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Is Radical Environmentalism Fueling Western Fires 6/28/2002 Is Radical Environmentalism Fueling Western Fires? 410,000 acres, destroyed at least 423 homes in Arizona at the time of this writing. -—Colorado has suffered equivalent damage.. As raging, drought-propelled wildfires rip through western states, condemnation of the Clinton administration forest policy are tearing through state and local governments. “We've got to clean up these forests,” Arizona Gov. Jane Hull told reporters this week from a meeting of western governors in Phoenix. Those comments were made as wildfires consumed 351,000 acres of forest and more than 390 homes in her state. Colorado, also ablaze, was already been declared a disaster area. Critics say the previous administration enacted policies at the behest of environmental groups, including the elimination of 80 percent of logging on federal lands and the roadless area initiative, which hinder fire control efforts and maintenance by allowing deadwood and underbrush to accumulate. “It is scandalous how the Clinton administration neglected our National Forests at the urging of wrong-thinking environmental groups,” said Tom Randall, director of the John P. McGovern, M.D., Center for Environmental and Regulatory Affairs for the National Center for Public Policy Research. “Today we are losing millions of acres of forests, the habitat they provide, and the animals and birds—even people—that call these forests 'home,'” he added. As of June 20, the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, says we have lost 1,857,500 acres of federal forest. Putting that number in perspective, it is double the 10-year average for wildfire destruction by this date and 50 percent greater than the destruction of 2000, which, until now, was the modern record. In 2000, Montana was burning. “These fires were predictable,” said then-Gov. Mark Racicot, a Republican critical of Clinton-era forest policy. “In one day last week we lost 85 million board feet of timber on 7,000 acres. That is twice the annual harvest in our state of 800,000 acres,” he told Environmental News Network. Environmentalists were quick to respond to Racicot's comments, saying that Republicans were using the wildfires to push for increased logging and road building in national forests. “The timber industry and its allies are quickly blaming decreased timber sales in national forests for the wildfires, with the hope of whipping the public into a hysteria to reverse attitudes and trends about national forest protection,” Mathew Koehler, spokesman for the National Forest Network told the Environmental News Network. Tom Powers, economist with the University of Montana, added that only 25 percent of the wildfires in Montana in 2000 occurred in roadless areas. Then Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman also responded to Racicot's charges, telling Fox News Sunday that federal funding for fire preparedness and treatment was higher under Clinton than it was for several previous years. But extra money is not always the problem. Sen. John Kyl (R-Arizona) told KTAR-AM last week that, today, the Forest Service spends 40 percent of its annual budget defending itself in legal challenges lodged by radical environmental groups. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth, concurs with Racicot's observations of two years ago. He said that this year's fires can also be attributed to National Forests that are just too dense. Last week, Bosworth told a congressional briefing that the radical green movement's agenda, enacted by the Clinton administration, returned National Forests to a “natural” state. As a result, he estimates that our National Forest has more than 400 tons of dry fuel per acre. The reduction of logging also reduces revenue, according to the Government Accounting Office. So, instead of logging companies paying the government for timber and clearing out deadwood in the process, taxpayers now fork over $12 billion dollars a year to cart it away. “We have so many more trees out there than under natural conditions,” he told The Washington Times. “There might have been 40 to 50 Ponderosa Pine [trees] per acre at one time. Now you've got several hundred per acre.” Those trees, along with heavy underbrush and fallen deadwood, mean wildfires burn hotter and often sterilize the soil, killing potential new growth. The hotter the fire, the longer it takes the burn areas to rebound from their moonscape-look to meadows of new growth. Forest Service records show that stewardship of national forest land has reduced the number of acres lost to wildfires annually from 50 million acres in the 1930s to 3 million acres in the 1970s. Pressure from environmentalist groups has reversed that trend so that by the end of Clinton's term 8 million acres were lost annually. That number has climbed exponentially since then. According to The Wall Street Journal, Bosworth told Congress that of the 192 million acres overseen by the U.S. Forest Service, 73 million are at risk from the severe fires we are seeing out west. Complicating the problem, tens of millions of acres are dying from insects and disease. “The Bush administration has been slow to remedy the situation,” added Randall. “Now the president must act courageously and quickly to institute sound forest management policies that will prevent future catastrophes.” For more information on environmental policy and wildfires: http://www.safnet.org/policy/psst/psst20.html http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/CSFS/ http://www.firehouse.com/wildfires/ |
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