Restoration and conservation: Those are the goals that will guide management of the U.S. forest system under the Obama administration, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in his first major policy address on the nation's forests.

"It is time for a change in the way we view and manage America's forestlands with an eye towards the future," he told a crowd gathered at Seattle's Seward Park.

"This will require a new approach that engages the American people and stakeholders in conserving and restoring both our national forests and our privately owned forests. It is essential that we reconnect Americans across the nation with the natural resources and landscapes that sustain us."

The address was short on policy specifics but remarkable in the generally positive reception it got both from conservation groups and the timber industry, who often find very little to agree on.

Vilsack did let drop two important points: One, that the Forest Service won't be appealing the recent federal court decision in Northern California striking down the national forest planning rules promulgated by the Bush administration -- rules designed in part to foreclose protracted litigation over management plans for the nation's 192 million acres of national forests.

The new rules, conservationists charged, relied too little on science and provided fewer guaranteed protections for wildlife. Vilsack also affirmed what the Justice Department had already quietly revealed a day earlier: that the government will uphold a 2001 ban on development in the nation's last remaining roadless wilderness areas by appealing a Wyoming federal court decision striking down the ban. (A federal appeals court has already reinstated the roadless rule.)

"The fact that they're not going to relive the past with respect to the fights ... and that they're going to go forward and do new [forest] planning rules, that's a big announcement," said Kristen Boyles, an attorney with Earthjustice in Seattle who has litigated some of the biggest forest cases in the Pacific Northwest.

"It's been a long time since we've heard anyone from the Forest Service talk about more than just timber."