Posted at 6:25 AM, PacificWith at least 20 dead and 2,600 homes destroyed, the fires that have ravaged at least 625,000 acres in southern California may come much closer to containment today as the extraordinary efforts of 13,000 firefighters get an assist from the weather, including a very unusual chance of rain and even snow at the higher elevations tonight.
The media will move on as soon as the fires diminish in their immediate threat to life and property, but sane people can only hope that the clean-up and rebuilding process is accompanied by a searching and thorough inquiry into the causes of the disaster --an undertaking that environmental activists will resist at every turn because a genuine inquiry will result in an indictment of almost every nostrum they hold dear.
My WeeklyStandard.com article this morning, "Up in Smoke," is a first installment in what should be an outpouring of critiques of the federal policies which came to dominate Southern California land use during the Clinton years. One of the conclusions of any fair review of the past ten years: "The Bush administration, as in so many areas, inherited eight years of disastrous extremism dressed up as 'science'--described by Bruce Babbitt as 'walking lightly on the land.' Babbitt's tenure as Secretary of the Interior, seen through the smoke of California and the charred remains from Arizona, Colorado, and South Dakota, is clearly the most damaging to the environment in the history of the department."
The most outrageous action among political elites concerning the fires is the sudden abandonment of Democratic opposition to President Bush's "Healthy Forests Initiative." Helen Dewar's article in the Washington Post states that the Senate was "[w]hipped into action by the deadly wildfires that are ravaging Southern California," but that is simply dishonest. Democratic obstructionism was once again revealed to have cost Americans dearly, and the Democrats leading the obstructionism --especially California's Barbara Boxer-- fled the field. The "Senate" didn't change course. The Senate Democrats did. Dianne Feinstein cobbled together some face-saving amendments, and the bill passed by a vote of 97 to 1 after a delay of many months.
If I was a burned out homeowner, or the family of a victim, I would be beyond outrage not only with the desperate hypocrisy of the left, but also with the media's willingness to allow the Senate Democrats to slip away without explaining why their opposition to forest thinning has evaporated this week.
The new bill addresses only part of the problem, and House Republicans should demand that the original bill be kept free of the wishful thinking and ideological posturing of the environmental lobby. How many disasters does it take, after all, to expose these people and their fraudulent theories?
The Endangered Species Act should be next up for thorough amendment --it is a disastrous and ineffective exercise in granting enormous power to incompetent federal bureaucrats that brings ever increasing hardships and little in the way of genuine conservation benefits. The GOP has got to realize that the public long ago woke up to the facts about the environmental movement's extremism on the issue of species protection.
The party of TR can recover the legacy of genuine conservation, but not by refusing to expose lousy science as lousy science, and bureaucratic ineptitude as just that. The Party fears getting labeled as anti-environmental, but the disasters of the past few years are the backdrop against which serious reforms can be demanded and explained.
Many in elite media will of course distort every attempt to recover a genuine conservation ethic that is now hostage to wild extremism of the left...