"Environmentalists baffled by Obama's strategy," reads the headline in The Los Angeles Times. The story by Jim Tankersley tells us that as a candidate, the President "wooed environmentalists with a promise to 'support and defend' pristine national forest land from road building and other development that had been pushed by the George W. Bush administration." As President, however, Obama is "actively opposing those protections on about 60 million acres of federal woodlands in a case being considered by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The roadless issue is one of several instances of the administration defending in court environmental policies that it once vowed to end." 

Another example of conflict between the President and environmentalists, can be found in the East, where the New York Times editorialized that the Obama administration has taken "several useful steps" to curb mountaintop removal coal mining, but that "these are stopgap measures, well short of the permanent protections needed." The Bush administration had interpreted rules in such a way that coal companies were allowed to strip off the tops of mountains and dump the rock and soil in the stream beds below. The Times editorial chastised the Obama administration for being slow to change these practices. 

Meanwhile, Jeff Biggers reminds us that there will be a rather large and star-studded protest in West Virginia Tuesday. The protesters (including actress Daryl Hannah) will attempt to attract some attention to a coal mining operation near the Marsh Fork Elementary School (photo above, from Coal River Mountain Watch). Biggers reports: "Marsh Fork Elementary School in Sundial, West Virginia might be the most tragic and symbolic site of American children left behind by their state government. Forsaken by state officials and a recent WV Supreme Court decision last week, the school and its children must play amid the toxic dust of a coal silo--and soon a second one--that sits less than a football field away." 

U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will review any new roads or projects in roadless areas in the national forests or grasslands. There is, however, no moratorium on new projects. Steve Miller, with the Rapid City Journal, sorts out the confusion stemming from an AP report Thursday that had Vilsack imposing a one-year moratorium on road building on 50 million acres of national forests — reinstating a Clinton-era ban on road building and logging on remote national forests, mostly in the rest. 

Miller explains that there is no moratorium, but that new projects must go through an additional procedural step — approval by the Secretary. "The actual language in this order reserves to the secretary the right to approve road construction or reconstruction and the cutting, sale or removal of timber in inventoried roadless areas," a USDA spokesperson told the South Dakota reporter.

In South Dakota, at least, the new order won't have much effect. There are three roadless areas in the Black Hills National Forest, and they'll remain roadless for the foreseeable future, according to Miller.

Another good reason not to pollute the land. God lives in the same neigborhood!