Whose forests?

So Bush has come up with an alternative to the roadless area rules he promised to defend in court but didn't: let the states decide if they want to preserve roadless areas. With their penchant for making the indefensible sound innocuous, the administration is selling this as 'local control'*. Who could argue with that?

Well...I could. Local control has inherent problems that make it the worst possible way to manage roadless areas.

The first problem is that the more localized the government, the more it tends to place jobs and revenue (not necessarily in that order) above all other values. It's simply not in their interest to do otherwise.  Unless you believe that those are the only values worth considering, this is a serious problem. 

The second, parallel problem is one of managing a scarce resource (wilderness) that is distributed unevenly. Wilderness is nonexistent in some areas (say, New Jersey), and abundant in others (say, Alaska). Thus, Alaska (for example) will tend to manage wilderness as if it were an abundant resource--which, from a national perspective, it is not.  State and local governments inherently lack the perspective to make informed decisions about wilderness. 
 
A hundred years ago or so, farsighted politicians understood this--and made the decision that a huge chunk of our natural resources would belong to the nation as a whole, rather than to the locals. 

* As I understand it, the 'local control' is somewhat illusory. Governors will have the right to petition the USFS to protect any given roadless area, but the USFS can still turn them down; in other words, a roadless area will need both state and federal support to be protected. In reality, the rule is less about local control than about adding one more obstacle to protecting any roadless areas from development.