Molly Ivins March 12

AUSTIN, Texas — Careless legislation will get git you if you don't watch out. And now we are relearning this sad lesson on several fronts.

The environment seems particularly prone to little legislative jiggers that just get slipped into this and that. A bill passed last year was supposed to exempt timber companies from normal environmental standards for the purpose of "salvage logging" — that is, cutting trees that are infested with bugs or damaged by fire. Until the end of this year, timber companies don't have to comply with certain laws protecting water or endangered species. And they are clear-cutting huge swathes in the national forests, including extensive clear-cutting of old-growth forest in the Northwest.

The Clinton administration, which supported the bill by Rep. Slate Gorton of Washington state, is now engaged in the bureaucratic equivalent of saying "Oops." This kind of logging is helping to pollute the beautiful Elk River in Oregon and is blamed for some of the flooding in that state this spring.

Activists have used environmental requirements to tie up timber companies in courts for years. As result, there is a backlog of permits for cuts in national forests that goes back for years. In fact, some of them go back so far that they were granted before foresters knew much about how to protect species and streams. With the allie-allie-in-free buried in last year's bill, timber companies are now doing clear-cutting that they could never have gotten permission for in recent years. The Forest Service estimates that more than 600 million board feet of ancient forests will be logged under the rider's exemptions — more than triple the amount cut in any of the five previous years.

Another example of how to get yourself in a mess without really trying is a provision of the farm bill already passed by the Senate. Passed with little debate, this takes away the federal government's right to regulate water flow on federal lands. Under current law, the Forest Service can require towns and irrigation farmers to maintain a minimum flow in streams that pass through the 200 million acres of forest land.

Without minimum flows, there go your fish and wildlife.

According to The Washington Post, the amendment, slipped into the Senate bill by Hank Brown of Colorado, is the result of a long-standing dispute over just one national forest in Brown's home state. Water users have been at odds with the Forest Service over water rights in the Arapaho-Roosevelt Forest for 10 years. Brown takes the position that the feds "come into a dry, arid state and try to steal the water." That begs, of course, the permanent dilemma of the West: Whose water is it? From an ecological point of view, there are few greater follies than allowing agricultural irrigation to suck dry precious water resources like Western streams and aquifers. But people whose livelihoods are threatened seldom take the long view.

Another "Oops" is to be found in the telecommunications bill, which, in addition to futilely and improperly attempting to censor the Internet, seems to have inadvertently outlawed a good bit of discussion of abortion there as well. Rep. Henry Hyde, a longtime opponent of abortion, tacked on an amendment that puts a pox not only on lewd and indecent words but on abortion information as well. Those who discuss abortion on the 'Net are theoretically liable to criminal charges. We'd all like to think no one would ever bring such a charge, but we should never underestimate the extent to which the law is an ass.

Just last week the Supreme Court issued a real prize. A fellow went to solicit a prostitute, using a car owned by him and his wife. He gets busted during said illegal activity, and the cops seize the car on the grounds that it's property used in the commission of a crime. So the wife sues on the grounds that she can't be expected to yell after him every time he leaves home: "Don't pick up a hooker using our car, honey."

The Supremes decided it was legal for the government to take her half of the car. Even scholars of the court couldn't explain their reasoning, especially since the justices have been leaning toward more restrictions on this seizing-property stuff.

Even Supremes are human; maybe some of them just missed their prunes. But that's all the more reason to write the laws carefully in the first place. ***

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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