By DAVID CARR

LAST YEAR, the White House unveiled its "Healthy Forests" initiative as a
response to the catastrophic fires that have beseiged the national forests
out West. The fires have taken a serious human and environmental toll - and
the administration has expertly played to this "fear factor" in marketing it
s new plan to the American public.

By name, the proposal sounds like mom and apple pie, but in fact it will do
little to protect the communities most at risk. Moreover, it advances the
administration's agenda of offering up the nation's natural heritage to the
highest bidders, and it restricts the public's right to defend its national
forests.

Time and again, surveys show that people value the national forests for
recreation, wildlife habitat, clean water and scenic beauty, and support
stronger protections for these publicly owned lands - including the 1.7
million-acre George Washington and Jefferson National Forests in Virginia.

The U.S. Senate will soon take up the "Healthy Forests" initiative; the
House has already passed the White House version of the plan. We urge Sens.
John Warner and George Allen to heed the wishes of Virginians and vote
against it.

Consider the contents within the "Healthy Forests" packaging. The plan fails
to require that fuel-reduction efforts be directed entirely or even
primarily to the communities most at risk, those in the urban-forest
"interface." It covers only federal lands, thereby ignoring fuel-reduction
needs on 85 percent of the land near these at-risk communities. And it ties
fuel-reduction projects to commercial logging, allowing the timber industry
to cut larger trees far away from communities as an incentive to work in
fuel-heavy, less profitable areas.

Worse, public involvement in and independent judicial review of these joint
projects would be restricted - the only meaningful checks on the Forest
Service's broad discretion in approving the industry's projects.

There's more. The Bush initiative provides wholesale exemptions from the
National Environmental Policy Act - the bedrock for environmental protection
in the United States for the last 30 years - for logging projects up to
1,000 acres when the Forest Service decides, at its sole discretion, an area
is "at risk" for insect infestation.

This policy has direct implications for mountain forests in Virginia and the
Southern Appalachians. Although our forests are less prone to wildfires due
to greater rainfall and different forest types, they can experience
substantial insect damage.

For instance, certain parts of our forests can have periodic outbreaks of
Southern pine beetle, which the Forest Service now manages by thinning tree
stands and other moderate means.

Granting blanket 1,000-acre exemptions from environmental review in areas
"at risk" of insect infestations would be like using a bulldozer to remove a
dandelion.

The Bush administration hopes to use its "Healthy Forests" plan to take yet
another swipe at the nation's "roadless areas" - 58 million acres of largely
untouched, remote wild lands scattered throughout the national forests,
including almost 400,000 acres in Virginia. A moratorium on most development
activities in these areas was issued in 1998, and in 2001 the last
administration adopted the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.

The Bush administration suspended the rule upon taking office and has since
sought to undermine it at every turn. It has now included a provision in its
forest initiative allowing road building and logging in roadless areas, even
though they are usually well away from communities at risk.

At the heart of the forest initiative is the mistaken concept that citizens
and environmental laws are the problem. Former timber lobbyist Mark Rey, the
current undersecretary for agriculture and prime architect of forest policy,
claims that timber sales held up by citizen lawsuits have led to the
build-up of fuel that feeds the intense Western fires.

In fact, the problem arises from 100 years of fire suppression in forest
ecosystems that need periodic burning, and from large-scale logging
operations that left behind brush and smaller, more fire-prone trees.

Further, a 2003 General Accounting Office study found that citizens rarely
delay fuel-reduction projects.

Citizens are not the problem. They are the owners, users and defenders of
their public lands. Over the last several decades, citizens have succeeded
in nudging the Forest Service toward a more balanced, wildlife- and
recreation-focused approach to managing the national forests.

Sen. Warner has already stepped up to the plate and supported forest
protection by co-sponsoring the Roadless Area Conservation Act of 2003.
Again, on this very important issue, we hope senators will take the right
course of action.

They should oppose the "Healthy Forest" initiative and recent Senate efforts
tweaking it, and instead support a program that both directs fire-hazard
funding to the community protection zones and maintains basic citizen
participation opportunities and environmental protections, including
roadless area protection.

DAVID CARR is the National Forests project leader with the Southern
Environmental Law Center, headquartered in Charlottesville.