Kendrick Wilson

The corporate giants who opened their wallets ÷ as the President campaigned nationwide to get a Republican majority in Congress ÷ should not be disappointed.

President Bush's Forest Service Associate Chief Sally Collins has already announced plans to remove environmental considerations and public input from the equation when it comes to deciding how to manage publicly owned forests.

Congressman-elect Raul Grijalva, who represents the UA and surrounding area, has already announced his opposition to the plan, and sees this as the beginning of many rollbacks of environmental legislation.

"We're going to continue to advocate for the regulations that are in place and the rules that are in place," he said.

In the proposal, more than 190 million acres of public forest nationwide could be opened up for logging without an environmental review. Collins calls this proposal "a way to cut red tape," but Sandy Bahr of the Grand Canyon Chapter of the Sierra Club believes the administration is trying to shut the public out of the process.

"Yeah, democracy takes a little longer, but they are public forests and the public should be involved," she said.

Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity base (Bush) is destroying the entire process that has allowed the public to see the destruction private industry inflicts on public lands. They're doing this because industry knows the environmental damage will be devastating," Suckling said.

There are local consequences of this proposal, as well. Nearly 18 million acres of public forest in Arizona would be at the mercy of the logging, mining and cattle industries ÷ should the plan go forward.

Grijalva believes the impact could be even more far reaching. "These regulations are vital to habitat protection in southern Arizona," he said. "They are vital to general issues that are connected with the (Sonoran Desert) Conservation Plan and scaling back on urban sprawl."

He also sees such protections for industry as leading to weakening of the superfund laws, which require polluters to foot the bill to clean up the contaminated sites they create.

In a time when a great deal of our elected Republicans are bought and sold by the corporate right, proposals like this one, while disturbing, are hardly unexpected. The corporate takeover artists who currently own the logging, mining and ranching cartels are now cashing in on their investments of campaign contributions.

Even Bush's most die-hard supporters could not call him an environmentalist and keep a straight face. His appointment of Gail Norton as Secretary of the Interior, whose top priority was opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, was the first of many anti-environmental moves the administration has taken. Columnist Molly Ivins has called Bush's administration, "the most anti-environmental administration since before Teddy Roosevelt."

Grijalva believes the public will be hurt the most by the Republicans' remunerations to their campaign contributors. "The whole onslaught on environmental regulations is part of a payback for the people who helped the Republican Party regain the Senate and keep the House and it's going to hurt the public in the long-run," he said.

Outgoing Gov. Jane Hull tried even more dramatic tactics for opening up our forests to irresponsible logging practices. She claimed that this summer's forest fires were due to some lack of large-scale logging, despite nearly every scientific analysis showing that underbrush, which isn't profitable to log, was the cause of the fires, and that most of the big trees were fire resistant.

Fortunately, Hull's bitter and misinformed attempt to destroy our forests didn't sell to a majority of the public. Now, the public must be mobilized to oppose the Bush administration's new proposals.

The public forests belong to the people, not the industries that have managed to buy elected Republicans. The time has come to stop tolerating the type of power our leaders give to special interests. Enough voters must wake up to the backroom dealings that are taking place, and learn to tune out a thousand Rush Limbaughs who hope to convince them that environmentalists are somehow the lifeblood of all evil. Hopefully, two more years will be enough time for them to learn their lesson. Our forests are depending on it.