Environmental idiocy comes out of Court of Appeals

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has done it again.

The most liberal court of the country has put reason on its head and issued a decision that favors the trees over the people.

This time, we believe, even the environmentalists have to ponder the sense of it.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a portion of President Bush's "Healthy Forests Initiative," which exempts environmental review of logging projects up to 1,000 acres and prescribed burns up to 4,500 acres. The court said it violated the National Environmental Policy Act.

In its opinion Wednesday, the three-judge appeals court panel said the Forest Service had failed to properly analyze the rule, causing "irreparable injury" by allowing more than 1.2 million acres of national forest land to be logged and burned each year without studying the ecological impacts.

The court ruled that the Forest Service no longer can exempt such projects from environmental analysis until the rule can be analyzed properly.

The ruling sided with the Sierra Club and Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign. The groups said the ruling would protect millions of acres of national forest from destructive and unnecessary logging projects.

We would like to know if there is a concern over the "irreparable injury" caused by devastating wildfires. This injury is not only to human lives and property, but to the forests that are decimated by overheated wildfires that can bake the ground to such a point that water runoff is an environmental disaster, and saplings cannot grow without human intervention.

Forest Service Chief Gail Kimball said that expedited logging on national forests saved thousands of homes during California's recent wildfires.

We see here in the Tahoe Basin that the Angora fire was considered an environmental disaster, and if an even larger fire occurred in the basin, it would greatly affect Lake Tahoe's clarity.

The National Environmental Policy Act already slows the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit from accomplishing various tasks quickly and cheaper.

This court ruling just entrenches an already huge bureaucracy deeper into political mire, leaving an unsuspecting public - and our nation's forests - in peril.

We urge an appeal.