Posted on 10/30/2003 7:32:06 AM PST by Isara
Fires: As Southern California burns, lawmakers may learn something about forests and safety. Perhaps harvesting a few trees isn't such a bad idea after all.
It's too bad it takes 600,000 charred acres (at last count), at least 16 lost lives, some 1,600 homes destroyed and a damage tab of $2 billion or more to knock some sense into the nation's forest management.
But Congress may have learned at least something from the wildfires in California. At this writing, the Senate was expected to get off the dime and finally consider a bill that would help prevent future disasters by giving greater leeway to logging.
This is President Bush's Healthy Forests legislation, passed by the House back in May. Its key provisions limit judicial and administrative review of tree-thinning and brush-clearing projects. Federal agencies overseeing public lands would have a freer hand in letting loggers do their work.
Environmental groups fiercely oppose the bill, and they've been able to slow it down in the Senate.
But some Democrats, including California's Sen. Dianne Feinstein, realize something has to be done about the millions of acres of federal lands that are full of fire fuel — brush that hasn't been cleared or burned in decades, or tinder-dry trees killed by drought and beetle infestation. Feinstein has come up with a compromise that bears a fair resemblance to the House bill.
So some form of Healthy Forests seems to stand a good chance of getting into law.
No one, including the spotted-owl set, denies that there's a high fire danger in the Western forests. The peril was vividly clear as newscasts showed trees lighting up like bonfires in Southern California mountain towns north of San Bernardino. The idea of letting loggers solve at least some of this problem by harvesting trees, thinning forests and creating a few local jobs is perfectly logical.
Everyone wins, since both the loggers and the public come out ahead. And it's very much in the historic tradition of public forest lands, which were established to manage timber resources, not to wall them off.
Fire control is a complicated task, covering private and public lands and many types of vegetation and terrain, from grasslands and chaparral to dense forests. Healthy Forests deals with only one part of the fire ecology.
But because of it, federal forests in years to come will be safer as well as healthier, and the work of conserving them will be easier. Such is the benefit of balanced forest policy, of which we've seen too little until recently.
Are they going to hug some trees to prevent the fire from burning their beloved trees?
Like when a tree that they are hugging suddenly erupts into a hellish torch of a flame!
As an adult living on the Kenai penninsula in Alaska, we had a similar infestation of spruce bark beetles. We were not allowed to selectively log and protect the forest because of lawsuits filled by environmental groups. Today most of the old growth timber on the penninsula is dead and brown. So far we have been lucky and have not had the wildfires similar to those in California, and we are cutting the dead trees to try and reduce the fire hazard.
Why, yes as a matter of fact. When the square miles all around them are burning, and the flame front finally reaches the tree one's roost is in. Dang! If only that tree, and that one and that one and that one had been logged, then the fire wouldn't be able to get to this one.
There has been very little coverage of the causes of these fires in the national or cable news reports. Sure, they mention "beattle infestation", but never mention there is a way it could have been stopped before it happened. Sure, they mention all the "dead fuel" in the forests, but don't wonder how it got to stay there.
Look for the next attack by the environazis to be on the homeowners who live in or near these forests. "If only these selfish people didn't live out in these natural wildlife habitats and put them in harms way..."
There will be no huge hue and cry against these radical "environmentalists" and their totalitarian movements. The Media is full of people who are on their side. There are well-organized and funded legions of lawyers with thousands of pages of legislation and court precedent on their side who will continue to tie up everything to do with the outdoors. They will just continue spin this catastrophe as something else or ignore it, as they have done for decades.
The public will go back to worrying about Kobe.
The horse isn't gone...The barn burned down.
Don't bet on getting the barn door shut even now. The usual liberal response to things like this is to say "We just didn't go far enough." Gun control makes Washington DC the murder capitol of the USA? No problem, they just didn't ban enough guns. High taxes kill the economy? No problem, raise them higher. Unmanaged forests go up in smoke? No problem with th law, the just didn't go far enough. Just add to the acreage of unmanaged forests - prevent homeowners from clearing brush on their property, etc.
Thinning forests and clearing chaparral costs a lot of money. Who's gonna pay for it?
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