Isaiah Thompson

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At a press conference in Penn Treaty Park yesterday, Governor Rendell signed an executive order placing a moratorium on leasing more state forest land for natural gas drilling.

This author did readers the disservice of calling the event "a huge victory for environmental groups." That is simply not the case.

In fact, Rendell's order marks a largely-symbolic act, delivered too late to make much of a difference and only after the governor himself authorized several leases of state forest for drilling, over repeated warnings from his own forestry officials to the potential impact to Pennsylvania's award-winning forests of doing so.

(In fact, after being warned against leasing a proposed 40,000 acres of forest in 2009, Rendell doubled the request to the state's Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, asking for 80,000 acres instead).

Rendell's power to enforce this executive order ends the moment he ceases to be an executive – I think we've got about 80 days.

Efforts to impose a meaningful moratorium on further forest leasing have to happen in the state legislature, where a small core of environmentally-minded legislators – among them Democratic House representatives Greg Vitali (above, far left) and Dave Levdansky – have fought a so-far losing battle to protect the sensitive forest land that hasn't been leased.

The key part of this equation is a decades-old provision in state law known as the Oil and gas Lease Fund, masterminded by longtime forest steward Maurice Goddard who is legendary for reviving Pennsylvania's forests during his tenure from coal and gas industry-devastated wastelands to some of the most expansive forests east of the Mississippi.

The law said this: if you lease forest land for oil & gas exploration, you put the profits of the lease back into the forests. The law not only allowed forest stewards to balance competing interests in the forests, but – most importantly – prevented the governor and legislature from using the state's forests as one big, green slush fund for their own budgets.

That precedent held for more than fifty years until, under Rendell's leadership, it was broken: last year, the state legislature raided the Oil & Gas Lease Fund for the state budget – largely in order to plug the hole left by Rendell himself when he backed down on imposing the tax on gas production that now, as a lame duck governor, he finds himself begging from a legislature with its eyes on the next executive.

What's more, an obscure provision in the FY09-10 fiscal code imposed a cap on the amount of money the DCNR may take in from gas royalties – effectively stealing for the state money that was suppoed to be earmarked for conservation, recreation, and new projects.

As DCNR's budget gets slashed year after year, the agency, rather than using the proceeds of gas drilling in its own forests for the restoration or expansion of forestland elsewhere, is increasingly forced to use that money just to fund its basic operations.

In a few words: the DCNR is increasingly becoming dependent on hand-outs from the legislature, whose members increasingly demand forest land for drilling as a condition for those hand-outs. If nothing changes, those charged with protecting our forests will increasingly be forced to sell them off.

Without new laws in place this – more than any moratorium – will be Rendell's lasting environmental legacy.