A Simple Wooden Box

While flying back to Colorado from Michigan yesterday, I happened to sit beside an impeccably-dressed Air Force member named David, who, I soon learned from our small talk, was escorting the remains of a comrade killed in Afghanistan back home to his family in Colorado Springs. We talked a bit about that, and about the huge mortuary the military houses at Dover, Delaware, where David was based, before moving on to safer topics, like sports, but the reality of the situation struck home again after we landed, when David carefully reached beneath the seat in front of him and produced a plain wooden box with a shiny brass handle on it. This, I suddenly realized, was the airman David was bringing home.

There was also a small metal plate affixed to the box, which I presume carried the person's name, but I resisted the temptation to look closer and read it, fearing it might seem a ghoulish invasion of privacy.

I followed David out through the terminal and into a blazingly-beautiful summer day, and I noticed, as he made his way through the crowd, that no one took any notice of the plain wooden box with the brass handle he was carrying.

Canada Cashes-in While America Pets Owls

Canadian sawmills are working overtime to satisfy China's insatiable appetite for wood imports, while American sawmills sit shuttered and rusting, because we evidently care more about "saving" spotted owls than saving American jobs. We were once a timber exporter; now we're an importer. Then some people wonder why our "trade deficit" is so out of whack. And this at a time when tens of millions of acres of federal forest are dying or burning, due to a failure of the federal government to aggressively and responsibly manage these lands.

It's another example of how far the U.S. has fallen, in terms of competitiveness and a lost instinct for economic self-preservation, that Canada is cashing-in on the Chinese building boom while we sit complacently on the sidelines, handing out welfare checks and petting spotted owls.

Shotgun Conservation?

The Orwellian term of the day is "shotgun conservation," which describes a crazy federal plan to save endangered spotted owls by butchering barred owls, a competing species, which we now know are the real reason for the spotted owl's decline, not the loss of "old growth" forests.

Natural selection favors the barred owl. Yet natural selection apparently isn't permitted by the Endangered Species Act, which requires that every species be saved, even if the cold, hard laws of nature say otherwise.

Talk about playing God.

The timber industry in the Pacific Northwest was decimated, thousands of high-paying jobs were destroyed and dozens of timber towns were brought to their knees based on the claim that the loss of "old growth" forests was to blame for the spotted owl's decline. But it belatedly became apparent that a rival species, doing what it does naturally, is invading the spotted owl's habitat and wiping it out. And the only response the feds can muster is a bizarre scheme to protect one species by killing-off the other.

The spotted owl saga is certainly among the most sordid in the annals of the ESA. But does anyone sue the federal government for regulatory malpractice and fraud? Is anyone called to account for the clear-cutting of jobs and opportunity in the former timber towns of Oregon and Washington State? The sad answer is "no" and "no."

It's hard to afford a good lawyer when you're living on food stamps.

It's a Start

What do you do with an out-of-control, reckless, irresponsible teenager, who has too much allowance for his own good?

You start by taking away his car keys.

Confiscating the credit card comes next.

The Price We All Pay

Chalk-up this $3.4 billion as part of the price we Americans must pay for inept and wasteful bureaucracy at the federal level. Whether $3.4 billion is a just or reasonable settlement can't be determined, because Department of Interior record-keeping was so shoddy that even millions of dollars spent on forensic accounting, in an attempt to reconstruct a reasonably-accurate set of records, was futile.

American Indians paid a high price for this, tragically, but so have the rest of us, since we taxpayers -- not "the government" -- will be footing the bill for decades of federal bumbling.

Keep Pulling the Plug, Doug

It's a shame that U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn is backpedaling on his support for federal funding cuts that could have led to staff reductions at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado. He's obviously caving-in to political pressure from others in the Colorado congressional delegation, who like to crow about all the techno-wizardry the lab supposedly cranks out but really only care about the federal revenues and jobs it keeps in state.

Lamborn was right the first time on NREL, even if he was right by mistake. It's time to pull the plug on the lab. It lab has been sucking on the taxpayer teat since 1974, with precious little to show for it in terms of renewable energy breakthroughs, and all it's really good for is keeping a lot of federal technocrats employed in Colorado. NREL has been studying solar and wind power breakthroughs since I was in junior high school, yet neither technology even today can compete with conventional energy sources -- which is why solar and wind must rely on taxpayer subsidies and government mandates to increase their meager market share.

NREL has failed, in other words, if one looks objectively at the results. If what the lab produces is so damn valuable, it ought to be able to support itself on the royalties it receives from technology transfer deals with private companies. But the lab received only $1 million in royalty returns last year, reports the Denver Post, while "investing" $350 million of your tax dollars in research. That's not just a lousy return on investment, it's corporate welfare of the worst kind.

Wind and solar power were held-up as our energy portfolio saviors way back in the mid-1970s, two or three energy crises ago, yet the same windy and sunny promises are being repeated 35 years later -- showing how little real progress the wizards inside NREL have made. Doug's original push to pull the plug on NREL was completely justified, even he's backing away now and calling it a mistake.

While Bureaucracies Fiddle . . .

A former Forest Service chief coined the term "analysis paralysis" to describe how too much red tape, too much analysis, too many legal fights and too much prolonged public "process" was tying his agency in knots, making it impossible to deal with public lands challenges in a coherent and timely fashion. This Arizona inferno is one result of analysis paralysis. And it might have been prevented, as this report points out, if federal public lands policymaking wasn't such a slow, complicated, belabored process.

The complexity and contentiousness involved in getting almost anything done on federal lands has gotten to the point where managing them has become virtually impossible. Federal agencies therefore have defaulted to a policy of complacency, passivity and non-management. That's made it impossible to get on top of the forest health crisis ravaging the West. And the consequences are becoming even more visible, from runaway wildfires to the bark beetle blight that is browning-up vast swaths of Colorado.

Imagine the public outrage if a rogue band of loggers clearcut 336,000 acres of national forest in an act of mass vandalism. People would be going to jail. But when 336,000 acres is destroyed, due in large part to federal incompetence, mismanagement and paralysis, all we get is a collective sigh. The destruction of America's national forests is a scandal that can and should be laid at Uncle Sam's doorstep. Yet a clueless public thinks these are all acts of nature or God.

Nature is playing a part, but don't let anyone fool you: This is a man-made disaster.