[NormsRevenge]

...66% of fuel reduction projects planned by the U.S. Forest Service for national forests in California were stalled by administrative appeals—mostly filed by environmental groups—in fiscal years 2001 and 2002.

"You can't point to a specific project that was appealed," he said, "but because so many of these projects are appealed, the Forest Service has stopped proposing them in areas where there is a lot of resistance."

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? - Should said same groups who stand in the way of these fuel reduction projects not also be subject to legal recourse, etc?

Or, is that option of legal action agianst such orgs no longer available due to legislation that Clinton signed in the 90s that provided certain "environmental" orgs immunity from prosecution?

Just curious. Thanks

[Jorge]

Somebody I worked with actually defended the forest fires as opposed to logging because he said they were "natural".

This is the mentality we are up against.

[tiki]

I'm glad that the press is actually printing this stuff. It isn't like no-one has known it before it was just that the enviros had louder voices and more money.

[logician2u]

"There's not enough money in the Interior appropriations bill to clear all the areas that need clearing. We need timber harvesting."

The President's "healthy forests initiative" calls for thinning 2.5 million acres of federal forests a year for 10 years. (Run this timber through sawmills and the Canadian dollar would sink like a lead weight.)

Anybody want to guess how many acres the fedgov has in forested land (and we can leave out Alaska, just to make it fair)?

Randal O'Toole is another critic of the Forest Service's record in managing the natural resources it is entrusted with. In a Cato Institute paper from last year, he observed:

The real problem with forest fire fighting is not a shortage of funds, but too much money. Congress has given the Forest Service a virtual blank check to put out fire and is now giving it a near-blank check to thin forestlands. When you have a blank check to do something, that becomes the only thing you want to do even if something else would work better at a far lower cost.

Similar perverse incentives can be found in the Forest Service timber program. Federal programs indirectly reward forest managers for losing money on timber sales while penalizing them for making money or doing good things for the environment. As long as these perverse incentives are in place, we can't trust the Forest Service to sell timber without the environmental safeguards that President Bush wants to remove.

No hard-and-fast rules can apply to all 600 million highly diverse acres of federal land. Commercial timber sales could improve forest health in some areas. Complete fire suppression may make sense in other areas. Yet the current incentives push the Forest Service to make the wrong decisions in most places.

The enviros want to keep everything untouched by humans, everyplace, at all all times, an any cost in lives and property.

Bush (and presumably Pombo) want to thin it all so it won't burn.

Seems to me there is a middle ground, and O'Toole is occupying it at the moment.

[Tailgunner Joe]

bump

[philman_36]

[farmfriend]

Rights, farms, environment ping.

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[js1138]

Whatever became of the goat idea?

[GSWarrior]

California's Santa Ana winds "blew the fires back up the hills into the conifer forests," said Robert Nelson, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Maryland and a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

I don't claim to be a climatologist but I don't think this guy knows what he is talking about. Santa Ana winds blow in from the desert, down through the mountains and valleys and out onto the Pacific.

[AuntB]

Bumping for a later read!