Posted on 06/10/2002 3:46:30 PM PDT by ElkGroveDan
The conflict between radical environmentalists and the logging communities of the Pacific Northwest over spotted owls and old growth forests has become a modern morality play. The outcome is tragic on two counts.
First, the effects on loggers and their families have been devastating. In the name of saving the owl, environmentalists succeeded in shutting down logging in an area the size of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut combined. The logging industry has lost billions of dollars, loggers have lost tens of thousands of jobs, and communities throughout the Northwest have closed schools and hospitals as local residents have turned to food stamps and sunk into a culture of poverty.
Spit at, yelled at and called "tree murderers," these basically decent people have been made to feel like moral scoundrels. Ecoterrorists have sabotaged their equipment and booby trapped trees with spikes that break chain saws and threaten life and limb. After one logger's death at the hands of ecoterroists, environmental extremists claimed that a man's life for a tree's life is just retribution.
If these actions promoted some good cause, such as saving owls and trees, there might have been a brighter side to this story. But here is the second tragedy: what the environmentalists want to do is worse for trees, and probably also worse for owls, than what the logging interests have in mind.
Spotted owls, it turns out, are not endangered after all. In fact the Northwest is crawling with them. Moreover, owls seem to do better in forests that have been logged and regenerated than in forests whose trees are 200 years old and older - the ones environmentalists want to declare off limits.
Even more important, there is nothing natural or beneficial about trees living for hundreds of years. As the canopy gets thicker, plant and animal life die out on the ground below. Major disturbances, usually fire, are nature's way of rejuvenating the life cycle of a forest. So in the modern era, where we actively suppress fires, logging replaces the benefits of fire and contributes to the health of forests.
These facts are documented in fascinating detail by Alston Chase in his new book, In a Dark Wood.
A committed environmentalist himself, Chase does much more than show how the leading environmental organizations are wrong about the Northwest. He shows that these organizations are wrong in their solutions to just about every problem relating to trees and endangered species. The fundamental problem is a fallacious belief in the balance of nature - the idea that nature would be in stable, self-regulating equilibrium but for the actions of human beings. From this vision stems the notion that nature knows best and that the ideal public policy is one of nonintervention.
Anyone familiar with the basics of evolution knows that this theory must be wrong. Random disturbance, not permanence or order, governs nature. And that's a good thing. Twenty thousand years ago most of North America was covered by huge sheets of ice. Fortunately, major climate change occurred. Evolution is characterized by extreme fluctuations in animal and plant populations. Change, not stability, is why the giant redwoods and Douglas firs exist at all today.
Yet under the influence of the Clinton administration, all major government agencies take the view that stable ecosystems will remain in healthy equilibrium if nature is preserved in its "original" state and human intervention is held at bay. The National Park Service was the first to endorse this view, in the late 1960s, and Chase described the devastating consequences in an earlier book, Playing God in Yellowstone.
Far from remaining stable, national parks when left alone have become overpopulated with elk, moose and deer. These ungulates destroy willow and aspen which sustain a host of creatures including beavers and grizzly bears. Yet, instead of abandoning a faulty theory, the Park Service responded to the embarrassing decline in grizzly bears in Yellowstone by expanding the range of the "ecosystem" it claimed needed to be left alone - from 2 million acres in 1980 to 6 million in 1986 to 18 million in 1991.
The idea of a stable ecosystem is one of several myths that dominate the rhetoric of misguided environmentalism. Another myth is that vast numbers of species are becoming extinct. For example, in her book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson claimed that the robin, which today is thriving, was on "the verge of extinction." More recently, Harvard's E. O. Wilson estimated that we are losing 27,000 species a year and the World Wildlife Fund warned that "we may kill one-fifth of all species of life on this planet in the next 20 years." In fact, the most thorough, most exhaustive and most authoritative study done to date - for the highly respected International Union for the Conservation of Nature - concludes that "the current rate of extinction is about one [species] per year."
Another myth is that when Columbus came to America vast ancient forests stretched from sea to shining sea and that today most of them are lost forever. For example, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups have claimed that old growth forests of the Northwest today are only 10 percent of their size at the time the white settlers arrived. The facts are otherwise. American forests today are more extensive than at the time of Columbus. One reason is that native Americans engaged in extensive burning - to assist in hunting as well as forest management. For similar reasons, when the settlers in the early 1800s reached Oregon and Washington - what is now spotted owl territory - there was probably less old growth than there is today.
Time and again, Chase shows, leading environmental organizations have ignored science, ignored history, ignored reality to promote their own agenda. The spotted owl did not become an issue because radical environmentalists actually cared about the bird. Instead, they needed for political reasons a "charismatic" creature - one the public would find cute and cuddly, as opposed to a minnow like the snail darter.
To "prove" that the owl was endangered, the anti-logging environmentalists got one of their own to produce a study estimating that there were fewer than 3,000 such birds and that their numbers were in swift decline. However, the author of this study had never actually seen a spotted owl! Later research estimated that there are from 6,000 to 9,000 spotted owls in California and perhaps an equal number in Oregon and Washington.
Moreover, mounting evidence suggests that clear cutting - the infamous practice of removing all trees on a patch of land - when consistent with modern techniques of forest management is precisely what is needed to rejuvenate forests, encourage biological diversity and improve the overall environmental health of a region. By contrast, the environmentalists' success at preventing logging is creating a powderkeg. Absent smaller fires or logging, America's forests are ripe for really big fires - the kinds that are destructive to humans, forests and wildlife alike.
Yet undeterred by reason or science, radical environmentalism pushes full steam ahead. According to Vice President Al Gore, we are reaching "the point beyond which an ecological collapse is inevitable" because "we have tilted so far toward individual rights." The Clinton administration is working on that problem by removing as many rights as possible. The Endangered Species Act is expanding the authority of government like a runaway train. And the administration's solution to the crisis in the Northwest extends the reach of government way beyond spotted owls - to virtually every creature or plant that crawls or swims or sprouts green leaves.
A Fish and Wildlife Service plan proposes to map America into 52 separate ecosystem units. Some environmentalists are pushing a plan that would keep humans off half of the country's land. And under the biodiversity treaty, power to preserve ecosystems would be removed from elected officials and placed in the hands of United Nations bureaucrats.
It is obvious why people in power want more power. But why would environmentalists ignore reality and promote policies that are bad for the environment?
The reason is psychological. Chase observes that ancient forests and wildlife sanctuaries are the playgrounds of the affluent, who join environmental organizations backed by the largest foundations and corporations. These environmental organizations have huge budgets and occupy high-rent offices in Washington, D. C. They are out of touch with ordinary people and, increasingly, they are out of touch with the needs of the environment as well.
Dr. Goodman is President of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a public policy research institute in Dallas, Texas.
Ask the folks in Denver tonight.
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