Posted on 09/06/2002 10:58:25 AM PDT by NorCoGOP
AUSTIN, Texas -- The best way to rid the world of the AIDS epidemic is to quarantine and kill those infected by it. Most people would agree that this statement is not only false, but extremely misanthropic and merciless. In the same way, the idea that cutting down old growth trees in national parks in the name of fire prevention should be seen as absurd as the previous statement. This gross misjudgment is exactly what President Bush is currently trying to feed the American public.
Most of the nation, as well as the world, is presently coming to terms with the destructiveness of wildfires. About 190 million acres of U.S. land have already been torched by uncontrollable blazes. Although this pales in comparison to fire-related sylvan losses in the rest of the world, it is a very serious problem, particularly because the fires continue to come perilously close to people's homes. As has been proven hundreds of times in the past, when a mass of people feel threatened, they will look for a quick solution to their feelings of impotence. Again, as history has shown, this has led to colossal disasters. In the face of the destruction of property and the potential loss of life, President George W. Bush has offered a delightful option: cut down trees in nationally protected parks and build roads through them to slow fire from spreading.
While this "solution" might be hailed for its speed and decisiveness, it is unimaginably ill-conceived. According to the U.S. Forest Service's chief fires specialist Denny Thursdale, trees bigger than three to four inches in diameter do not pose a threat. What causes wildfires to spread so quickly through an area is the overgrowth of underbrush and saplings. Of course these do not hold any commercial worth to the timber industry, which has eyed the western United States for its huge expanses of mature, old growth trees. The irony is that this forest "thinning" plan is aimed at temperate forests - mostly in national parks - while 80 percent of the wildfires have raged on non-federal owned chaparral and grasslands which are mostly devoid of timber interests.
Recently Bush visited Oregon and experienced its "war" against wildfires first hand. Apart from the belligerence that comes with insisting that everything is a war, he called for a relaxation of the red tape that is wrapped around requests to log the last tracts of unspoiled land. This completely ignores Clinton's monumental decision to protect the vulnerable national parks from New Hampshire to California on Jan. 5 of last year. From the date that this was passed, timber industry lobbies in Congress have worked to overturn the decision. With the toll wildfires have taken and Bush's unabashed gung-ho attitude, they needn't work too hard.
The Forest Service's expert Jack Cohen recently published studies that confirm the best way to protect American families is to reduce the flammability of their homes. A disastrous example to look at would be the Fort Valley timber sale on the Coconino National Forest in northern Arizona. The project was designed to remove flammable undergrowth. However, like all commercial logging projects, it focused on removing mature trees more than five feet in diameter. This eliminated the forest canopy, resulting in the removal of hundreds of habitats including that of the goshawks, an already-imperiled species of hawk. In addition to this, logging mature trees not only ignores the true root of the problem, but leaves behind extremely flammable material such as dry twigs and branches in its wake.
Just as President Bush restricted individual rights and ignored social issues in the name of the war against terror, he is now relaxing environmental laws in the name of the war against fire. This blatant abuse of the American's public support cannot be denied. With the events that pulled the nation together a year ago, come a very important responsibility that only American citizens themselves can carry out: To monitor potential abuses of power, be they by foreign antagonists or domestic. Only in this way can we hope to avoid possible disaster.
Or burned wildlife, for that matter. I have not seen (probably because it wouldn't promote the leftist envirals' cause) any stats on how many spotted owls, gnatcatchers, etc., etc. have been killed by the massive wildfires that have recently (and still are) ravaging the west.
I'll wager it's a helluva lot more than those lost to logging.
This book is not about pristine, undisturbed lands. If such a thing exists, there are so few left in the continental U.S. that are not already protected, that there is no point in writing yet another book about “preserving nature.” This book is about motivating people to profit from the study, restoration, and development of healthy, productive ecosystems on the other 95% of the land.I'm gonna make you guys read this one way or another. ;-)Snip...
