Ridecamp: [RC] The Fire This Time - From the Wall Street Journal

>From Jerry Fruth-AERC Trails Chairman


The Fire This Time
In December 1995, a storm hit the Six Rivers National Forest in 
northern California, tossing dead trees across 35,000 acres and 
creating dangerous fire conditions. For three years local U.S. Forest 
Service officials labored to clean it up, but they were blocked by 
environmental groups and federal policy. In 1999 the time bomb blew: 
A fire roared over the untreated land and 90,000 more acres.

Bear this anecdote in mind as you watch the 135,000-acre Hayman fire 
now roasting close to Denver. And bear it in mind the rest of this 
summer, in what could be the biggest marshmallow-toasting season in 
half a century. Because despite the Sierra Club spin, catastrophic 
fires like the Hayman are not inevitable, or good. They stem from bad 
forest management -- which found a happy home in the Clinton 
Administration.

In a briefing to Congress last week, U.S. Forest chief Dale Bosworth 
finally sorted the forest from the tree-huggers. He said that if 
proper forest-management had been implemented 10 years ago, and if 
the agency weren't in the grip of "analysis paralysis" from 
environmental regulation and lawsuits, the Hayman fire wouldn't be 
raging like an inferno.

Mr. Bosworth also presented Congress with a sobering report on our 
national forests. Of the 192 million acres the Forest Service 
administers, 73 million are at risk from severe fire. Tens of 
millions of acres are dying from insects and diseases. Thousands of 
miles of roads, critical to fighting fires, are unusable. Those facts 
back up a General Accounting Office report, which estimates that one 
in three forest acres is dead or dying. So much for the green mantra 
of "healthy ecosystems."

How did one of America's great resources come to such a pass? Look no 
further than the greens who trouped into power with the last 
Administration. Senior officials adopted an untested philosophy known 
as "ecosystem management," a bourgeois bohemian plan to return 
forests to their "natural" state. The Clintonites cut back timber 
harvesting by 80% and used laws and lawsuits to put swathes of land 
off-limits to commercial use.

We now see the results. Millions of acres are choked with dead wood, 
infected trees and underbrush. Many areas have more than 400 tons of 
dry fuel per acre -- 10 times the manageable level. This is tinder 
that turns small fires into infernos, outrunning fire control and 
killing every fuzzy endangered animal in sight. In 2000 alone fires 
destroyed 8.4 million acres, the worst fire year since the 1950s. 
Some 800 structures were destroyed -- many as a fire swept across Los 
Alamos, New Mexico -- and control and recovery costs neared $3 
billion. The Forest Service's entire budget is $4.9 billion.

That number, too, is important. Before the Clinton Administration 
limited timber sales, U.S. forests helped pay for their own upkeep. 
Selective logging cleaned up grounds and paid for staff, forestry 
stations, cleanup and roads. Today, with green groups blocking timber 
sales at every turn, the GAO says taxpayers will have to spend $12 
billion to cart off dead wood.

It's no accident that two of the main Clinton culprits -- former 
director of Fish & Wildlife Jamie Rappaport Clark and former Forest 
Service boss Michael Dombeck -- have both landed at the National 
Wildlife Federation, which broadcasts across its Internet 
homepage, "Fires Are Good."

Fixing all of this won't be easy. After 30 years of environmental 
regulation, the Forest Service now spends 40% of its time 
in "planning and assessment." Even the smallest project takes years. 
Mr. Bosworth has identified the problems, but fixing them will 
require White House leadership and Congressional cooperation.

One solution would be to follow the lead of private timber companies, 
whose forests don't tend to suffer such catastrophic fires. Their 
trees are an investment; they can't afford to let them burn. 
Americans should feel the same way about theirs.

Updated June 21, 2002

 




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