The U.S. Forest Service can't even responsibly manage the hundreds of millions of acres in its vast inventory, as anyone knows who has driven through Colorado, or read about the similar devastation sweeping across much of the West. It seems a joke, therefore, to read that the agency is also taking an interest in helping private landowners manage their lands.
If this were merely an effort by the feds to encourage private conservation, I would applaud. Too much emphasis is placed on government-centered conservation (which is an abject failure, as the forest health crisis demonstrates), to the neglect of private-sector alternatives, which frequently have shown much better results.
But nothing is innocent where the federal government is concerned. The deeper agenda is to get taxpayers to "incentivize" -- meaning subsidize -- private conservation efforts (even more than already takes place, through conservation easement tax benefits and the Department of Agriculture's Conservation Reserve Program). With federal money comes federal strings, meaning federal control. This threatens to corrupt, and co-opt, the whole idea of private conservation.
Although the feds tout their credentials as preservationists and "protectors," facts "on the ground" tell a more damning story -- one of massive mismanagement of public resources, resulting in a perfect storm of wildfire, disease, insect infestation and benign neglect. Most private forests are much better cared-for than publicly-owned counterparts, because a private owner's personal stake and (yes) profit motive generally make him or her a better steward of the resource than red tape-bound bureaucrats going through the motions.
Public land managers have precious little to lecture private owners about. They would do better to focus on getting their act together.
Showing posts with label forest health crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label forest health crisis. Show all posts
Friday, August 13, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Righteous Indignation
This piece by Denver Post Editorial Page Editor Dan Haley captures the anger I feel every time I drive through Colorado's beetle-ravaged forests. Instead of defaulting to the cop-out position, that it's all the fault of climate change, Haley lays the blame where it belongs -- with unsound policy, paralyzed federal land managers and tree-hugging extremists:
"Katrina was a natural disaster followed by gross incompetence. This was gross incompetence that allowed for a natural disaster.
Pine beetles are native and a natural part of the eco-system, and forests need them, and fire, to regenerate. But decades of neglect — of short-sighted politicians foolishly choosing to put out fires later than pay now to create a healthier forest, and of knee-jerk environmentalists opposing every logging proposal — have finally taken root. Our forests may have looked thick and lush, but they were overcrowded and unhealthy.
We began ruining them more than a century ago when we started putting out fires that would otherwise cleanse forests of downed trees, underbrush and dry pine needles. And when well-intentioned yet overzealous tree-huggers made logging a sin a few decades ago, problems only mounted."
I began writing about the forest health crisis in the late 1990s, while at The Washington Times (which I picked up on from an unlikely source: Government Accountability Office reports), but it had been a recognized problem for at least a decade before that, dating back to the Yellowstone infernos of the late 1980s. The great Alston Chase sounded the alarm with his prescient book, "Playing God in Yellowstone," but the alarm went un-heeded.
It became much more obvious in 2002, when the Hayman and other wildfires ignited public awareness. It was widely acknowledged at that point -- before climate change became the default excuse for everything, and a convenient way for federal eco-crats and politicians to evade responsibility -- that there was a significant man-made component to the crisis. Here is a piece I wrote on the subject that year.
But by then, getting ahead of the problem was itself a problem, given the neglect this issue had received at most levels of government. Paralysis and defeatism were plaguing federal land agencies, which largely had lost the ability to actively manage forests, due to a constant barrage of lawsuits and a "public process" that worked to the advantage of professional activists.
Greens prefer non-management to traditional multiple-use management, because the latter translates into timber-cutting, mining, drilling, etc., and reeks to them of the evil profit motive. Quiet and reverent communing with nature is the only legitimate use for public land in their eyes. Cutting out the cancer, when it was still a manageable problem, was opposed, because it opened the door to "logging." That selective "logging" could have actually helped restore forest health was heresy. Better to see the forests die and burn than to give an inch on dogma.
Politicians (like Mark Udall, Ken Salazar and others) slept through most of this history, and only recently awoke from their slumbers, offering responses that are mostly too little, too late. They also share responsibility for this scandalous -- and it is a scandal, arguably criminal is nature, given the vast destruction of public assets involved -- chain of events. Public anger over the Gulf Coast oil spill is understandable, but where's that same righteous indignation, and where are the presidential promises of a little ass-kicking, over a forest health disaster that has been incrementally destroying Western landscapes for more than 20 years, without an adequate federal response?
