Still paving paradise

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
(Big Yellow Taxi, by Joni Mitchell)

And they’re still at it, almost 40 years after Joni Mitchell first wrote the song. The Bush administration is poised to give the go-ahead to paving roads that will target mountain forests in Montana, facilitating development of far-flung housing subdivisions. The change would directly benefit Plum Creek Timber, which owns some eight million acres overall and 1.2 million acres in western Montana.

The change would let Plum Creek pave old logging roads. That would open its land to building vacation homes for the wealthy. The scattered sites make provision of county services more expensive.

[Costs include] the costs of firefighting in the wildland-urban interface (already, about a quarter of the Forest Service’s $4 billion annual budget is spent on defending homes from wildfires), the costs of road maintenance and stresses on other public services, and the effects on wildlife habitat in remote woodlands bordering public lands.

You might think that a conservative national administration would uphold local control. Not so. Corporate control trumps local control every time.

The Forest Service and Plum Creek tried to sneak by the change without consultation with local officials, but word leaked out in April, and Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) joined Missoula County and Flathead County officials in challenging the plans.

According to the Washington Post, there’s no 30-day waiting period for this change, because it is a modification of existing easements. That means the Forest Service could act at any time, with no legal requirement for consultation or comment. If Plum Creek, “the nation’s largest landholder,” prevails, the change will come before January 20. President-elect Obama spoke out against the change in Montana during the campaign.