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Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Obama administration issues major rewrite of national forest rules

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Obama administration issues major rewrite of national forest rules

Text SizePrintE-mailReprints By Juliet Eilperin,

The Obama administration finalized a rule Thursday governing the management of 193 million acres of national forests and grasslands, establishing a new blueprint to guide everything from logging to recreation and renewable energy development.

The guidelines — which will take effect in early March and apply to all 155 national forests, 20 grasslands and one prairie — represent the first meaningful overhaul of forest rules in 30 years. The George W. Bush administration had issued a management-planning rule for national forests in 2008, but a federal court struck it down the next year on the grounds that it did not provide adequate protection for plants and wildlife.

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In announcing the new procedures, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said they were crafted to enhance the nation’s water supplies while maintaining woodlands for wildlife, recreation and timber operations. The lands provide 20 percent of the nation’s drinking water, according to the U.S. Forest Service, an agency of the Agriculture Department.

“Restoration is the philosophy, with a focus on forest health and our water,” Vilsack told reporters in a conference call, adding that the rules require that planning decisions be “driven by sound science.”

The debate over how best to manage forests — especially in regions such as the Pacific Northwest — has pitted timber companies against environmentalists and some scientists for decades. On Thursday, administration officials emphasized that they had sought input from an array of constituencies to develop a plan that could minimize these public disputes.

“We expect to see much less litigation with this process,” said Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell.

The rule will serve as the guiding document for individual forest plans, which spell out exactly how these lands can be used. While these plans are updated periodically, Vilsack noted that half are more than 15 years old.

Michael Goergen, executive vice president and chief executive of the Society of American Foresters, said that given the scientific advances in the past three decades, “we need to put that knowledge to work and outdated rules aren’t going to help us. The new rules should be given a chance to work.”

Several environmentalists and scientists praised the guidelines, which were revised to include additional scientific safeguards after the department received 300,000 comments. But they cautioned that the rules gave local supervisors considerable discretion in their implementation.

“The vision is laudable, and this is no small shift in how the national forests will be managed, from one of commodity extraction into a vision of protection, restoration and water preservation,” said Dominick DellaSala, president and chief scientist for the Oregon-based Geos Institute.

Society for Conservation Biology policy director John Fitzgerald said the rule had “several weaknesses,” including the fact that it would “assume and not require the responsible official to show that the plan includes all practicable steps to conserve the full biological diversity” within a given forest.

Agriculture officials noted that the guidelines still compel managers to document how the “best-available scientific information” has guided decisions ranging from what areas should be logged to how officials are monitoring wildlife.

“We have 155 forests. They are not all alike,” Vilsack said. “That requires some flexibility and some acknowledgment of that uniqueness.”

House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) said the concerns that he and other lawmakers expressed about the planning rule’s impact on jobs “apparently fell on deaf ears.”

“These new Obama regulations introduce excessive layers of bureaucracy that will cost jobs, hinder proper forest management, increase litigation and add burdensome costs for Americans,” Hastings said.

Officials at the American Forest & Paper Association, which represents pulp, paper, packaging and wood products companies along with forest landowners, said they were “still reviewing” the blueprint. But the group had concerns “regarding the costly procedural requirements in the proposed rule,” said vice president and general counsel Jan Poling.

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Saturday, February 4, 2012

National Signing Day: Hokies poised for resurgent recruiting year in Virginia

When it comes to recruiting, Virginia Tech Coach Frank Beamer isn’t shy about his desire to lock up what he calls the six-hour radius around Blacksburg. That means the Hokies “home” recruiting territory essentially stretches from Atlanta to Baltimore.

But Beamer is also fond of saying he believes there is enough talent in the state of Virginia to win a national championship. So it was surprising last year when the Hokies signed just five of the state’s top 25 players, according to Rivals.com, instead getting 12 recruits from out-of-state. It was the fewest top 25 in-state players Virginia Tech had signed since Rivals started tracking such stuff in 2002.

This year, though, the Hokies are poised to reel in more of the state’s top 25 players than they have since 2008, and could set a record if things fall right when National Signing Day arrives Wednesday. Virginia Tech has received oral commitments to its 2012 recruiting class from 10 of the top 25 players from Virginia, and four more are debating whether to pick the Hokies this week.

Currently, the top-ranked in-state commitment for the Hokies is running back J.C. Coleman of Oscar Smith High in Chesapeake, Va. Coleman, the No. 5 prospect in the state per Rivals, is already enrolled in school for spring practice and will get an opportunity to compete for the starting tailback job now that David Wilson is preparing for the NFL draft.

But the Hokies will hear from two of Virginia’s top five recruits – two-time All Met Ken Ekanem of Centreville High and Richmond-area wide receiver Joel Caleb, the state’s No. 1 recruit – on signing day. Defensive tackle Korren Kirven of Lynchburg, Va., and All Met offensive lineman Jackson Matteo of Broad Run High in Ashburn could also pick Virginia Tech Wednesday.

