Washington- Environmental activists and community groups from more than twenty cities around the nation held demonstrations, marches, sit-ins and rallies to protest the Bush administration's attempts to weaken environmental laws protecting public land, including endangered forests. These Earth Day protests come just one week before the U.S. House will consider legislation containing parts of President Bush's controversial, "Healthy Forest Initiative." The cities included Atlanta, New York, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.

"The Bush administration assumes Americans are too distracted by global politics to care about our national forests here at home," said Andrew George, Campaign Coordinator for the National Forest Protection Alliance, a coalition of 130 forest protection groups, including Greenpeace. "This national day of protest serves to demonstrate how much the public cares about national forests and signals the beginning of an escalating campaign to expose, confront and prevent attempts to undermine our environmental laws and the forests those laws safeguard."

In 2001, the Bush administration handpicked former logging lobbyist Mark Rey to serve as the Undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment, and oversee the management of 192 million acres of national forest lands. A industry lobbyist for 18 years, Rey has since initiated a series of unprecedented rollbacks to the nation's environmental laws that protect clean water and wildlife habitat and guarantee public oversight and participation.