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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/465299/posts
Posted by marsh2, June 2, 2001.
Not much difference one year later!
I Just saw Dr. Wallace Covington on Local TV Press Conference addressing the Arizona fires.
He was discussing the management of forests. He is mentioned here one year ago.
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snip From Hansen's (rep. Utah) address to Congress ONE YEAR AGO titled
ENVIRONMENTALISTS ORGANIZATIONS EXPOSED
And what has congress done in response to this testimony??? I'm sending the whole document to my mailing list to refresh some memories.Last year in this article from the Sacramento Bee, during the 1990's, the government paid out $31.6 million in attorney's fees for 434 environmental cases brought against Federal agencies. The average award per case was more than $70,000. One long-running lawsuit in Texas that involved an endangered salamander netted lawyers for the Sierra Club and other plaintiffs more than $3.5 in taxpayers' funds, as the chairman has already pointed out.
That is money that could be used for other environmental purposes and actually cleaning up the environment and taking care of the backlog in maintenance we have in our National Forests and in our National Parks.
Again, it is taxpayer money. One of the main arguments for the roadless issue was that the Forest Service did not have the money to maintain the roads that they currently had, and so if they couldn't maintain those, how could they justify building more roads, so we might as well make them roadless. If we are spending all that money on lawsuits, then certainly we do not have the money to take care of the roads.
One of the things that was interesting in this series of articles is that the effect of these things are actually damaging to the environment oftentimes. Let me read a portion of these articles.
Wildfire today is inflicting nightmarish wounds, injuries made worse by a failure to heed scientific warnings. For example, and there are three of them here that they list. In 1994, Wallace Covington, a Professor of Forest Ecology at Northern Arizona University and a nationally recognized fire scientist and a colleague warned that the Kendrick Mountain wilderness area in northern Arizona was so crowded with vegetation that it was ready to explode. ``Delay will only perpetuate fuel build-up and increase the potential for uncontrolled and destructive wildfires,'' they wrote in a scientific analysis for the Kaibab National Forest. Some thinning was done, but not enough. Last year, a large fire swept through the region carving an apocalyptic trail of destruction.
What happened is much worse ecologically than a clear cut, much worse, Covington said, and that fire is in the future. It is happening again and again. We are going to have skeletal landscapes.
The other example, listening to fire and forest scientists, Martha Ketelle pleaded in 1996 for permission to log and thin an incendiary mass of storm-
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killed timber in California's Trinity Alps. ``This is a true emergency of vast magnitude,'' Ketelle, then supervisor of the Six Rivers National Forest, wrote to her boss in San Francisco. ``It is not a matter of if a fire will occur, but how extensive the damage will be when the fire does occur.''
Because of an environmental appeal, the project bogged down. Then, in 1999, a fire found its way into the area. It spewed smoke for hundreds of miles, incinerated Spotted Owl habitat and triggered soil erosion and key damage in a key salmon spawning watershed.
These stories are something I hear about daily as I go back to Idaho from my resource advisory group and my ag advisory groups and I talk to them. We did more damage last year in Idaho with the Nation's largest wildfires. We did more damage to the environment, to salmon habitat, to spawning habitat, than was done by any logging practices that ever have been done. And today as the snow melts and the rains come, hopefully the rains come, that erosion is going to filter down into those streams and it is going to cover the beds, and consequently you are going to have a difficult time with managing salmon habitat.
So, oftentimes these efforts to address these environmental concerns, the potential for catastrophic wildfire, today the Forest Service says something like 35 million acres of our National Forests are at risk of catastrophic wildfires. These are not just fires, but these are cataclysmic fires that burn everything, they burn so hot. They burn the micro-organisms, they sterilize the soil down to as much as 18 inches, and for years and years those forests never recover, if they ever do recover.
We still have spots in Idaho from the 1910 fire that nothing will grow on. We do more damage to the environment by not proactively managing it. Of course, every time you try to do that, there is an environmental lawsuit from someone.
Now, they say, well, maybe we can do thinning if it is not for commercial purposes, as if commercial or business or profit adds some damage to the environment that thinning just to thin does not do. Of course, there are the Sierra Club groups that want no cut.
The fact is we have to proactively manage these forces, and we can do that. It was managed by fire before. Now we have to get in and do some management so that we do not have these catastrophic fires. Unfortunately, at every step of the way, we are fought by groups who think that man should not touch the forest, that they should be left as natural as they ever were before we came.
Mr. HANSEN. I thank the gentleman.
Mr. Speaker, let me just say a word about what the gentleman from Idaho just talked about. We were having a hearing not too long ago and, lo and behold, one of the big clubs was there, and I asked this vice president the question, why is it that you resist managing the public ground? Why is it that you resist the idea that we can go in and do some cleaning, thinning, prescribe fires and take care of it and keep a wholesome forest, like many of the private organizations have?
We now have, as the gentleman from Idaho said, fuel load. What is that? It is dead trees, it is dead fall, it is brush. So now you have the potential of this summer, as last summer, is a careless smoker, a fire caused by a campfire that is left unattended, or a lightning strike, which is one of the bigger ones, and here we go again, we are going to burn the forest.
This person from this organization answered me and said, because it is not nature's way. Nature's way is just let it do its thing. I do not know if I bought into that. You get down to the idea of 1905 we started the Forest Service, and if you read the charter of the Forest Service, it is to maintain and take care of the forests of America. And that means cleaning it, thinning it, fighting fires, instead of getting ourselves in what we had in the year 2000, the heaviest fire year in record. And I dare say, and I am no prophet, but I think the fuel load is still there after these 8 years of mismanagement we have had, and we now have 2001 waiting for another one, because talk to your local forester and the people, Mr. Speaker, those who are watching this should talk to their district rangers, talk to them and ask the question have we still got that fuel load? The answer is a resounding yes.
Here we go again. We are going to spend taxpayers' money all over the place, because we have not done what they said in 1905 we should have done, and that is manage the forest.
This new administration luckily has a man of the stature of Dale Bosworth, now the chief; and I am sure we will see some management.
I have to ask the question. Does it mean to be a good environmentalist if we let the forest burn to the ground? Does that mean being a good environmentalist? If that is so, I hope there are not too many of them out there. Does it mean the idea that we drain some of our water resources, like Lake Powell that services the whole southwest part of America, and that is the way we live because we have got water, does that mean being a good one? Yet one of the biggest organizations around in their book, the Sierra Club, had a whole four or five pages on let a river run through it and drain Lake Powell.
I live in the heart of Georgia pulpwood & forestry country, and this sort of willful mismanagement is insane. We cut firebreaks and access roads as a matter of routine- of course, this is on private land!