Efforts by the Bush administration to change rules on old-growth logging in the Northwest were dealt a setback yesterday by a federal judge in Seattle who rejected an attempt to reduce scrutiny of animals and plants on land targeted for logging.

U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman ruled that federal land managers broke the law when they failed to study whether species would be protected enough if the administration scrapped a "look-before-you-log" rule that had governed millions of acres of Northwest forests.

Pechman didn't say what the government must do to correct the problem. That will come after further court proceedings.

Environmentalists lauded the ruling as a victory against the administration's dismantling of forest protections.

The timber industry said it could put a dent in logging but not if the judge can be satisfied by further government studies justifying keeping the rule changes.

The ruling probably will have little immediate effect in state forests, where old-growth logging is largely a thing of the past.

The U.S. Forest Service said it hasn't offered any old-growth logging sales in Washington or Oregon under the disputed rules, which were issued last year.

Environmentalists who filed the suit challenging the rule change agreed.

"We've not been in a situation where the agency [Forest Service] is promoting controversial and environmentally harmful old-growth logging practices," said Dave Werntz, a spokesman for Conservation Northwest in Bellingham.

Even so, the outcome of the dispute could affect a million acres of old-growth forest in the Northwest that remain outside protected reserves set up in the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan to protect northern spotted owls.

That plan, brokered by the Clinton administration, left patches of old growth open to possible logging. But the plan required forest managers to look for hundreds of species on the land before cutting the trees.

Environmentalists say the provision was critical to stymie logging excesses on a sizable chunk of the old growth covered by the Clinton plan. The plan covers 24.5 million acres of land, 8 million of it considered old growth. One million acres of that are outside the protected reserves.

"It was supposed to be a roadblock," said Doug Heiken of the Oregon Natural Resources Council. "The entire point is to save places where the species live."

The timber industry, however, objected to rules that blocked logging in areas it contended shouldn't be off-limits. Logging has dropped below what was envisioned when the spotted-owl plan was crafted.

The species checks were costly and reduced logging by millions of board feet a year, the government said.

"And it didn't protect the species any more than it would have otherwise," said Ross Mickey of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber-industry trade group.

The Bush administration dropped the rule and replaced it with one that relied on existing programs that required protection of fewer species and gave land managers more flexibility to decide when to restrict logging.

Warren Cornwall: 206-464-2311 or wcornwall@seattletimes.com

This report includes information from The Associated Press.