Playing with fire: Environmental rules fuel massive inferno

WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Wednesday, October 9, 2002 | By Sarah Foster

[stalin]

You guys want to blame environmentalists because you don't like them but they are only a small part of the problem. I don't like some of them but it isn't wise to make up science and ignore the evidence of what really caused the problem.

That's like trying to blame Bin Laden for the deficit. Maybe he has won a small battle by giving cowardly politicians an excuse to spend more money than we take in but he didn't create our budget. We did.

Lands logged in the past are the ones that are the most suceptible to fires now because the largest trees that can survive fires were removed and the small trees and brush were left to flurish with more light. Now they are the tinderboxes.

The only logging used by by industry that prevents fires in the short run is clear cutting but that is so destructive to the environment that it is economically worse than no logging at all.

Blaming envinormentalists that had almost nothing to do with the problem isn't going to solve the problem any more than blaming Bin Laden for the deficit is going to solve the deficit. It was very poor managment practices of the past that caused this. The environmentalists of today had virtually no influence on those policies.

It is only very recently that environmentalists have power to stop logging in a few managed forests. That's not what made these fires terrible. It was fire supression , first and formost , combined with short term profit taking instead of managment by the timber industry in the recent and distent past. It is the forest service that is responsible for this mess , not environmentalists.