Saving the Enviroment frome one screwball at a time

[Kiouni]

Gov. Chris Gregoire and three other Western governors scored a major victory Wednesday in a lawsuit challenging the Bush administration's plans for about one-third of the land inside U.S. national forests.

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the Bush administration's plan to open as much as 58.5 million acres of the forests to mining and logging was illegal because it failed to abide by two landmark environmental laws: the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

The ruling by U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte re-extends protections granted to about 2 million acres in Washington by rules developed during the Clinton administration. The regulations applied to areas of national forests where no roads had been built, but that had not been preserved as official wilderness.

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U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee and U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, both Democrats, spearheaded resistance in Congress to the Bush roadless policy

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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/285937_roadless21.html