It wasn't the environmentalists that screwed up though. This billboard is wrong. When the forests were being managed, was it imprudent to put out all fires that occurred there? Putting out fires in managed forests is, from everything I've seen, reasonable and prudent.
That the forsts were turned into unmanaged forsts without any sort of "transitional" effort is what caused the problem, and that transition was forced by the environmentalists.
Good article on the cumulative effects of lobbying and litigation efforts of extreme environmental groups to affect management policies that result in fuel loading and limited access.
http://www.timberharvesting.com/vserver/hb/display.cfm?MagazineKey=4&IssueKey=157&SectionKey=150&ArticleKey=177
Out Of The Woods: Besieged By Federal Policies by
Cheryl Larson (excerpts - this was written two years ago but is still good.)
..."Today we are besieged by a flood of federal policies. They include the Roadless Area Conservation Rule and Planning Rule, the Long-term Road Management Rule, Interior Columbia River Basin Ecosystem Management Project (ICBEMP), Off-highway Vehicle EIS and Plan Amendments, as well as new and pending listings to the Endangered Species Act. All of these new proposals, in addition to the requirements of the ESA, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and so on, reduce the term "local management" to little more than myth.
"The district managers of our forests are as frustrated and overwhelmed as we are. They can no longer perform their jobs; jobs they were trained to do and have years of experience in doing. The multi-layering of past policies, appeals and litigation have resulted in stymieing active forest management. These new proposals only add to the heap, culminating in the president's Roadless initiative. The prohibition of building new roads is of relative little consequence, when you take into account that the procedures of preserving "roadless characteristics" are to be applied to lands that presently have roads. We all know how the ESA has become a tool to drastically reduce timber harvests on National Forest System lands over the last decade. So, too, these roadless characteristics will give environmental groups the loopholes they need to eliminate timber harvests, grazing, mining and most forms of motorized recreation from all NFS lands.
"We know this is their goal, as Chad Hanson of the Sierra Club stated boldly in an opinion piece, recently published in a local paper, that he has been working hard for the last 10 years to ban all logging on our national forests. Of late, there have been numerous encounters and conflicts between multiple-use advocates, and those who would prefer that all public lands be managed as wilderness. It appears to us that the president's initiative has provided them with the means to accomplish their desires; if not in the individual forest plans, then in the courts which they will not hesitate to make use of."...
"I found some of the remarks made by our Chief of the Forest Service, Michael Dombeck, in his May 22 address to the American Forest and Paper Assn., excerpts of which were recently reported in a local newspaper, to be rather naÔve for one who is in charge of our national forest. He apparently believes that fuels, left to build over the last decade and a half, can be dealt with in a mere five years and that then the threat of catastrophic wildfire will never again rear its ugly head.
"In the Roadless DEIS there are charts depicting the acres and incidences of fire on national forests since 1910. Has it not occurred to the planners that the dramatic increase of fire since 1984 directly correlates to the decrease of logging during that same period? Without the responsible, ongoing treatment of logging to continually remove trees that are susceptible to disease, insects and blow-down, our communities are at the mercy of fire. Without first mechanically removing the bulk of the fuels, catastrophies will become the rule, rather than the exception."...
With hindsight , it wasn't prudent. Now everything is destroyed instead of the brush and small trees.
The forests we had were being managed in a way that would make them tinderboxes. The so-called unmanaged were also. We were managing them by stopping the fires.
Now , if the timber industry paid 100% of the cost for stopping fires on their land and the tax payers paid $0 , that wouldn't be bother me. They would be creating a hazard to adjoining forests though.