The unrestricted logging of virgin redwood timber during the earlier part of this century engendered resistance by political and legal means. The redwood preservation movement was organized to protect many of these unique and archetypal resource lands. The intent was to preserve what little remained of the primeval forest. There have been many successes, for which we as a society owe much. Unfortunately, the practice of legal tactics toward a goal of preservation has distorted the aim and function of these organizations, much to the detriment of their purpose.
Preservation is a form of conservation that can be understood and supported by urban contributors. It is simple to implement by court order and enforce by administrative government. It is thus an expedient way to extend collective claims. It was out of that demonstrable effectiveness, that preservation organizations derived their public support.
By the late 20th Century, the amount of undisturbed and unprotected domestic land had dwindled to the point that these “protection corporations” faced survival concerns of their own. When a corporation depletes its raw material, it considers another source. They needed new objectives in order to justify the donations that supply a continuing cash flow.
The new products were obvious spinoffs of existing organizational capabilities; both designed to prevent harm:
1. “Protection” of other lands both further afield and already disturbed.
2. Sponsoring regulation of industry practice to minimize the harm done.
It was inevitable that these two constituencies would eventually collide, with the latter ceding to the former. In organizations operating under an ethic of preventing harm, it is much easier to assert that preservation prevents harm than to take the position that action is necessary. Over time, preservationists have won out and the regulatory product is now used to reduce the cost of acquisition for preservation purposes.
As preservationists extended “their” holdings, they ran out of primeval domestic habitat to protect. According to the Sierra Club, 96% of more than two million acres of ancient redwood forests are gone. They have been logged. The remaining amount, not already under legal protection, is so small that hyperventilated discussions of preserving ancient forests is in large part no longer applicable to the situation we have. That battle is largely over.
The preservationists had to find other lands to protect. While the prescription of “preservation” had some scientific efficacy in the case of ancient virgin redwood stands, that method does not apply to regions that have been logged.
Snip...
The sad fact is that much of the forest is in no condition to recover from catastrophic fire to anything resembling primeval structure. The fuel levels are too high, the size of area threatened by fire is too large, and the exotic species are too aggressive and well distributed. Massive, hot fires in Santa Cruz will have enormous secondary environmental consequences for native species. (See Endnotes under this section for listed abstracts on fire.)
The response of many environmental groups is to “leave it alone,” with the idea that nature will select the stronger trees, while the others will fail, fall, and build soils. Many erroneously believe that native plants are best adapted to this region. There are open suggestions that we have only to wait 200 to 500 years and that we should not judge a preservation policy until then. This presupposes that the forest will successfully compete with exotic species and that we could then reverse course should that theory prove incorrect.
Given the spread of exotic pests, their progress belies the preservationists’ “promised” outcome. It leads one to question the ability of preser-vationist groups to deliver upon their promises, once they have increased the acreage under their control by a factor of hundreds. If they extend such a policy and it proves to be in error, it is also cause for concern about the risks to ecosystem health or our ability to reverse course. This is to say nothing of the effects of conflagration or toxic weeds on animals or, for that matter, people.
Doesn’t this seem like an obvious scenario? Why is it that the activists and political appointees seem so unconcerned about fire risk and the resulting damage to watersheds? Is there something intrinsic to the management system that abets denial of such an inevitable result?
Geez!:)
There are other ways to thin an old forest without logging or inducing a crown fire. My comment to this depends upon too many factors to be practical for this forum.
I believe it was you that posted an article some months ago that exposed how much western forests have densified in the past century or so.
Might have been. If not I probably commented on it.
It is that crown density that makes the fires impossible to fight on a small scale basis. ( that's not my idea, it comes from rank and file CDF smoke eaters)
Only if the fire gets into the crown and depending upon the type of forest. That depends upon those "too many factors" to which I was alluding. It makes a big difference if you are talking redwood versus Ponderosa pine for example, factors include slopes, composition of understory fuels, the progress of the fire, the distribution of meadows, whether the forest is mixed, the presence of pathogens or infestations, weather history...
It's too complex for the pat generalizations endemic to political discourse.
He never should have followed his 'friends' onto the iceberg in the first place, serves him right! :o)
Then again, perhaps not.
The Second Amendment...
America's Original Homeland Security !!
Molon Labe !!
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