"Katrina was a natural disaster followed by gross incompetence. This was gross incompetence that allowed for a natural disaster.
Pine beetles are native and a natural part of the eco-system, and forests need them, and fire, to regenerate. But decades of neglect — of short-sighted politicians foolishly choosing to put out fires later than pay now to create a healthier forest, and of knee-jerk environmentalists opposing every logging proposal — have finally taken root. Our forests may have looked thick and lush, but they were overcrowded and unhealthy.
We began ruining them more than a century ago when we started putting out fires that would otherwise cleanse forests of downed trees, underbrush and dry pine needles. And when well-intentioned yet overzealous tree-huggers made logging a sin a few decades ago, problems only mounted."
I began writing about the forest health crisis in the late 1990s, while at The Washington Times (which I picked up on from an unlikely source: Government Accountability Office reports), but it had been a recognized problem for at least a decade before that, dating back to the Yellowstone infernos of the late 1980s. The great Alston Chase sounded the alarm with his prescient book, "Playing God in Yellowstone," but the alarm went un-heeded.
It became much more obvious in 2002, when the Hayman and other wildfires ignited public awareness. It was widely acknowledged at that point -- before climate change became the default excuse for everything, and a convenient way for federal eco-crats and politicians to evade responsibility -- that there was a significant man-made component to the crisis. Here is a piece I wrote on the subject that year.
But by then, getting ahead of the problem was itself a problem, given the neglect this issue had received at most levels of government. Paralysis and defeatism were plaguing federal land agencies, which largely had lost the ability to actively manage forests, due to a constant barrage of lawsuits and a "public process" that worked to the advantage of professional activists.
Greens prefer non-management to traditional multiple-use management, because the latter translates into timber-cutting, mining, drilling, etc., and reeks to them of the evil profit motive. Quiet and reverent communing with nature is the only legitimate use for public land in their eyes. Cutting out the cancer, when it was still a manageable problem, was opposed, because it opened the door to "logging." That selective "logging" could have actually helped restore forest health was heresy. Better to see the forests die and burn than to give an inch on dogma.
Politicians (like Mark Udall, Ken Salazar and others) slept through most of this history, and only recently awoke from their slumbers, offering responses that are mostly too little, too late. They also share responsibility for this scandalous -- and it is a scandal, arguably criminal is nature, given the vast destruction of public assets involved -- chain of events. Public anger over the Gulf Coast oil spill is understandable, but where's that same righteous indignation, and where are the presidential promises of a little ass-kicking, over a forest health disaster that has been incrementally destroying Western landscapes for more than 20 years, without an adequate federal response?
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Loving the Forests to Death
A report in today's Helena Independent Record highlights one of the great ironies, and great outrages, of our time: that the groups who claim to love our forests the most are doing everything in their power to destroy them, by obstructing any federal mitigation efforts that involve the harvesting of trees.
Our Western forests are in crisis, with beetles and wildfires destroying vastly more trees every year than the timber industry ever could, even in its heyday. Yet as the story below illustrates, litigious "tree-huggers" are the single biggest obstacle to saving the trees. Bigger than budget constraints. Bigger than bureaucratic inertia. Bigger than "analysis paralysis."
The story pretty much speaks for itself, but it's not an isolated case. Many a national forest has been stymied in its efforts to respond to the crisis, by extremists who would rather see the forests die en masse, and go up in flames, than see a single tree removed by human hands.
Managers of the Helena National Forest had a plan to counter invading mountain pine beetles and buffer nearby communities from the wildfire threat, which involved culling parts of the overly-dense forest in an effort to reduce "fuel loads" and cut out the cancer. That was in 2003. But because there was a commercial element to the plan -- because some of the logs could be milled and put to productive and profitable uses -- the zero-cut crowd, true to form, went running to the federal courts, demanding it be stopped.
Six years later, the plan has been upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But at this point the damage has been done, and there's not much forest left to save.
It's outrageous. It's criminal. It's madness. But it's typical of how knee-jerk obstructionism by gang green is helping to wipe out the very forests they claim to love -- and explains why federal agencies have been so ineffectual in countering the forest health crisis. The 3 groups that helped kill this forest, just for the record, are Alliance of the Wild Rockies, Native Ecosystems Council and the Wildwest Institute. An army of rampaging loggers couldn't have done this forest more harm.