That the Hokies have done so well recruiting the state this year is perhaps a credit to the changes Coach Frank Beamer made during last year’s offseason. After watching Virginia Coach Mike London beat him on the recruiting trail a year ago, Beamer brought in two new assistants (his son, Shane, and former Hokies linebacker Cornell Brown) while also altering the in-state recruiting responsibilities of his entrenched staff.

Virginia Tech also has more scholarships to work with this year. According to Beamer’s official website, the Hokies could sign as many as 28 recruits this year. The Hokies only had enough room to enroll 18 players in 2011.

NCAA rules prohibit schools from signing more than 28 players and enrolling more than 25 in any given year. Teams are only allowed 85 scholarship players total. But there are ways to maneuver around this through gray shirting, meaning certain recruits will delay their enrollment until at least January 2013 and therefore not count against the 2012 scholarship limits. Others could fail to qualify academically and be forced to spend a year at prep school.

Beamer, however, believes there are enough in-state recruits for both the Hokies and Virginia to be successful, and this year could go a long way toward proving that. Though Virginia Tech has done exceedingly well in the Commonwealth, the Cavaliers haven’t been slouches this year, either.

Together, Virginia Tech and Virginia have gotten oral commitments from 17 of the state’s top 25 players. That would be the most since 2005 when Virginia Tech and Virginia combined to sign 20 of the top 25 recruits from Virginia. But with four of the top 25 waiting to announce until Signing Day and still considering either the Hokies or the Cavaliers, there’s a chance this could be a record year in-state for both schools.

We’ll have much more on Signing Day here at Hokies Journal throughout the week, including live streaming video of Ekanem’s announcement as well as updates throughout Wednesday as Virginia Tech receives national letters-of-intent from its 2012 recruits.

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National Gallery reopens renovated 19th-century French galleries

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National Gallery reopens renovated 19th-century French galleries

National Gallery of Art - Edouard Manet French (1832–1883), ‘The Old Musician,’ 1862, oil on canvas overall.

Text SizePrintE-mailReprints By Philip Kennicott,

After two years of renovation and rethinking, the 19th-century French galleries at the National Gallery of Art are open again. Visitors will notice little in the way of architectural change. Old systems have been updated and, as of last week, the wooden floors had a powerful odor of new varnish. A room once used for storage has been added to a suite of 14 large and small spaces that highlight 163 of the best of the National Gallery’s nearly 400 works from this period.

“The building is 70 years old, and it was basically never updated,” says Mary Morton, curator of French painting at the National Gallery.

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(Courtesy National Gallery of Art) - Claude Monet French (1840 - 1926), ‘Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight,’ 1894, oil on canvas

(Courtesy National Gallery of Art) - Paul Cézanne (French, 1839–1906), ‘Boy in a Red Waistcoat,’ 1888–1890, oil on canvas.

A significant change in how the paintings are displayed, however, is obvious. Morton, who came to the National Gallery from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in part to oversee the rehang of these rooms, has taken an eclectic approach. It is not strictly chronological or biographical (only two rooms are devoted to the work of single artists) or thematic, but a mix of the three. Some rooms, especially one devoted to some of the “greatest hits” of the collection (Renoir’s 1885 “Girl With a Hoop” and Monet’s 1880 “Artist’s Garden at Vetheuil”), seem designed purely for sybaritic delight.

The National Gallery originally was not strong in French work. At its 1941 opening, there was not a single 19th-century French work to be seen. That reflected the tastes of the principal donor, Andrew Mellon, who wasn’t much interested in the period, and his conviction that other donors would come forward to fill the gap. They did, notably Chester Dale in 1962; Mellon’s children Paul and Aisla; Joseph Widener; and Agnes and Eugene Meyer (who owned The Washington Post and whose descendants still run it). The collection is now very strong, but also (in terms of competing U.S. museums) rather new.

Morton says the new galleries have “some things from storage, but not a lot, because it is still such a young collection.” Major holes include academic art and the more conservative or establishment painters, against whom the renegades of 19th-century art supposedly struggled but from whom they learned everything that made that struggle meaningful. There are images by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres across the hallway, filling out a neo-classical, 18th-19th century gallery. But a wish list would include Ary Scheffer, Alexandre Cabanel and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, often given to insipidity but rarely dull. Even so, the galleries look and feel splendid, with dynamic tension built into many of the rooms and a sense of thoroughness, without the monotony of a more orthodox, rigorously chronological approach.

Paris, as Walter Benjamin said in the title of one of his most famous essays, was “the capital of the 19th century.” And never more so than in 1905, when Picasso painted his large-scale vision of poor circus performers, “Family of Saltimbanques,” or in 1910 when the fabricated Russian exoticism of Stravinsky’s “Firebird” premiered at the Ballets Russes.

Although Paris dominates the new galleries, the idea of “French” art has been interpreted liberally, as have the boundaries of the “19th century.” The Picasso “Saltimbanques” is the climax of the new space, bridging the 19th-century inheritance and the new modernist impulse that would lead to cubism and beyond. Paintings by Amedeo Modigliani, which Morton says straddle awkwardly the 19th and 20th century divide, have been brought out of storage and included in the last room, with the Picasso.

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