The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that many environmentalists now agree mismanagement has played a major role in the carnage and devastation wrought by the Golden State wildfires. To wit: Longstanding limitations on logging, along with federal fire suppression efforts, have created a tinderbox ripe for explosion.
“Forests have become overgrown with trees and under brush due to a mix of human influences,” the Journal reports. Those “human influences” include successful pressure over the decades from green groups to hamstring the logging industry. Legal disputes dating back to the 1980s, the paper notes, led federal land managers to shut down a wide swath of Western forests to logging.
But now some environmental groups have reversed course and today favor policies that would hasten the thinning of overgrown forests.
“We need to try new things,” David Edelson, Sierra Nevada project director of the Nature Conservancy, told the Journal, “because what we’ve done in the past hasn’t worked.” Jim Branham, executive officer of the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, agreed. “Having the fuel loads in forests and wild lands reduced is definitely helpful in modifying fire behavior, but it needs to occur at a much greater scale than we are currently doing.”
And that could entail relaxing limitations on tree harvesting, controlled burns and a greater willingness by federal land managers to let fires that pose no danger to homeowners burn themselves out.
This perspective represents “a new front” for green groups, the Journal notes. “Mr. Edelson used to sue to block logging plans in national forests as an attorney for another green group,” the paper reveals. “Now he said he sees the need for limited logging because of the dramatic rise in wildfires.”
1 comment:
get rid of the ESA and the united states problems will go away. When the Dems formed it they never put people into the equation. Read the book "trashing the economy" it hits the spot on what is happening to the united states. it was written in 1993 i think. I am a logger and fire fighter. the feds don't want to manage the forest or put out the fires when they come.
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