Here's the story:
Court rules in favor of logging project
By Eve Byron
Three environmental groups couldn’t quash a project on national forest lands meant to lessen the threat of wildfires near Clancy and Unionville southwest of Helena, but it appears that the tiny mountain pine beetle has made the Helena National Forest rethink its plan.
In a decision issued Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the Helena forest’s 2003 plan to undertake commercial thinning and other efforts to remove small trees and vegetation on about 1,500 acres. However, Helena District Ranger Duane Harp said the prescription is only good now for about 100 acres containing Douglas fir trees, since about 90 percent of the trees on the remaining 1,400 acres — mainly lodgepole pines — are now dead.
“We are obviously extremely pleased that the Ninth Circuit has found in our favor. But it’s bittersweet news because with the current beetle epidemic, the vast majority of the project area, which was proposed for timber harvest, is now dead,” Harp said. “You can’t use the prescription for green trees on dead trees.
“So I guess we’ve implemented the no-action alternative.”
Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance of the Wild Rockies, said that if the Helena forest had worked with his organization and the two others that began appealing the lawsuit in 2004 — Native Ecosystems Council and the Wildwest Institute — that some compromise might have been reached to allow the project to move forward. He said the groups did agree with the forest that some thinning should be done on forest lands near homes while the lawsuit was under way, and that his group has worked with the Helena forest and others in the past to craft projects that wouldn’t be litigated.
“Our main focus was that the forest’s own five-year review of its forest plan showed that it was failing to ensure the viability of species,” Garrity said. “The forest service never disclosed that report to public, as originally planned, and has never addressed that concern even though it continues to implement the same flawed forest plan.”
He added that the appeals court’s decision wasn’t “published,” meaning it can’t be used as precedent, and that they disagree with the findings of the three-member judicial panel that issued the ruling. Garrity said they’re considering whether to ask for an opinion involving more of the appeals court’s judges.
Planning for what became known as the Clancy/Unionville Project began in 1997, because the forest service and some of the neighbors in the area thought this might reduce the threat of large-scale catastrophic wildfire. Harp said he also hoped thinning the forest here would also create a habitat less conducive to mountain pine beetles.
A final Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision for the project was issued in 2000, but was successfully appealed and sent back to then-forest Supervisor Tom Clifford by the regional forester. Additional analysis was conducted and a new decision issued in February 2003. It’s that decision that’s been in litigation until this week’s Ninth Circuit Court ruling.
Garrity and others have long disputed that logging is good for reducing the threat of wildfire forestwide; they’d rather see it implemented only near homes for that purpose. They also argue that it’s impossible for the forest to “log its way out of the beetle epidemic.”
“British Columbia has a huge beetle infestation, and they log like crazy in Canada,” Garrity said. “There aren’t any scientific, peer-reviewed papers that say you can log your way out of a beetle infestation.
He adds that once the needles fall off of the dead trees after a year or two, the fire hazard actually is reduced. The danger increases, however, when those trees eventually fall to the forest floor, creating ladder fuels that fires use to creep up a tree from the ground into the crowns of trees.
But Harp said that at this point, the fire hazard has significantly increased in the Clancy and Unionville areas due to the standing dead trees.
Harp said they plan to remove “hazard trees” lining roads in the area that are at risk of falling on vehicles or people. They also may try to sell the dead trees as part of a commercial harvest plan, but will have to do additional studies to look at the impacts. He doesn’t expect any logging, other than possibly for hazard trees, in the area this year, but he wants to proceed as quickly as possible because the longer the dead trees stand in the forest, the less value they have to sawmills.
“We now have to decide if we will do any harvest at all under the Clancy Unionville decision,” Harp said. “We will however, move forward with the prescribed burning and other treatments that are outside the timber harvest units.”
Our Western forests are in crisis, with beetles and wildfires destroying vastly more trees every year than the timber industry ever could, even in its heyday. Yet as the story below illustrates, litigious "tree-huggers" are the single biggest obstacle to saving the trees. Bigger than budget constraints. Bigger than bureaucratic inertia. Bigger than "analysis paralysis."
The story pretty much speaks for itself, but it's not an isolated case. Many a national forest has been stymied in its efforts to respond to the crisis, by extremists who would rather see the forests die en masse, and go up in flames, than see a single tree removed by human hands.
