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FOREST CONSERVATION NEWS TODAY
Chainsaw George - Bush forest fire plan: Log it all
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Forest Networking a Project of Forests.org, Inc.
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August 28, 2002
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by Forests.org
Some better pundits than I are superbly critiquing President Bush’s plans
to commercially log huge areas of America’s forests as a forest fire
protection plan. Below, Andrew Cockburn and Paul Krugman ravage Bush’s
ludicrous suggestion that heavy commercial logging will reduce wildfires.
They both make for very good reading. Cockburn notes the brazen political
opportunism in the policy’s announcement; and that North America’s forests
were born of fires, not destroyed by them. Krugman notes the proposed
policy is a new corporate welfare program. He concludes by noting that
wouldn’t it be nice if on some environmental issue “the Bush
administration came up with a plan that didn't involve weakened
environmental protection, financial breaks for wealthy individuals and
corporations and reduced public oversight?” America’s forest and
ecological sustainability depends upon the forest conservation movement
defeating the Toxic Texan’s horrible forest fire prevention proposal, and
coming up with ecologically sound alternatives.
g.b.
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ITEM #1
Title: Chainsaw George
Bush forest fire plan: Log it all
Source: Copyright 2002 Working for Change,
http://www.workingforchange.com/
Date: August 28, 2002
Byline: Alexander Cockburn, Creators Syndicate
George W. Bush, fresh off a brush-clearing operation at his Crawford,
Texas, ranch, snubbed the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, Africa, for a trip
to Oregon, where he vowed to fight future forest fires by taking a
chainsaw to the nation's forests and the environmental laws that protect
them.
In the name of fire prevention, Bush wants to OK the timber industry to
log off more than 2.5 million acres of federal forest over the next 10
years. He wants it done quickly and without any interference from pesky
statutes such as the Endangered Species Act. Bush called his plan "the
Healthy Forests Initiative." But it's nothing more than a giveaway to big
timber that comes at a high price to the taxpayer and forest ecosystems.
Bush's stump speech was a brazen bit of political opportunism, rivaled,
perhaps, only by his call to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for
oil drilling as a way to help heal the nation after the attacks of
September 11. That plan sputtered around for a while, but didn't go
anywhere in the end. But count on it: This one will.
Bush is exploiting a primal fear of fire that almost overwhelms the
national anxiety about terrorists. In one of the great masterstrokes of
PR, Americans have been conditioned for the past 60 years that forest
fires are bad ... bad for forests. It's no accident that Smokey the Bear
is the most popular icon in the history of advertising, far outdistancing
Tony the Tiger or Capt. Crunch.
But the forests of North America were born out of fires, not destroyed by
them. After Native Americans settled across the continent following the
Wisconsin glaciation, fires became an even more regular event, reshaping
the ecology of the Ponderosa pine and spruce forests of the Interior West
and the mighty Douglas-fir forests of the Pacific Coast.
Forest fires became stigmatized only when forests began to be viewed as a
commercial resource rather than an obstacle to settlement. Fire
suppression became an obsession only after the big timber giants laid
claim to the vast forests of the Pacific Northwest. Companies like
Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific were loath to see their holdings go up in
flames, so they arm-twisted Congress into pouring millions of dollars into
Forest Service fire-fighting programs. The Forest Service was only too
happy to oblige because fire suppression was a sure way to pad their
budget — along with the lobbying might of the timber companies they could
literally scare Congress into handing over a blank check.
Where did all the money go? It largely went to amass a fire-fighting
infrastructure that rivals the National Guard: helicopters, tankers,
satellites, airplanes and a legion of young men and women who are thrust,
often carelessly, onto the firelines. Hundreds of firefighters have
perished, often senselessly.
Since the 1920s, the Forest Service fire-fighting establishment has been
under orders to attack forest fires within 12 hours of the time when the
fires were first sighted. For decades, there's been a zero tolerance
policy toward wildfires. Even now, after forest ecologists have proved
that most forests not only tolerate but need fire, the agency tries to
suppress 99.7 percent of all wildfires. This industry-driven approach has
come at a terrible economic and ecological price.
With regular fires largely excluded from the forests and grasslands,
thickets of dry timber, small sickly trees and brush began to build up.
This is called fuel loading. These thickets began a breeding ground for
insects and diseases that ravaged healthy forest stands. The regular, low-
intensity fires that have swept through the forests for millennia have now
been replaced by catastrophic blazes that roar with a fury that is without
historical or ecological precedent.
Even so, the solution to the fuel problem is burning, not logging. The
Bush plan is the environmental equivalent of looting a bombed-out city and
raping the survivors. The last thing a burned-over forest needs is an
assault by chainsaws, logging roads and skid trails to haul out the only
living trees in a scorched landscape. The evidence has been in for
decades. The proof can be found at Mt. St. Helens and Yellowstone Park:
Unlogged burned forests recover quickly, feeding off the nutrients left
behind in dead trees and shrubs. On the other hand, logged-over burned
forests rarely recover but persist as biological deserts, prone to
mudslides, difficult to revegetate, and abandoned by salmon and deep
forest birds, such as the spotted owl, goshawk and marbled murrelet. They
exist as desolate islands inside the greater ecosystem.
