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"There's not enough money in the Interior appropriations bill to clear all the areas that need clearing. We need timber harvesting."

The President's "healthy forests initiative" calls for thinning 2.5 million acres of federal forests a year for 10 years. (Run this timber through sawmills and the Canadian dollar would sink like a lead weight.)

Anybody want to guess how many acres the fedgov has in forested land (and we can leave out Alaska, just to make it fair)?

Randal O'Toole is another critic of the Forest Service's record in managing the natural resources it is entrusted with. In a Cato Institute paper from last year, he observed:

The real problem with forest fire fighting is not a shortage of funds, but too much money. Congress has given the Forest Service a virtual blank check to put out fire and is now giving it a near-blank check to thin forestlands. When you have a blank check to do something, that becomes the only thing you want to do even if something else would work better at a far lower cost.
Similar perverse incentives can be found in the Forest Service timber program. Federal programs indirectly reward forest managers for losing money on timber sales while penalizing them for making money or doing good things for the environment. As long as these perverse incentives are in place, we can't trust the Forest Service to sell timber without the environmental safeguards that President Bush wants to remove.
No hard-and-fast rules can apply to all 600 million highly diverse acres of federal land. Commercial timber sales could improve forest health in some areas. Complete fire suppression may make sense in other areas. Yet the current incentives push the Forest Service to make the wrong decisions in most places.

The enviros want to keep everything untouched by humans, everyplace, at all all times, an any cost in lives and property.

Bush (and presumably Pombo) want to thin it all so it won't burn.

Seems to me there is a middle ground, and O'Toole is occupying it at the moment.

Bush (and presumably Pombo) want to thin it all so it won't burn.

I don't know if it is fair to characterize their intentions that way. Maybe that they want it all to be available to thinning, but to actually do it would be too massive a project that would never happen. By slicing off areas where thinning(or anything else) would be prohibited, will only encourage more 'no-go' territory until the whole program is useless. Granted there will be some places, such as stands of giant Redwoods and the like, but exceptions are just noses under the tent that the environazis want to begin to incrementally make the exception the rule again.