Managers of the Helena National Forest had a plan to counter invading mountain pine beetles and buffer nearby communities from the wildfire threat, which involved culling parts of the overly-dense forest in an effort to reduce "fuel loads" and cut out the cancer. That was in 2003. But because there was a commercial element to the plan -- because some of the logs could be milled and put to productive and profitable uses -- the zero-cut crowd, true to form, went running to the federal courts, demanding it be stopped.
Six years later, the plan has been upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But at this point the damage has been done, and there's not much forest left to save.
It's outrageous. It's criminal. It's madness. But it's typical of how knee-jerk obstructionism by gang green is helping to wipe out the very forests they claim to love -- and explains why federal agencies have been so ineffectual in countering the forest health crisis. The 3 groups that helped kill this forest, just for the record, are Alliance of the Wild Rockies, Native Ecosystems Council and the Wildwest Institute. An army of rampaging loggers couldn't have done this forest more harm.
Here's the story:
Court rules in favor of logging project
By Eve Byron
Three environmental groups couldn’t quash a project on national forest lands meant to lessen the threat of wildfires near Clancy and Unionville southwest of Helena, but it appears that the tiny mountain pine beetle has made the Helena National Forest rethink its plan.
In a decision issued Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the Helena forest’s 2003 plan to undertake commercial thinning and other efforts to remove small trees and vegetation on about 1,500 acres. However, Helena District Ranger Duane Harp said the prescription is only good now for about 100 acres containing Douglas fir trees, since about 90 percent of the trees on the remaining 1,400 acres — mainly lodgepole pines — are now dead.
“We are obviously extremely pleased that the Ninth Circuit has found in our favor. But it’s bittersweet news because with the current beetle epidemic, the vast majority of the project area, which was proposed for timber harvest, is now dead,” Harp said. “You can’t use the prescription for green trees on dead trees.
“So I guess we’ve implemented the no-action alternative.”
Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance of the Wild Rockies, said that if the Helena forest had worked with his organization and the two others that began appealing the lawsuit in 2004 — Native Ecosystems Council and the Wildwest Institute — that some compromise might have been reached to allow the project to move forward. He said the groups did agree with the forest that some thinning should be done on forest lands near homes while the lawsuit was under way, and that his group has worked with the Helena forest and others in the past to craft projects that wouldn’t be litigated.
“Our main focus was that the forest’s own five-year review of its forest plan showed that it was failing to ensure the viability of species,” Garrity said. “The forest service never disclosed that report to public, as originally planned, and has never addressed that concern even though it continues to implement the same flawed forest plan.”
He added that the appeals court’s decision wasn’t “published,” meaning it can’t be used as precedent, and that they disagree with the findings of the three-member judicial panel that issued the ruling. Garrity said they’re considering whether to ask for an opinion involving more of the appeals court’s judges.
Planning for what became known as the Clancy/Unionville Project began in 1997, because the forest service and some of the neighbors in the area thought this might reduce the threat of large-scale catastrophic wildfire. Harp said he also hoped thinning the forest here would also create a habitat less conducive to mountain pine beetles.
A final Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision for the project was issued in 2000, but was successfully appealed and sent back to then-forest Supervisor Tom Clifford by the regional forester. Additional analysis was conducted and a new decision issued in February 2003. It’s that decision that’s been in litigation until this week’s Ninth Circuit Court ruling.
Garrity and others have long disputed that logging is good for reducing the threat of wildfire forestwide; they’d rather see it implemented only near homes for that purpose. They also argue that it’s impossible for the forest to “log its way out of the beetle epidemic.”
“British Columbia has a huge beetle infestation, and they log like crazy in Canada,” Garrity said. “There aren’t any scientific, peer-reviewed papers that say you can log your way out of a beetle infestation.
He adds that once the needles fall off of the dead trees after a year or two, the fire hazard actually is reduced. The danger increases, however, when those trees eventually fall to the forest floor, creating ladder fuels that fires use to creep up a tree from the ground into the crowns of trees.
But Harp said that at this point, the fire hazard has significantly increased in the Clancy and Unionville areas due to the standing dead trees.
Harp said they plan to remove “hazard trees” lining roads in the area that are at risk of falling on vehicles or people. They also may try to sell the dead trees as part of a commercial harvest plan, but will have to do additional studies to look at the impacts. He doesn’t expect any logging, other than possibly for hazard trees, in the area this year, but he wants to proceed as quickly as possible because the longer the dead trees stand in the forest, the less value they have to sawmills.