Even worse, such a plan only encourages future arsonists. The easiest way
to clear cut an ancient forest is to set fire to it first. Take a look at
the major fires of the west this summer: The big blazes in Arizona and
Colorado were set by Forest Service employees and seasonal firefighters,
another big fire in California was started by a marijuana suppression
operation, fires in Oregon, Washington and Montana have been started by
humans.
In Oregon, more than 45,000 acres of prime ancient forest in the Siskiyou
Mountains were torched by the Forest Service's firefighting crews to start
a backfire in order to "save" a town that wasn't threatened to begin with.
The fires were ignited by shooting ping-pong balls filled with napalm into
the forest of giant Douglas-firs. By one estimate, more than a third of
the acres burned this summer were ignited by the Forest Service as
backfires. That's good news for the timber industry since they get to log
nearly all those acres for next to nothing.
Far from acting as a curative, a century of unrestrained logging has
vastly increased the intensity and frequency of wildfires, particularly in
the West. The Bush plan promises only more of the same at an accelerated
and uninhibited pace. When combined with global warming, persistent
droughts and invasions by alien insects species (such as the Asian long-
horned beetle) and diseases, the future for American forests looks very
bleak indeed.
ITEM #2
Title: Bush on Fire
Source: Copyright 2002, New York Times
Date: August 27, 2002
Byline: PAUL KRUGMAN, Opinion
Round up the usual suspects! George W. Bush's new "Healthy Forests" plan
reads like a parody of his administration's standard operating procedure.
You see, environmentalists cause forest fires, and those nice corporations
will solve the problem if we get out of their way.
Am I being too harsh? No, actually it's even worse than it seems. "Healthy
Forests" isn't just about scrapping environmental protection; it's also
about expanding corporate welfare.
Everyone agrees that the forests' prime evil is a well-meaning but
counterproductive bear named Smokey. Generations of fire suppression have
led to a dangerous accumulation of highly flammable small trees and
underbrush. And in some — not all — of the national forests it's too late
simply to reverse the policy; thanks to growing population and urban
sprawl, some forests are too close to built-up areas to be allowed to
burn.
Clearly, some of the excess fuel in some of the nation's forests should be
removed. But how? Mr. Bush asserts that there is a free lunch: allowing
more logging that thins out the national forests will both yield valuable
resources and reduce fire risks.
But it turns out that the stuff that needs to be removed — small trees and
bushes, in areas close to habitation — is of little commercial value. The
good stuff, from the industry's point of view, consists of large, mature
trees — the kind of trees that usually survive forest fires — which are
often far from inhabited areas.
So the administration proposes to make deals with logging companies: in
return for clearing out the stuff that should be removed, they will be
granted the right to take out other stuff that probably shouldn't be
removed. Notice that this means that there isn't a free lunch after all.
And there are at least three severe further problems with this plan.
First, will the quid pro quo really be enforced, or will loggers simply
make off with the quid and forget about the quo? The Forest Service, which
would be in charge of enforcement, has repeatedly been cited by Congress's
General Accounting Office for poor management and lack of accountability.
And the agency, true to Bush administration form, is now run by a former
industry lobbyist. (In the 2000 election cycle, the forest products
industry gave 82 percent of its contributions to Republicans.) You don't
have to be much of a cynic to question whether loggers will really be held
to their promises.
Second, linking logging of mature trees to clearing of underbrush is a
policy non sequitur. Suppose Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced that Waste
Management Inc. would pick up Manhattan's trash free, in return for the
right to dump toxic waste on Staten Island. Staten Island residents would
protest, correctly, that if Manhattan wants its garbage picked up, it
should pay for the service; if the city wants to sell companies the right
to dump elsewhere, that should be treated as a separate issue. Similarly,
if the federal government wants to clear underbrush near populated areas,
it should pay for it; if it wants to sell the right to log mature trees
elsewhere, that should be a separate decision.
And this gets us to the last point: In fact, the government doesn't make
money when it sells timber rights to loggers. According to the General
Accounting Office, the Forest Service consistently spends more money
arranging timber sales than it actually gets from the sales. How much
money? Funny you should ask: last year the Bush administration stopped
releasing that information. In any case, the measured costs of timber
sales capture only a fraction of the true budgetary costs of logging in
the national forests, which is supported by hundreds of millions of
dollars in federal subsidies, especially for road-building. This means
that, environmental issues aside, inducing logging companies to clear
underbrush by letting them log elsewhere would probably end up costing
taxpayers more, not less, than dealing with the problem directly.
So as in the case of the administration's energy policy, beneath the free-
market rhetoric is a plan for increased subsidies to favored corporations.
Surprise.
A final thought: Wouldn't it be nice if just once, on some issue, the Bush
administration came up with a plan that didn't involve weakened
environmental protection, financial breaks for wealthy individuals and
corporations and reduced public oversight?
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