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Are Luddites Lethal?
Ned Ludd hailed from Leicestershire, England and was credited with the idea that if workers
would just destroy laborsaving devices then peasant subsistence living would make a comeback. It didn't work in
the 19th century and it doesn't work now. There is no better example of Luddites in today's world that the "restore
nature" environmentalists who are racing neck and neck with Tom Daschle for the title of befuddler of the
week.
Sen. Daschle's problem is his friends - the ones who declared the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional just when
he had announced his latest plan to bash Bush. The enviro's problem is their enemies. It turns out that the advocates
of active management - forest thinning and proscribed burns - were correct all along. Following the environmentalist's
radical program of "nothing but nature" has created the worst wildfire situation ever and proven their
position untenable in both science and philosophy. Crown fires kill.
To be sure, the problems of the forest began long before the greens knew what color they were. For nearly a century,
it was government policy to put out fires started by lightening as soon as they started. Ponderosa pines have thick
bark and tall crowns (the area at the top where the leaves are) and low intensity fires actually help mature trees.
The competing small trees and underbrush are cleared away. By stopping the naturally occurring fires, the government
allowed the buildup of fuel load until today's fire becomes so intense that it reaches the crown and kills the
tree. Not only that, the fire jumps from crown to crown and spreads at a pace so rapid that it defies experience.
Smokey was a jokey.
Another factor is the current drought. Fires are starting earlier in the season, summer monsoons bring lightning
but not much rain. As a result, this year we have already seen some 20 major fires across 2.7 million acres. The
season is still so long that another 40 fires are projected.
Which brings us to the back-to-nature bunnies that run just like EverReady batteries - all the time - beating their
noble savage drums against human activity anywhere near the nexus with nature. Through political pressure from
know nothing dilettantes who live far away from the woods, through the threats of future lawsuits and through current
suits and injunctions, the greens have been successful over the last decade in disrupting the active management
of federal lands. As a result, the national forests of the West are so dense and the amount of fuel load they carry
so large that catastrophic fires over as much as 80 million acres of the 192 million-acre national forest system
are a distinct possibility.
How did they do this? Recall the Clinton era effort to ban roads and road building in the woods? Roads are how
firefighters get to the fire. According to federal reports, some 40 percent of the service's budget is earmarked
for defense against law suits or for studies to fend off anticipated law suits from future regulations. With that
kind of drain on the budget, the Forest Service projects that its active management programs have funds to clear
about two million acres a year. The job can be done by government - baring unforeseen circumstances - in just a
mere 40 years.
The Bush administration has proposed to hire timber companies to remove underbrush and to pay them with enough
marketable trees to make their effort worthwhile but restrict the harvest so as not to take the largest and oldest
trees. Even gadfly John McCain is with the Bush administration on this one. He recently urged environmental groups
to get a hold of their hostility to logging and help prevent forest fires. "We don't have money to have the
government fund it," McCain said, "The only way to thin the forests quickly enough to protect people
is to let timber companies earn a profit if they will do the job."
The answers to McCain were altogether predictable. The Sierra Club announced that it did not trust commercial loggers
who will likely cheat on their contracts and take out commercial timber while leaving the brush behind. They also
advised people who moved to the West not to build homes in the forest. A sister green group went even further.
They announced that they were not opposed to thinning just so long as no one made a profit and the work was done
with solar-powered chain saws.
The law suits to block cleanup efforts continue unabated. (See for yourself at www.fs.fed.us/forests.)
Therefore, the Forest Service continues today to spend funds attempting to protect its future plans from lawsuits,
legal appeals and injunctions.
Public opinion in the western states is three to one behind logging to prevent forest fires of such dangerous intensity,
according to recent polls. The people understand forests choked with flammable material. They like to build vacation
and retirement homes in the woods, maybe even log homes. They even understand that commercial logging has been
driven to extinction in some areas. Therefore, the thinning of small, non-commercial trees and salvage logging
from burned areas will have to be taxpayer subsidized.
What the citizens don't understand is why foolish government policies can't be changed or why the government far
away listens to a movement way past its better days instead of to the people who know what they are talking about.
The West is burning. Both human and animal habitats are going up in smoke. Like Klamath Falls, both political parties
are so afraid of the environmental movement they would rather let America burn than confront the green lobby. In
Washington, almost no one believes that the suburban voter can be educated about sensible environmental policy.
The government now owns about 42 percent of the land mass of the United States so Federal regulations guide firefighting.
Western governors are mobilizing to get the administration's ten-year active management plans agreed to and funded.
For the 'do-nothing" Senate and Tom Daschle, the fall election awaits.
And in the meantime, the fuel meets the flames.
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