Washington Post Editorial

This is the kind of crap our elected officials read in D.C. It's enough to make you sick.

Fire Damage

Wednesday, October 29, 2003; Page A24

WITH TERRIFYING intensity, fires are burning across Southern California and Mexico this week, proving once again that natural disasters can be no less devastating than the man-made kind. They have already killed more than a dozen people, destroyed more than 1,500 homes and burned half a million acres. A staggering 50,000 more homes are thought to be under threat, as the fires, fanned by desert winds, move into the Los Angeles and San Diego suburbs. It's a genuine national tragedy -- and one that shouldn't be misused for political purposes.
Unfortunately, that is a distinct possibility. The fires happen to have arrived just as the Senate is wrestling with a bill, already passed by the House, which is supposedly designed to help prevent catastrophic fires. In theory, the bill would address the environmental imbalance that has developed over the past several decades from the Forest Service's misguided policy of preventing all forest fires, even the low-level fires that once cleared away brush and young trees from old forests. Without these periodic fires, forests have become much denser, and big fires are far more damaging than they used to be.
But although foresters and scientists now recognize this problem, brush is still not being cleared away fast enough. Why? The House Republican authors of the forest bill blame overly bureaucratic environmental regulations. Accordingly, their bill attempts to loosen the procedures that the Forest Service must go through before it can carry out "fuel reduction activity" -- a change that would also help the timber industry dodge objections to the cutting down of older forests. This explanation does not stand up to close scrutiny. Last week, the General Accounting Office released the final results of its study on fuel reduction activity and discovered that of the Forest Service's 818 applications to cut brush, only one-quarter were appealed. Of these, 79 percent were processed within 90 days. What is hampering the process is not environmental litigators but finances. To carry out more brush-clearing operations, the Forest Service needs more resources.
But the Forest Service is unlikely to get significantly more resources anytime soon. It would therefore make sense for Congress, instead of passing laws that appear to be largely of benefit to the timber industry, to encourage the Forest Service to spend whatever money it does have on brush-clearing projects closer to human communities. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has helped write a compromise bill that would instruct the Forest Service to spend at least 50 percent of its fuel reduction resources on precisely that. Although this is the right approach, Ms. Feinstein has received no guarantee that her bill won't be completely rewritten by a Republican conference committee, as has lately become common practice.
In the absence of such a guarantee -- which would have to come from the White House -- it's probably better to pass no bill at all. We retain just the slimmest hope that the California blazes might cause members of Congress to redirect their energy toward saving people and homes, and away from helping loggers cut down mature trees.

That's right, let the west burn if need be, just don't do anything that might be beneficial to the timber industry.

Too bad the following column by Alan Caruba is not in a daily paper read by most people on the hill.

When Will Congress Stop Pandering To Greens And Begin To Protect Our Forests And People?

On September 22 of this year, Jack Blackwell, a regional forester of the Pacific Southwest Region of the US Forest Service, testified before the Committee on Resources of the House subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health. Barely a month later, his warnings about the conditions of the forested areas of southern California came true, destroying countless homes and taking lives in its path.

He began by noting that the 672,000 acres of the San Bernadino National Forest had some 24 million people living within a two-hour drive and that it was going through "a significant cycle of drought-related, vegetation mortality" involving "severe tree loss." The result was "a tremendous build-up of hazardous fuels" for a cataclysmic fire.

He noted, "Some community covenants have restricted landowners since the 1920s from tree removal activities on private land within the National Forest" and that the "Forest has not had an active timber harvest program for nearly ten years. There are no lumber mills in southern California and now the current removal of dead and dying trees is difficult and expensive."

How much more expensive will be the replacement of the homes that have since been destroyed? Or the loss of revenue due to the restrictions on properly managing this forest areas that could have been gained by cutting and thinning its overgrown mass of trees? Since the Greens mounted their Spotted Owl hoax in the northwest more than a decade ago, countless sawmills have gone out of business and many small towns dependent on them have withered to a few families.

Blackwell told the committee "The President´s Healthy Forest Initiative would play a key role in helping us avoid situations such as we see on the San Bernadino National Forest today. The initiative is based on a common-sense approach to reducing the threat of catastrophic wildfires by restoring forest and rangeland health and ensuring the long-term safety and health of communities and natural resources in our care."

