FEDS SHOULD CALL HUDDLE, CHECK ENVIRO-SIGNALS.

It's a bit like trying to reverse the path of a runaway freight train: First you have to stop it -- and that takes time ...

So environmentalists shouldn't expect miracles in a matter of months when the Bush administration spent eight years encouraging pro-pillage-and-pollution policies.

But some groups note, correctly, that reforms are overdue -- and they're not bashful about telling it to the judge.

Santa Fe's WildEarth Guardians are taking the Environmental Protection Agency to federal court, saying it's two years late preparing plans to protect Westerners against smog and soot wafting across state borders.

The federal Clean Air Act demands plans from every state -- but the EPA has been slow to approve many of them, including New Mexico's, which was filed in 2007. California, Colorado, Idaho, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Oregon also haven't gained the agency's approval.

That might not mean that our state and those others aren't enforcing clean-air standards -- so maybe the EPA's laxity is as much a technicality as a threat to our air from other states' pollution, and vice versa. But because the wind respects nobody's borders, Guardians figure some nudging is in order -- especially since EPA also has failed to come up with a federal plan, as the clean-air law also requires.

Without federal coordination, individual states can feel free to blame each other for cumulative pollution -- the way Arizona and Sonora used to excuse each other's border-crossing smelter smoke during the copper-boom years.

The late Santa Fean John Wirth was a leading debunker of Big Copper's refusal to take responsibility for cross-border pollution -- and New Mexicans can expect Wirth's son, Peter, now a state senator, to take up the cudgel for our state's environmental responsibilities in an era when coal smoke blows about the West.

On the federal level, we suspect that the EPA inaction is a matter of transition; that the Barack Obama administration, up to its neck in economic and diplomatic reform, is checking its environmental signals even as you read this.

For example, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has just called a year-long moratorium on exploitation of our national forests' most sensitive areas. It's a step toward a permanent version of President Bill Clinton's 2001 end-of-term "roadless rule."

The George W. Bush administration did its darnedest to weaken the rule, while conservationists waged legal war on the woods' behalf.

Vilsack has decreed there'll be no new timber-cutting or road-building without his personal approval. Good idea -- but it's time he talked with another Cabinet member: Attorney General Erick Holder's Justice Department is still defending Bush policies of watering down the roadless rule, even though the president's campaign promises included a return to Clinton policy, and as a senator, Obama co-sponsored legislation that would have made law of Clinton's rule.

While Secretary Vilsack has new development on hold, he should lead a campaign in Congress to enact that overdue law. Meanwhile, the president should order the EPA, the Forest Service and enviro-related bureaus of the Interior Department to huddle and come up with comprehensive environmental-protection strategies.