“We now have to decide if we will do any harvest at all under the Clancy Unionville decision,” Harp said. “We will however, move forward with the prescribed burning and other treatments that are outside the timber harvest units.”
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Disorder in the Courts, Devastation in the Forest
I've been writing about Bill Clinton's roadless rule since it was approved nearly 8 years ago, as one of his last actions in office. But even I've lost track of how many related court cases are going, and how many often contradictory court rulings have been made, in this seemingly endless, seemingly unresolvable, controversy.
We just had court ruling 10 or 11, I think. And this one -- like the rulings before it -- resolves nothing and only deepens the confusion. I defy readers to make sense of the situation, as described by the AP:
"SAN FRANCISCO — A federal magistrate judge on Tuesday scaled back a 2006 decision that reinstated a Clinton-era ban against new road construction and development on millions of acres of national forest.
Two years ago, Judge Elizabeth Laporte in San Francisco invalidated a 2005 Bush administration rule that overturned the 2001 "Roadless Rule," which protected 58.5 million acres of federal land in about 40 states. But in August, a federal judge in Wyoming invalidated President Clinton's Roadless Rule, prompting the Bush administration to request that the two judges modify their conflicting rulings.
In response, Laporte on Tuesday reduced the geographic scope of her 2006 ruling, so that the road construction ban would apply only to national forests in 10 western states. The ban doesn't apply to national forests in states such as Colorado and Wyoming, because those states are in the district overseen by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, rather than the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Laporte's move is only a temporary fix. Federal appeals courts in San Francisco and Denver both are expected to rule on the case next year, and road construction rules also could change under President-elect Barack Obama's incoming administration."
The reporter does his best, but doesn't (and can't) do justice to the complexity of the situation, which would require a book, rather than a wire story, to fully explain (any literary agents out there interested in such a book, please drop me a line). Here one gets a Reader's Digest Condensation of a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners public lands battle that demonstrates, I would hope, the impossibility of having any coherent public lands policy when every decision is hashed-out (and turned into hash) in court. It shows, as well, that such conflicts ultimately get us nowhere, whether we support the roadless concept or not.
I do not support it.
Clinton's actions constituted a typically slick attempt to overturn multiple-use management on 60 million acres of national forest, and turn those acres into de-facto wilderness areas, without going through Congress. That dishonesty -- that unwillingness to say what the real agenda was, while using euphemisms like "roadless areas" as obfuscations -- still angers me, as it angers many in the West.
But the Clintonistas and gang green, rather than admit that they were trying to pull a fast one, and retreat when they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar, have been trying ever since to legitimize the illegitimate, and to secure their ill-gotten trophy. They know they would lose in the court of public opinion, and probably in Congress, if these roadless areas were proposed as wilderness areas. The public understands that this means severe access restrictions and the throwing out of multiple use. So the exclusionists try to win from judges what they can't get from Congress. Chaos and confusion have been the result.
And roadless advocates are kidding themselves if they imagine that the Obama administration is going to settle the matter, once and for all, in their favor. Now that the matter is tangled up in the courts, it will stay in the courts. Even the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-benevolent Obama can't override the federal judiciary. And the other side has access to the courts as well.
The roadless push was also terribly ill-timed, since the wildfire threat and forest health crisis (which already was apparent when Clinton left office), if we're going to combat them, will require more access to the forests, not less. But this all circles back to a fundamental disagreement (already touched on in my earlier post about Terry Barton and Smokey Bear) between those who want the forests left to themselves, with man and his management techniques subtracted from the equation, and those, like me, who believe that we can responsibly manage the forests for multiple uses, balancing economic and ecological values, and be a force for good, as well as for ill.
We've been chasing our tails in circles now for 8 years, while the forest health crisis -- a crisis that demands decisive action, not paralysis -- deepens around us.
The full impact of that crisis, and the economic devastation it will bring to Colorado and the American West, will be clear to anyone who takes the shortcut between Breckenridge and Keystone ski resorts, as I did last weekend. Once green forests are a sickly mustard brown. It's now obvious to the untrained eye that all these trees are dead or dying. It's only a matter of time before the brown needles are shed and the skeletons start blowing over, littering the landscape and blocking (and perhaps closing) the road -- if they don't go up like a torch first. A moonscape will follow, destroying the views from the million dollar homes nearby and driving many winter visitors to more bucolic settings.
Riding the chairs at Keystone, on a very windy day, I worried that the brown giants nearest the lift line could snap and fall, bringing disaster. It was frightening and depressing. And it's happening everywhere in Colorado, and in many Western states.
