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.
There you go using your head again dammit.
The author doesn't care about the distinction between a National Park and a National Forest. There is one thing they do have in common though... They're both unconstitutional.
Of course they never bother to check that old rotting growth is a huge poluter of methane and what not.
The left's phony hypocritical phobia of money is psychedelic paranoia to the utmost. Watch out, tomorrow they might say we cause the moon to scare them.
HERE IS A SITE FOR ALL VIORO WHACK JOBS
The real culprit is Congress, who violated state citizenship by retaining lands when the states were admitted, sold off Western lands for nothing, allowed their rape by Eastern timber interests, then sponsored tax funded forestry for their benefit (in the form of National Forests) including fire suppression, and then (after everybody, including private industry, stocked the forests for high production) faced a glut of timber so large that no one could fund the environmental overhead with the lumber and paper. So AlGore lets them burn and the big timber companies get higher prices for their products.
The Constitution forbade Federal Lands ownership for good reason.
The fact that the forests were not allowed to go through the natural process of fire-rebuilding-fire-rebuilding is the single most important factor in why we're in our current situation.
It depends (I guess you knew I'd say that ;). There is nothing intrinsically wrong with reforestation, the problem was that the spread of goals was way too narrow. That "natural process" was abetted by human management for millennia. The presumption that nature "knows" how to recover after an unprecedented disturbance is instead an anthropogenic projection onto nature, usually out of a sense of guilt and futility for being accountable for such an enormous mess.
Add to that the droughts we've had, and the entire West is a box of matches.
What if I told you that at least some (if not all) of the drought was man-made? (Yep, it's quite possible; likely imho.)
The "enviro-wackos" have some valid points. Unfortunately, we're past the point of being able to let the forests fend for themselves.
We always were. You might want to read Thomas M. Bonnicksen's book: AMERICA’S ANCIENT FORESTS, From the Ice Age to the Age of Discovery; Department of Forest Science, Texas A&M University; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2000.
I do support most of the plan proposed by Bush, as it's the only choice we have now. As things get back to a more "normal" state, we do need to back off. That process will take longer than most of us will live though.
I am afraid you are giving Bush's plan way too much credit. It is correct in principle, but not in application.
Western forests are already overstocked. The Sierra Nevada alone produce a net (above fire and pest mortality) of 2.3 billion board feet annually. The Bush plan is to thin 1 billion board feet annually in California, Oregon, and Washington, COMBINED. Thinning, as proposed, COSTS a net of $500 per acre, or $100 billion dollars by the time they (supposedly) catch up AND assuming that the lawyers don't eat up all the money.
That's one big assumption.
Things in Chile are fine...the rest of South America remains problematic with many countries dissapearing into a self-made hole. Like it or not, the rest of Latin America needs an Augusto Pinochet in their near-term future. This will surely still up a debate, but Pinochet is singularly the reason Chile is NOT like the rest of South America. Chile is the only country in South America where you will go to jail if you try to bribe a cop.
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