Scorched earth: another season of catastrophic wildfires caused by government policies and activist obstruction tactics threatens the environment and people.

The 2004 forest-fire season could set new records for destruction. By the first week of July, hundreds of thousands of acres in the Western states and Alaska were already ablaze. By mid-July, thousands of people were fleeing their homes in California and Nevada, as flames engulfed forests and nearby communities. And the real fire-hazard months of August and September have yet to arrive.

Forestry experts have warned us for years. The catastrophic wildfires that have reduced millions of acres of national forest to ashes over the past decade have proven their warnings correct. But government policies and the obstructionist tactics of the hard-core environmental extremists continue to cause incalculable devastation to the environment and the economy.

The wildfire season of 2003 brought another round of massive conflagrations; in southern California alone, the raging infernos took 22 lives, destroyed more than 3,500 homes and turned 750,000 acres of forest and grassland into smoke and cinders. Forest experts have been predicting that 2004 will see a blazing repeat of the 2003 firestorms in the bone-dry, brush-clogged forests of the West. California, Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Montana are all likely to face a scorching summer-fall fire season, with the attendant desolation to lives, livelihoods and environmental quality.

Ironically, the radical environmental policies responsible for the tinderbox situation in the Western forests were crafted, say the environmentalists, to protect the forests. The effect has been just the opposite. Now, forest scientists point out, the harmful effects of the policies have gone on so long that more massive destruction is inevitable. Even some of the nation's most prized scenic and environmental gems could soon be incinerated: Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, Shasta, Sequoia and other forest "crown jewels."

According to Dr. Thomas Bonnicksen, a forestry professor at Texas A&M University, the Tahoe National Forest surrounding beautiful Lake Tahoe is a prime holocaust candidate. "Tahoe could burn and if it does, it will be virtually unstoppable," he said in February of this year. "I don't think people in the Tahoe basin fully appreciate exactly how dangerous it is," he added.

Real environmentalists should take note: Dr. Bonnicksen is an ecological prophet whose analyses of the disastrous policies in our national forests have repeatedly been proven accurate. Last August, before the deadly firestorms raged though southern California, he sent a written statement to the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources warning of the impending havoc. Bonnicksen, who has testified many times before congressional committees, said in his statement:

   I have been working in California's
   forests since the late 1960s. Never
   have I seen anything more dangerous
   than the overgrown, beetle-ravaged
   forests of the San Bernardino and San
   Jacinto Mountains. I am concerned
   for the safety of people living in communities
   surrounded by these forests.

His similar warnings about the Tahoe forest this past February should be heeded. Bonnicksen and other forest experts have been urging more intensive logging and thinning of forests miles away from residential areas. "That's where the fires come roaring into communities from," Bonnicksen says. "These flames are 200 feet tall, burning at 2,000 degrees, moving at sometimes a mile a minute."

An April 1999 U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) study entitled Catastrophic Wildfire Threats warned that "39 million acres on national forests in the interior West are at high risk of catastrophic wildfire" due to unnatural and excessive tree density, massive buildup of undergrowth, disease and insect infestation. Since then, the estimated at-risk forestland in our national forests has increased by another 31 million acres.

Lock It Up, Burn It Down

Some indication of the situation in our national forests can be gleaned from this fact: In 1992, the Forest Service sold 8 billion board feet of timber from national forest land. In 2002, it sold only 1.2 billion. All those beautiful trees were saved from the loggers' rapacious chain saws--right? No, those trees were consigned instead to bug infestations, disease, overstocking--and the ash heap.

Dr. Robert Nelson, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Maryland, echoes Bonnicksen's grim monitories, warning that more destruction is on the way, if we don't change our disastrous course. "In the 1990s, we didn't do anything to speak of for fire reduction purposes all around the country," Nelson says, noting that environmental activist opposition to logging and controlled burning has produced a tremendous underbrush fuel load. With the elimination of commercial logging, says Nelson, the task of fuel reduction has fallen on the U.S. Forest Service, "which suffers from bureaucratic inertia, obstacles from environmentalists, and doesn't have the money to do it anyway. We're looking at a ten year period of major government groups predicting disaster because of lack of fire-prevention efforts."

In 1998, a GAO study said that in southern California "high levels of fuels for catastrophic fires" were in the process of "transforming much of the region into a tinderbox." Another GAO report said, "In summary, the Forest Service's decision-making process is broken." Professor Nelson points out that the millions of acres of forestland unnecessarily destroyed by fires over the past decade prove the process is broken. "We ought to turn over responsibility for the lands to state and local authorities," says Nelson.

House Resources Chairman Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) points out that eco-extremists have done everything imaginable to stop timber harvesting, prevent forest thinning and controlled burns, and stop responsible firefighting. Last year Pombo took on a group of radical enviros operating within the Forest Service who brought a lawsuit to stop the dropping of fire retardant on forest fires, claiming the retardant was toxic to wildlife habitat. As Rep. Pombo and various scientists have pointed out, the retardant is fertilizer!

The Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE), an eco-activist group, claimed that the government's use of nearly 18 million gallons of retardant is not in compliance with the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. The Forest Service should be required to conduct environmental impact statements and endangered species biological assessments on the use of the retardant, say FSEEE activists.

"Honestly, are the people at FSEEE drinking the retardant?" asked Pombo. "Certainly something is responsible for retarding common sense and reality over there [at the FSEEE]." With more than 70 million acres of forest land at extreme risk of catastrophic wildfire, says Pombo, the proposal to restrict retardant drops is "insane." "These radical environmental lawsuits are not just frivolous anymore. They are irresponsible and dangerous," he noted. "Forest fires ruin wildlife habitat, contaminate water supplies, pollute the air, incinerate houses and kill people."

Rep. Pombo noted that the San Bernardino National Forest is a prime example of environmental policy run amok. "In the case of the San Bernardino National Forest, Southern California Edison was trying to remove trees that were growing along their power lines," he stated. However, since "timber harvesting is no longer allowed there, there is no sawmill in the area, so the company had to pay to have the timber dumped in a landfill." Pombo points out that in recent years environmental extremists have successfully used the appeals process to stall or stop 66 percent of fuel reduction projects planned by the U.S. Forest Service for national forests in California.

Enviro Politics

Last year a partial victory for sanity was obtained in a bipartisan effort that won passage of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, which was signed by President Bush. The law aims at reducing the red tape and delays that have stopped even salvage logging of burned timber. It has allowed forestry officials to move forward in the removal of a small portion of the dangerously overgrown forest tinderboxes.

However, it is wholly inadequate to solving the national forest dilemma. The new law focuses primarily on thinning timber and brush near urban areas. And, as a trade-off for the militant environmentalists, it classifies millions of acres of endangered harvestable timber as "old growth," thereby granting it a sacred status that makes it off limits to cutting. Unfortunately, the insects and fire that ravage these "old growth" forests pay no heed to the legislators' designation.

Professor Bonnicksen points out that some large trees as well as underbrush must be cut, and he has criticized Forest Service restrictions that put most trees larger than 30 inches in diameter off limits to logging. One of the main sponsors of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), has sent the Forest Service a strongly worded letter, sternly charging that it must not allow cutting of old-growth timber.

Senator Feinstein is trying to have it both ways: She wants to keep her high rating with the environmental groups, while protecting herself from the political backlash that is certain to come from California voters when the devastating fires of 2003 are repeated again this year. On March 15 of this year, Sen. Feinstein was the headliner at a much-publicized forest fire prevention forum in South Lake Tahoe. "I am here today to call upon the Tahoe community to once again unite--this time to help save the lake and surrounding basin from a conflagration which could turn the forests to ash, which could send sediment tumbling into the lake, which could destroy homes and businesses," she declared. Feinstein sounded like Rep. Pombo as she attacked forest policies and dilatory appeals that have strangled the forest cleanup efforts.

Forest Service spokesman Rex Norman stated that Tahoe forest are at eight times their normal density and that about 40 percent of the Tahoe Basin is at risk of fire. If the environmental logjams that have prevented logging and prescribed burning are not overcome, Norman said, "nature would take care of the over-density problem with consequences that would be totally unacceptable." Those consequences include massive air pollution, mud slides and pollution of the lake and surrounding rivers and streams, vast stands of scenic forest blackened, animals and animal habitat destroyed, and valuable timber products and recreational resources lost.

Many people have been surprised that the ultra-liberal Senator Feinstein has been in the forefront of the effort to reverse the harmful national forest policy trends. They shouldn't be; her grandstanding on the Healthy Forests initiative and the Tahoe forum is a calculated political move. Even though the Sierra Club and other groups opposed to the law have attacked her for supporting the measure, she is firmly in the "Green" camp. She gets high marks from most environmental groups, as she has for her entire Senate career. For years she supported the environmental legislation that produced the policies she now claims to oppose. She is a proud sponsor of the current McCain-Lieberman legislation on global warming that would saddle the U.S. with a UN regulatory nightmare, threaten our sovereignty and cripple our economy with hundreds of billions of dollars in environmental costs.

Senator Feinstein and other politicians know that political retribution awaits those politicians who will be seen as responsible for the conflagrations that already are darkening the western skies and will continue to ravage forest lands and communities this year (and next year, and the next, and ...). Even Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who is more militantly left-wing than Feinstein, has felt the heat. She too is a sponsor of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act. Like Feinstein, she knows that the fires of voter anger are being stoked by the criminally bankrupt policies. It is so-called "green" politicians like Senators Feinstein and Boxer who created these policies. Unless voters replace them and their culpable cohorts in Congress, there will be little left that is truly green in our national forests.