hen George W. Bush and Dick Cheney hit the campaign trail in 2000, the then-Texas governor and his Big Oil sidekick shook their fingers at Bill Clinton, accusing him of lording it over American citizens on environmental issues like a green king in a bureaucratic fiefdom. They promised to be "collaborative" and to give citizens more "commonsense local control" over government decision-making. "I am a conservative because I believe government should be limited and efficient," Bush declared.

We now know exactly what the president had in mind -- whom he likes to collaborate with, who gets the control, and how to be efficient. When it comes to U.S. national forests and parks, the answer seems to be, in almost every case: Ignore the public and do whatever industry wants.

Again and again, the Bush administration has plowed over long-established democratic processes that exist to give ordinary people a say in decisions affecting their lives. When a federal agency makes a major new land management decision, the public is supposed to have the right to file an appeal with the agency. When a federal agency proposes a major new rule, public comment is supposed to help shape the final version. But instead of supporting these measures for government accountability, the administration has circumvented them.

"The president continually tells us how he believes in listening to citizens," says Chris Wood, who was a senior advisor to former Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck. "But on environmental issues the administration seems willing to listen only if we say what it wants to hear."

Case 1: OVERRIDE THE LAW

Last winter, a federal judge in Missoula, Montana, had to remind the Bush administration that the United States is "a participatory democracy." U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy delivered the rebuke after the administration had enthusiastically endorsed a proposal for heavy logging in the recently burned Bitterroot National Forest. The plan would have been one of the largest commercial salvage logging operations in U.S. history. Knowing that it was bound to be challenged by environmentalists in the appeals process that is required by law, Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, a former timber industry lobbyist, bypassed the appeals altogether and gave the go-ahead for logging unilaterally.

Environmentalists immediately sued in Missoula's federal court. In his injunction, Judge Molloy wrote that "in electing to disregard the express mandate of Congress the Forest Service is acting without authority." Molloy went on to condemn "the precipitous action here [by the administration] of electing to take the law into its own hands."

Case 2: KEEP THE GAME GOING UNTIL YOU WIN

During the 1990s, as unregulated snowmobile use proliferated in Yellowstone, park officials were besieged with complaints from visitors about air and noise pollution, disruption to wildlife, and damage to park aesthetics. In response, the government undertook several studies, which concluded that environmental protection laws were being violated -- including the law that restricts human activities in national parks to those that leave the landscape "unimpaired."

The Clinton administration proposed a gradual phaseout of snowmobiles from the park by 2004. In the costly and exhaustive public review process, 58,000 comments came in from citizens across the country, more than on any other issue in the history of the Park Service. The vast majority favored a ban.

Then the Bush administration took over. Shortly after coming into office, administration attorneys held secret negotiations with the snowmobile industry, which had filed a lawsuit. Behind closed doors, Interior Secretary Gale Norton apparently struck a deal to keep the machines in the park. And so the administration, along with the states of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, held another public comment period. Some 8,000 comments came in; 82 percent favored the original snowmobile ban.

A final decision is due in November -- with the administration now in the precarious position of having to choose between honoring the will of the public or of the snowmobile manufacturers.

Case 3: REDEFINE "COLLABORATION"

The administration has even overridden several local agreements between industry and citizens -- exactly the kind of innovative collaboration Bush claimed to support when he was running for president.

In the mid-1990s, the National Wildlife Federation and Defenders of Wildlife worked to broker collaborative relationships among citizens, government, and land users to break up political logjams over endangered species protection. Their most innovative success was an agreement between conservationists and the timber industry to bring grizzly bears back to the Selway-Bitterroot wilderness region of western Montana and central Idaho. Restoring grizzlies in the Bitterroots, where they were eliminated by humans sixty years ago, is vitally important for the big bears' survival in the lower forty-eight states.

Seven years in the making, the plan gave citizens a voice in deciding the fate of roaming bears and included measures for keeping humans safe.

It won an endorsement from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and broad support among citizens in the Rockies. Marc Racicot, then the governor of Montana and today the national chairman of the Republican Party, praised it as a model for bringing local citizens into endangered species management.

Bear reintroduction was slated to begin in 2002. But Interior Secretary Norton abruptly shelved the plan. She was evidently acting in response to a lawsuit brought by Idaho governor Dirk Kempthorne -- whose inflammatory rhetoric about "this flesh-eating, antisocial animal" was a smokescreen for his real concern: Grizzlies in the Bitterroots would mean more protection for the forests the bears depend on. (The Idaho State Journal wrote that Kempthorn "isn't as interested in scientific research or cool analysis as he is in frightening constituents and placating the conservative lobbyists who apparently supply him with his bullet-point sheets.")

Throughout her confirmation hearings and repeatedly over the last year, Gale Norton has trumpeted her faith in "local collaboration." In this case, that meant collaborating with a single timber-friendly governor.

ometimes, citizens can shine daylight into the shadows. On February 26, U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler ruled for NRDC in a lawsuit to force the Energy Department to turn over its records on Dick Cheney's energy task force. (See Washington Watch, p. 47.) The congressional General Accounting Office and the nonprofit Judicial Watch have also filed lawsuits requesting other task force documents.

But U.S. citizens shouldn't have to file lawsuits to keep their government accountable. "Members of this administration have arrogantly held themselves above the law," says NRDC attorney Sharon Buccino. "They've forgotten who they serve. They've forgotten this is a democracy built on the premise that when citizens speak up their voices will be heard."