He urged "a public and private partnership" as "critical in providing an integrated and coordinated approach to address the crisis forest-wide." And he told the committee that the Forest Service had "redirected $3.2 million in State Fire Assistance and Community Protection/Community Assistance funding for wildfire prevention and hazardous fuels reduction…"

Blackwell warned that other forested areas have similar conditions. "Those ecological conditions, combined with the massive influx of people into California´s wildlands and the rapid growth of communities in and around those wildlands, particularly in the Sierra Nevada, have created the potential for truly disastrous wildfires."

One can hardly wonder what Blackwell is thinking these days or the many forest managers and others who, for years now, have been warning against the now annual loss of huge forest areas to these fires. The plain fact is that the US Forest Service has known for decades that these problems exist and has been issuing these warnings, but the success of the environmental movement in deterring the proper management of forests has once again reaped the whirlwind.

There literally is no excuse for the loss of life and property we have witnessed on our television news and read about in our daily newspapers. The President has been under attack the Greens for his proposed solution to this problem and this is just one more example of the irresponsible and dangerous efforts of Greens to attack the timber industry in every way possible.

It is, of course, all part of the Green attack on the economy in general. It has succeeded, not only with the huge loss of forested areas, the homes of those in and adjacent to them, but also in driving up the cost of lumber in an economy in which new home sales plays a significant, if not the leading role.

There are 490 million acres called timberlands in the US. They can produce more than 20 cubic feet of wood per acre annually. They´re growing more trees today than they were fifty years ago. At the same time, 247 million acres (33.5%) are reserved from harvest by law or are slow-growing woodlands unsuitable for timber production. The bottom line is that the US has some 70% of the forestland that was here in 1600, fully 737 million acres, when the pilgrims first arrived.

The US National Park System represents 83 million acres and unlike national forests, national parks do not allow any timber harvesting. The National Forest System, some 191 million acres, was established "…to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States." These National Forests contribute 25% of the gross receipts from timber sales directly to states for county roads and schools, amounting to millions of dollars each year. All that revenue has been lost because of these preventable catastrophic fires.

This situation has long been known to Congress and to Americans who have witnessed the annual losses. Civil servants like Jack Blackwell have been telling Congress what the problem is and how to solve it. The real question is when will Congress stop pandering to vocal Green organizations and their lobbying, and begin to protect our forests and our people? And when will Americans stop buying into all their lies?

And Hugh Hewitt absolutely gets it

How 'habitat protection' causes killer infernos

...Of course, fire has always been with us. What has not been a feature of the West, however, has been the perversion of land-management policies to extremist environmental agendas.

Serious students of land use in the West know that since 1992, the aggressive expansion of the mandates of the federal Endangered Species Act has led to a crazy quilt approach of federal dictates, many of which are simply incomprehensible. The bewildering array of designations of critical habitat for a variety of species and the threat of federal criminal law violations for illegal "take" of any of a growing list of species has led to a dramatic curtailment of habitat management that has allowed fuel loads to skyrocket throughout the region.

Similarly, the radical expansion of the National Environmental Policy Act as a tool of obstruction has mirrored the rise of the "no growth" movement among environmental activists. Logging plans are routinely challenged and die a death of delay and obstruction. The predictable consequences are infernos that feed on the years of neglect.

When the media arrive at the scene of the disaster, they hear of Santa Ana winds and drought, but never of the relentless opposition to common-sense management practices that could limit the destruction. They never learn that the California Gnatcatcher, to use just one example, was listed as endangered a decade ago despite a robust population here and in Mexico, or that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service routinely refuses to propose aggressive brush-management practices that would allow local governments and landowners to proactively clear habitat that might house the birds. Rather, the Service continues to issue sweeping designations of "critical habitat," the publication of which complicates the management and use of land that doesn't even support gnatcatchers.

For more than a decade, the leadership of the "resource" agencies at the state and local level has included numerous individuals who lack the ability or the motivation to serve the communities that need innovation and action, not more grand plans and environmental documents. President Bush and Gov. Schwarzenegger would both do themselves great good with the public if they embraced reform of these government bureaucracies that have once again failed to protect either the public or the environment from disaster.