Members of the joint U.S. House Representatives and Senate appropriations committee have attached an anti-environmental rider to the Interior Appropriations bill, according to Biodiversity Associates, a Wyoming-based conservation group working to protect wild places and wildlife. The rider will gut an important federal environmental law requiring the United States Forest Service to include public input and recent scientific research in forest management.

A rider is a piece of unrelated legislation tied to a major bill likely to pass both the House and Senate. This type of law-making is used when members of Congress know that a piece of legislation won’t pass on its own merits because it is too controversial or simply because it is ill-conceived.

"This appropriations bill rider is a stealth maneuver used by law-makers to prevent open, fair, and informed debate," said Eric Bonds of Biodiversity Associates.

Specifically, the rider will affect forest management. Federal environmental law (the National Forest Management Act) requires the United States Forest Service to maintain a long-term Forest Management Plan for every national forest in the country, and to revise each plan at least every fifteen years. The plans determine how much protection will be provided for wildlife and streams in the National Forests, which parts of the forest will be open to logging and mining, and how much logging and road construction will be allowed. It is important that the plans be updated every ten to fifteen years to account for new scientific information and changes in public values.

However, many National Forests have failed to revise their Management Plans within the fifteen year deadline. "Rather than comply with the law and simply revise the Plans, the Forest Service has lobbied Congress to revoke the fifteen year deadline—and that’s exactly what this rider does." According to Jeff Kessler, also of Biodiversity Associates. "The appropriations bill rider does nothing but protect the Forest Service’s blatantly illegal behavior."

Perhaps the best example of the need for Forest Plan revision is the Medicine Bow National Forest in southeastern Wyoming.

"The importance of a Forest Management Plan revision on the Medicine Bow National Forest cannot be overstated." Said Eric Bonds. "The current Plan does not protect the Forest’s special places, it allows for ecologically unsustainable amounts of logging, and does not adequately protect the forest’s imperiled animals and plants."

The Medicine Bow’s current Forest Plan was completed in 1985. This plan was designed to last only ten years. But just five years later, in 1990, an independent team of forestry experts commissioned by the Forest Service found significant problems in the Forest Plan and questioned its ability to sustain the Medicine Bow forest ecosystems. The team recommended the Management Plan be revised as soon as possible. However, after nearly seventeen years, the Medicine Bow National Forest is yet to revise and update its Management Plan, in violation of current federal law.

"The Medicine Bow National Forest has known for at least twelve years that the current Management Plan is significantly flawed and needs to be revised. Yet it has refused, despite federal law requiring it to do so. Now a Congressional Committee has stepped in and provided the Forest Service with a backdoor escape hatch, only rewarding the agency’s illegal behavior." Said Jeff Kessler.

Recently, Biodiversity Associates filed a lawsuit to compel the Forest Service to revise the Medicine Bow National Forest Management Plan. The lawsuit also seeks to stop three large-scale timber sales explicitly authorized through the outdated and expired Management Plan. Together, the sales would have resulted in more than 500 acres of clearcuts (an acre of land is about the size of a football field) and the construction of twenty miles of roads. The lawsuit does not question the Forest Service’s ability to continue day-to-day maintenance activities, public recreation, or fire fighting. But it does seek to halt the three timber sales because they would significantly diminish the forest environment by destroying habitat important to rare animals and reducing the water quality of forest streams.

Biodiversity Associates believes the intention of this anti-environmental rider is to shield the Forest Service from this lawsuit and similar lawsuits which might be filed in the future.

Said Eric Bonds, "This is all extremely frustrating. The Forest Service has been acting in clear violation of the law—operating without a valid Management Plan yet still cranking out new industrial logging projects. And rather than comply with this law, it as instead asked Congress to step in and make the law disappear. That’s what now seems likely, that this very important provision of federal law will simply go away."