While I know you need to take a little literary
license to keep the controversy alive and sell papers, you went way
over the edge and into fiction with your article “The end of
‘analysis paralysis’?” You state five times in
this article that under the new planning regulations “Forest
plans would no longer be required to go through NEPA
analysis.” This is patently false.
Under the new
planning regulations, revised forest plans don’t have to have
an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and review numerous
alternatives, but they still go through NEPA analysis. Revised
forest plans would be categorically excluded from analysis in
either an Environmental Assessment or EIS, but they still have to
have a Decision Memo, which is NEPA analysis. The current NEPA for
revised forest plans includes extensive collaboration and public
involvement to develop the proposed plan, an ecological
sustainability analysis, an evaluation of Inventoried Roadless
Areas for wilderness potential, a timber suitability analysis, and
a timber economics analysis, to name a few.
Remember, the
agencies don’t make this stuff up or go to work every day and
say, “I wonder what I’m going to do today?” They
do what the people you and all your readers elect to office tell
them to do.
Andy Kulla
Florence,
Montana
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Not the end of NEPA analysis.
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