Bush is stealing Christmas from trees, sneakily and slyly as usual. Maybe he never met a nice tree? Everything he decides to do as president seems to be based on his own experiences. In any case, here's what the administration is doing about trees:
The new rules give economic activity equal priority with preserving the ecological health of the forests in making management decisions and in potentially liberalizing caps on how much timber can be taken from a forest. Forest Service officials estimated the changes will cut its planning costs by 30 percent and will allow managers to finish what amount to zoning requirements for forest users in two to three years, instead of the nine or 10 years they sometimes take now.
The government will no longer require that its managers prepare an environmental impact analysis with each forest's management plan, or use numerical counts to ensure there are "viable populations" of fish and wildlife. The changes will reduce the number of required scientific reports and ask federal officials to focus on a forest's overall health, rather than the fate of individual species, when evaluating how best to protect local plants and animals.
(Bolds mine.)
I am very angry. The trees are not going to take this lying down, either. Why is being moral equal to this?
And as a sidenote, this article also shows another bit of wingnut framing:
"We're really in a new world," Collins said in an interview. "You've got to have different plans for different places, and you've got to have more dynamic plans."
This new world business. Everything changed after 9/11. And so on. They keep saying that, and the intention is for you to think that maybe it is now necessary to turn fascist and to turn all trees into corporate desks and all animals into leather jackets, and that the only reason this makes you feel vomity is because you're still living in the pre-9/11 world. Don't you believe a word of it! Baby Jesus liked animals and trees, and He liked both of them alive.
Sorry about ranting on Christmas eve.