest Service spokesman Matt Mathes said.
“We have too many smaller-diameter trees due to well-meaning but overzealous fire suppression in the past,” Mathes said.
“We would have to pay somebody $1,000 per acre top cut and remove those trees and brush, and that thinning work is needed on literally millions of acres in the Sierra Nevada,” he said.
Lockyer, a potential candidate for California governor in 2006, says the U.S. plan would violate national environmental protection laws.
The Sierra Nevada region spans 400 miles along the eastern edge of California and is home to black bears, Bighorn sheep and sequoia, pine, and aspen trees.
