Posted on 10/30/2003 7:32:06 AM PST by Isara
Fires: As Southern California burns, lawmakers may learn something about forests and safety. Perhaps harvesting a few trees isn't such a bad idea after all.
It's too bad it takes 600,000 charred acres (at last count), at least 16 lost lives, some 1,600 homes destroyed and a damage tab of $2 billion or more to knock some sense into the nation's forest management.
But Congress may have learned at least something from the wildfires in California. At this writing, the Senate was expected to get off the dime and finally consider a bill that would help prevent future disasters by giving greater leeway to logging.
This is President Bush's Healthy Forests legislation, passed by the House back in May. Its key provisions limit judicial and administrative review of tree-thinning and brush-clearing projects. Federal agencies overseeing public lands would have a freer hand in letting loggers do their work.
Environmental groups fiercely oppose the bill, and they've been able to slow it down in the Senate.
But some Democrats, including California's Sen. Dianne Feinstein, realize something has to be done about the millions of acres of federal lands that are full of fire fuel — brush that hasn't been cleared or burned in decades, or tinder-dry trees killed by drought and beetle infestation. Feinstein has come up with a compromise that bears a fair resemblance to the House bill.
So some form of Healthy Forests seems to stand a good chance of getting into law.
No one, including the spotted-owl set, denies that there's a high fire danger in the Western forests. The peril was vividly clear as newscasts showed trees lighting up like bonfires in Southern California mountain towns north of San Bernardino. The idea of letting loggers solve at least some of this problem by harvesting trees, thinning forests and creating a few local jobs is perfectly logical.
Everyone wins, since both the loggers and the public come out ahead. And it's very much in the historic tradition of public forest lands, which were established to manage timber resources, not to wall them off.
Fire control is a complicated task, covering private and public lands and many types of vegetation and terrain, from grasslands and chaparral to dense forests. Healthy Forests deals with only one part of the fire ecology.
But because of it, federal forests in years to come will be safer as well as healthier, and the work of conserving them will be easier. Such is the benefit of balanced forest policy, of which we've seen too little until recently.
It's not that they don't see, it's that there are hidden incentives.
Outfits like Weyrhauser which own huge tracts of private timber land would have the value of their holdings increased if there was no logging on federal lands to compete with them.
Mega-wealthy people who like their home in the wilderness will not have to feel crowded if common people are unable to build due to not being able to get fire insurance
Whenever you ask "why don't they", the answer can be discovered by looking for who benefits from conditions the way they are
The point is that brush clearance is necessary but it isn't free. No logging company, for example, wants chaparral. If we want to protect these areas from future fires it will require expensive brush clearing and dangeous controlled burns.
I agree. Now we need to convince our congressional representatives of that. The "Healthy Forests Inititiative" isn't written to do much for Southern California. I'm sure hoping that will change.
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