Facts undercut attack on environmentalists
Facts undercut attack on environmentalists
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"Burning policy questions" [Editorial, Nov. 2] included a number of misstatements about environmentalists, the U.S. Forest Service and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., regarding forest policy. As Orange County communities continue to grow adjacent to the Cleveland National Forest and into the few remaining areas of county wildland, these misstatements are too important not to address.
We can agree that environmentalists are using the "fires to political advantage." Environmentalists are using this opportunity to again advocate nonpartisan fire policies recommended by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, developed from lessons learned in the past decade at the Laguna and Malibu fires and last year in Summerhaven, Ariz. We've learned the best fire protection for structures occurs within 500 yards of homes and communities and includes the use of appropriate fire-resistant building materials, community protection zones and defensible space around homes. These principles apply to both private and public lands.
The logging industry, through the White House, is using these fires for "political advantage" as well. In the face of the recent tragedies in Southern California, the Bush administration continues to press forward with its "Healthy Forest Initiative," which creates profits through public subsidies for timber companies but leaves communities that are not adjacent to federal lands with commercial timber, such as the homes in Southern California, without essential fire protection.
The editorial says the Forest Service was "reluctant to thin out trees, even those with bark beetles, due largely to environmental concerns." In fact, the local Forest Service has been creating community protection zones in beetle-infested communities with the support of the environmental and forest communities. Only a lack of funding has slowed progress.
Not mentioned in the editorial but often heard is that appeals and lawsuits by the environmental community are to blame. This claim is unsupported by fact.
A study this year by the nonpartisan General Accounting Office shows that 97 percent of the 818 fuel-reduction projects it reviewed went forward. In Southern California forests, 100 percent of projects went forward. Public participation in forest planning is not a problem, funding is.
Local Forest Service and state Department of Fire and Forestry officials, local congressmen of both parties and local communities were given a deaf ear and handed an empty pocketbook when pleading for immediate funding and emergency help from the Bush administration to help protect communities from the expected fires. A sad joke circulated at community meetings in Lake Arrowhead in early summer: If an aircraft carrier were built in the lake, then the president might fly in and pay attention. Unfortunately, it wasn't and he didn't.
Current funding is not enough. In fiscal 2002, a mere $53 million was spent on fuel-reduction projects in California, and Southern California forests received a small fraction of it - $2.9 million. The fact is a great majority of fuel-reduction funding has gone to forests with commercial timber programs, not to the most-visited and lived-in forests in the country: the largely chaparral and oak-woodland forests of Southern California.
Sensible proposals to protect communities have been made, namely the Boxer-Leahy bill offered last spring. It asked for $5 billion over five years to focus on community protection zones and would treat chaparral, oak-woodland, conifer or any other type of vegetation on public and private land. With the cost of the Southern California fires alone expected to top $2 billion, Sen. Boxer's bill looks like a missed opportunity.
Communities remain at risk. Hopefully that carrier will be built in time.
FMCDH
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