Freeing forests. (Privatizing Land Management).

IT WAS JUST a suggestion in one paragraph of President Bush's proposed 2003 budget, but it has already generated many pages of controversy.

The idea has become known as "charter forests" (analogous to charter schools): allowing segments of the national forests to be managed by private trusts in order to, as the budget proposal says, "overcome inertia and an excessive decisionmaking structure...[and] avoid the central bureaucracy and thereby reduce organization inefficiencies" in forest management.

Mark Rey, a former timber industry lobbyist and now an undersecretary in the Department of Agriculture, is the administration's front man on this issue. Charter forests are already being condemned by environmental organizations as a giveaway to rapacious loggers who want to fell national forests. Rey notes that the enviros are criticizing a proposal that hasn't even been formalized in congressional legislation yet.

The Bush administration has itself to blame for the bad press, suggests Daniel Kemiss, who heads the Center for the American West at the University of Montana. He has long supported decentralized management ideas like charter forests. "It was a mistake for [Bush] to have brought this out as an administration proposal rather than developing bipartisan support [in Congress] for it first," Kemiss says. "They clearly will have to achieve bipartisan support to make it actually happen, and it may be harder to do that now" since the environmental lobbies are already up in arms against the idea.

In November, Rep. Scott McInnis (R-Colo.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health, along with Rep. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), wrote to the head of the Forest Service suggesting pilot projects like charter forests. That action suggests bipartisan congressional support could well be there for a more concrete legislative proposal.

Nevertheless, "I don't think it's going to happen," says John Baden, head of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment. Baden has been pushing the idea of having trusts manage portions of the national forest for decades. (He wrote a July 1981 story on the topic for reason.) Baden says the Republicans tend to place "rape-and-ruin resource people" in prominent environmental positions, making their proposals a hard sell. "Rey is a timber lobbyist," he says. "I can't think of a worse guy to sell [charter forests] than him, which tells me the administration is not very serious" about the idea.