President Bush gave the liberal hive a good solid whack last week when he traveled to Oregon to propose relaxation of logging restrictions in the national forests. The usual busy bees in the green community are buzzing about the decision, but so far the reaction has been less than frenzied.
I believe that, until the 1970's the Forestry Service allowed culling of underbrush, overmature trees and dead timber. It's the envirofascists who put a stop to most of that with the result that the intensity of forest fires have increased to the point where ecosystems have much more trouble reestablishing themselves.
I seem to remember that during the Bush I administration, the evirowackos blamed Bush's Interior Secretary James Watt for allowing the forests to burn. Go figure.
I stand corrected. I thought it happened later than Reagan.
IMHO, Mr. O'Toole's assessment about the USFS and how long Bush's programme will take to complete the job it can't do s fairly accurate. However, he doen't provide many better answers.
Mr. Bush's program is a joke.
Mr. Bray doesn't know what he is talking about either.
Joe...
A great post Tailgunner- the article raises many intriguing issues.
I had some trouble following the author's reasoning about which political group or whose policies are responsible for the condition of the western forests.
Wouldn't the answer to such speculation lie in the author's statement:
“…since 1872, the National Forest Service has pursued a policy of squelching all forest fires.”
Granted, the policy had seemed a good idea during the course of 150 years, for many reasons. (remember Smokey the Bear, a campaign launched in the early 60s, because humans were causing too many forest fires.)
At various periods, the Feds sold tracts of timber to the lumber companies, and people began building their homes in the forests. These groups, too, as well as others, I am sure, had very good reason to pressure the National Forest Service to pursue and enforce its no-fire policy.
Yet, and I think the National Forest Service has come to realize so, squelching ALL fires was a bad idea. ( For reference:
http://www.nps.gov/yel/nature/fire/index.htm
)
Anyone who grows wild blueberries in Maine will tell you how critical is the practice of controlled burning to ensure a healthy wild-blueberry ecosystem, one that will generate healthy crops today and for years to come.
For thousands of years, the wild blueberry grew and adapted to the presence of nature’s fires, and now today depends on fire to germinate and grow.
The western forest evolved and adapted to nature’s fires, too. Many of its trees and wild plants need fire to germinate their seeds, and to build the kind of soil in which the new seedlings can grow.
Had we not disrupted natural burning for so long, forest fires would be relatively small and self-limiting, so mature strands of trees would be present as well as other areas at successive stages in a forests growth. This process is the reason for the existence of forests as we know them.
But we did interfere, and we’ve created a monstrous timber box, and in the same way that the whole of Northern Maine’s wild blueberry region would burn in its entirety at the drop of a match, under dry conditions, had Mainers squelched all fires in that region for 150 years, the Western forests have succumbed.
Surely, no one meant for the whole damn thing to someday go up in flames at once.
To haul into jail the people who dropped the match, or to suggest that this group or that is responsible, and how do they like it now, seems to me, so unreasonable.
And surely, it is a damn shame that all that mature timber had not been harvested, rather than burnt to cinders, but implying that anyone who did not advocate for logging or who was opposed to logging is somehow responsible for the conflagration is just wrong.
(I mean no disrespect to President Bush, and I have no opinion on the logging issue, because I don't know what kind of activity might preserve the remaining forests, i.e. controlled burning or logging).
Risa