Regarding Senators willing to stand-up to them, nobody like Jon Kyl of AZ. Bingaman is one of them (his solution is to spend more money to deal with the after-effects) and Domenici is pretty much silent (he's up for re-election and needs some support from the less radical enviro types). The ABQ Journal had an editorial on June 26 which had a rebuke (mild as it was) of the fringe groups:
Thin Forest Instead of Spinning Blame
There's plenty of blame to go around for the tinderbox condition of the West, according to an environmental activist and an advocate of natural fire.
Don't single out environmentalists for overgrazing, overzealous fire suppression and other factors that go back more than a century, said John Horning of Forest Guardians in Santa Fe and Tom Swetnam, director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research in Tucson.
Their remarks came in the wake of a statement from the Western governors meeting in Phoenix. But neither the governors nor anybody else is laying a century of accumulating forest fuels at the environmentalists' door.
The governors criticized efforts over the past couple of years to stall or block removal of those fuels by weeding out smaller trees. And that was not a criticism of environmentalists in general, but of a far smaller group of litigious activists.
For example, the watershed above Santa Fe, grown thick as a matchbook, is a disaster waiting for a spark. It is imperative that it be thinned. Santa Fe Mayor Larry Delgado doesn't blame "environmentalists" for a century's worth of mistakes. He blames environmental extremist Sam Hitt for threatening a lawsuit to keep foresters from starting to rectify those mistakes now.
There is plenty of blame to go around -- but the full-time activist fringe is too self-righteously obsessive to shoulder its share, much less adopt a cooperative approach to reducing today's threat.
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