When the Bush administration released a new rule Wednesday making it easier and quicker for national forest managers to develop mandatory forest plans, the response from environmental groups was predictably shrill. Trout Unlimited, a Virginia-based group, claimed that the regulations ”offer little in the way of planning and nothing in the way of regulation.” Meanwhile, Defenders of Wildlife President Rodger Schlickeisen fulminated that ”this is all about opening more and more forested lands to unsustainable logging with no regard for environmental impact.”

To hear such carrying on you’d think it was only a matter of months before the last tree over the age of 50 toppled, squashing the very last grizzly bear on the way down. Now, we don’t claim to know whether the new rule will prove good, bad or indifferent. But we do know that drawing up forest plans can be an absurdly long and expensive process, and the new rule offers what appears at this point to be a reasonable approach to streamlining it.

Under the 1976 National Forest Planning Act, each national forest must develop a 15-year management plan that serves as a framework for smaller projects within the forest. Because so much environmental analysis goes into the creation and updating of these plans, however, they frequently take several years to develop and cost millions of dollars. Bringing the plan for the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forest in Colorado up to date, for instance, took seven years and cost a staggering $5.5 million.

Most reasonable people would consider such numbers appalling, especially when the result, as the Forest Service claims, is a plan that’s practically out of date by the time it’s adopted. So why not change the way things are done? The process announced Wednesday would take two to three years, the Forest Service estimates, and cost about 30 percent less. That’s still lengthy and expensive, to be sure, but it’s at least an improvement.

To the chagrin of environmentalists, time would be saved by easing environmental-review requirements. Forest managers would also enjoy a great deal more autonomy. In some cases, these changes could, indeed, lead to an increase in logging, though that’s hardly a bad thing considering the crowded conditions in many of our forests. The new forest plans, meanwhile will be audited periodically to ensure they’re doing what they’re supposed to. And rigorous environmental analysis will still happen for individual projects. Anyone who claims that there would be no oversight is simply wrong.

Much about the implementation of the new rules still remains unknown, however. The nitty-gritty, according to the Forest Service, will appear in the agency’s so-called ”directive system,” which the Forest Service characterizes as an internal ”how to” manual for meeting broad goals. It’s nearly impossible to judge the new rule without understanding the fine print. However, as long as it’s consistent with the intent of the rule, it’s quite possible that the creation of forest plans could become the relatively flexible, timely and economical process it ought to be – and without being irresponsible. In any case, the status quo is so undesirable that a new approach is at least worth a try.