Washington, DC -- Dale Bosworth, the Chief of the Forest Service, resigned today. The Administration promptly replaced him with Gail Kimbell. Kimbell currently serves as Regional Forester for the Northern Region in Missoula, Montana, which includes northern Idaho and North Dakota. It's far from clear whether Kimbell's vision for her new job really matters. We'll never know what kind of Chief Dale Bosworth could have been. All the shots were called from upstairs, mainly the office of Undersecretary Mark Rey, the architect of the Bush Administration's desperate, and largely unsuccessful, effort to turn the remaining wild areas in the National Forest into clear cuts. Bosworth went along while Rey tried to undo the Clinton Administration's Wild Forest protections -- recently restored by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. He went along in 2006 with Rey's proposal to finance rural schools by selling off the National Forests, an idea which sank beneath the waves of outrage from conservative Republicans in both the House and Senate. Environmentalists never had to lift a finger. And right up until he resigned, Bosworth loyally soldiered on, endorsing Rey's idea of completely gutting the applicability of the National Environmental Policy Act to the Forest Service, saying the exemption to this fundamental environmental protection was "crucial to the success of the Forest Service land management planning," in a letter to key House Democrats.
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