One of the President Clinton's last-minute "midnight" enactments designated 58.5 million acres of national forest land as off-limits to timber harvesting, oil and gas leasing, and even road construction, returning a total area that is by now the size of California to a natural, pre-civilized state. In practice, "natural" refers to conditions prior to European settlement, even though Native Americans shaped western forests for thousands of years by deliberately setting fires, so nobody knows what a truly "natural" environment really means.

Clinton's policy, referred to as "ecosystem management," replaces the old federal policy of "multiple use management." As a result of the hands-off policy, one can expect the recurrence of massive wildfires in the "protected" areas, due to a long policy of fire suppression that led to the accumulation of densely packed, fire- and disease-prone undergrowth. The lack of roads will make it impossible to thin forests and more difficult to engage in planned burns. Even prescribed burns can go easily out of control in neglected forests, as New Mexico residents found out when 230 of their homes and part of the Los Alamos National Laboratory were destroyed. Such extremely intense fires do far more damage to the affected area, burning even normally fire-resistant trees and doing lasting damage to forest soils. (Such fires also fill the air with particulate matter the EPA deems hazardous, at least when it comes from smokestacks.) The Forest Service estimates that about 55 percent of its current lands are in poor or declining health.

[Ed.: A federal judge in Idaho blocked the new regulation soon after the Bush administration upheld it, ruling that it would cause "irreparable harm" to the timber industry and to forest managers' fire prevention efforts.]

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