U.S. Court Reinstates Roadless Rules

As states continue to try to formulate their own roadless access laws, a panel of U.S. appeals court justices has found that pushing the responsibility for access to National Forest land back to the state level — a Bush administration policy which removed restrictions on miners and loggers on tens of millions of acres of public land — wasn’t quite legal after all. “The panel concluded that when the Bush administration replaced the 2001 rule with a regulation giving states considerable say in the fate of federal roadless areas, it took ‘substantive environmental protections off the books.'” Bettina Boxall in the Los Angeles Times.