Internet Changes Everything

Forest Service shifts e-mail plan

Yahoo! News - Forest Service shifts e-mail plan

By Paul Rogers , Mercury News

In a victory for groups that use the Internet to lobby the government, the U.S. Forest Service has decided to drop a proposal to ignore mass e-mails from people commenting on its pending rules and regulations.

The Mercury News first reported in April that the agency (news - web sites), which manages 190 million acres of public land nationwide, was considering blocking bulk e-mails and pre-printed postcards from the public on the grounds that they provided little meaningful comment on decisions about logging, grazing, forest fires and other issues.

But organizations from the American Cancer Society (news - web sites) to the National Wildlife Federation protested, saying the government would be shutting the public out of decision-making.

Wednesday, the Forest Service said it got the message.

"We didn't have any intention of cutting the public out. We want to have responsible government," said Heidi Valetkevitch, a communications specialist with the Forest Service in Washington, D.C. (news - web sites) "And we didn't want people to think we don't care what they say."

The decision not to ignore form e-mails and postcards means that other federal agencies that had been considering similar actions are now less likely to do so.

High-tech civil liberties groups, along with liberal and conservative organizations, hailed the news.

"What they are calling `form letters' is the best and easiest way for people who have busy lives and cannot afford their own personal lawyers and lobbyists to still have their voices heard," said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group in San Francisco.

Since the 1990s, hundreds of groups, including the Sierra Club (news - web sites), the National Rifle Association and the AARP, have used bundled e-mail and their Web sites to lobby Congress and federal agencies.

In most cases, interested people simply go to a group's Web site, type their names on a form letter and hit a button to send an electronic letter to Washington, D.C.

The Forest Service tried to stem the flow a year ago.

It crafted a proposal to ban "substantially similar" comments from portions of its rule-making process.

The issue received little notice at first because it was tucked into a 48-page item in the Dec. 6, 2002, Federal Register -- part of a wider proposal by the Bush administration to eliminate rules dating to the 1970s that require the government to write regular environmental-impact studies on national forests.

Environmentalists mounted an unprecedented e-mail campaign three years ago when the Clinton administration proposed rules to ban new logging roads on 58 million acres of national forests.

Now, as they try to keep the Bush administration from rolling back those rules, environmentalists regularly note that the Forest Service received 2.5 million comments on the policy, with more than 95 percent in support. They don't advertise that the vast majority were their identical e-mails and preprinted postcards.

Any show of interest by the public in the government is a good thing, they argue.

"The Forest Service finds it difficult to get masses of Americans to e-mail their support for creating stump fields out of national forests," said Niel Lawrence, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, in Olympia, Wash. "So they have a natural bias against e-mail comments."

Conservative groups said the issue isn't about ideology.

"When they say we are getting bombarded and the response on a particular issue is overwhelming, that is a reflection of real passion from a lot of people," said Ian Walters, communications director for the American Conservative Union, which sends out 120,000 e-mail messages a year to Congress and federal agencies advocating lower taxes and fewer gun laws.

December 18, 2003 at 12:00 PM in email | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home