Yet the vocational activists who profess to love the forests most -- the tree hugging industry -- stand mute and passive in the face of the devastation, creating chaos and paralysis by playing their usual games in court and blaming a man-made crisis on natural causes or climate change. And worse, they want to severely restrict access to a third of these forests, impeding any possible response, through their roadless agenda.
But perhaps roadless areas serve a secondary purpose for gang green now. This way, fewer Americans will be able to venture far enough onto the "public" lands to see the destruction all this pointless conflict, all this costly litigation, all this paralysis, all this stupidity has wrought. They'll be able to hide this scandal, and their culpability in it, from the public eye.
Out of sight, out of mind. Right?
We just had court ruling 10 or 11, I think. And this one -- like the rulings before it -- resolves nothing and only deepens the confusion. I defy readers to make sense of the situation, as described by the AP:
"SAN FRANCISCO — A federal magistrate judge on Tuesday scaled back a 2006 decision that reinstated a Clinton-era ban against new road construction and development on millions of acres of national forest.
Two years ago, Judge Elizabeth Laporte in San Francisco invalidated a 2005 Bush administration rule that overturned the 2001 "Roadless Rule," which protected 58.5 million acres of federal land in about 40 states. But in August, a federal judge in Wyoming invalidated President Clinton's Roadless Rule, prompting the Bush administration to request that the two judges modify their conflicting rulings.
In response, Laporte on Tuesday reduced the geographic scope of her 2006 ruling, so that the road construction ban would apply only to national forests in 10 western states. The ban doesn't apply to national forests in states such as Colorado and Wyoming, because those states are in the district overseen by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, rather than the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Laporte's move is only a temporary fix. Federal appeals courts in San Francisco and Denver both are expected to rule on the case next year, and road construction rules also could change under President-elect Barack Obama's incoming administration."
The reporter does his best, but doesn't (and can't) do justice to the complexity of the situation, which would require a book, rather than a wire story, to fully explain (any literary agents out there interested in such a book, please drop me a line). Here one gets a Reader's Digest Condensation of a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners public lands battle that demonstrates, I would hope, the impossibility of having any coherent public lands policy when every decision is hashed-out (and turned into hash) in court. It shows, as well, that such conflicts ultimately get us nowhere, whether we support the roadless concept or not.
I do not support it.
Clinton's actions constituted a typically slick attempt to overturn multiple-use management on 60 million acres of national forest, and turn those acres into de-facto wilderness areas, without going through Congress. That dishonesty -- that unwillingness to say what the real agenda was, while using euphemisms like "roadless areas" as obfuscations -- still angers me, as it angers many in the West.
But the Clintonistas and gang green, rather than admit that they were trying to pull a fast one, and retreat when they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar, have been trying ever since to legitimize the illegitimate, and to secure their ill-gotten trophy. They know they would lose in the court of public opinion, and probably in Congress, if these roadless areas were proposed as wilderness areas. The public understands that this means severe access restrictions and the throwing out of multiple use. So the exclusionists try to win from judges what they can't get from Congress. Chaos and confusion have been the result.
And roadless advocates are kidding themselves if they imagine that the Obama administration is going to settle the matter, once and for all, in their favor. Now that the matter is tangled up in the courts, it will stay in the courts. Even the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-benevolent Obama can't override the federal judiciary. And the other side has access to the courts as well.
The roadless push was also terribly ill-timed, since the wildfire threat and forest health crisis (which already was apparent when Clinton left office), if we're going to combat them, will require more access to the forests, not less. But this all circles back to a fundamental disagreement (already touched on in my earlier post about Terry Barton and Smokey Bear) between those who want the forests left to themselves, with man and his management techniques subtracted from the equation, and those, like me, who believe that we can responsibly manage the forests for multiple uses, balancing economic and ecological values, and be a force for good, as well as for ill.
We've been chasing our tails in circles now for 8 years, while the forest health crisis -- a crisis that demands decisive action, not paralysis -- deepens around us.
The full impact of that crisis, and the economic devastation it will bring to Colorado and the American West, will be clear to anyone who takes the shortcut between Breckenridge and Keystone ski resorts, as I did last weekend. Once green forests are a sickly mustard brown. It's now obvious to the untrained eye that all these trees are dead or dying. It's only a matter of time before the brown needles are shed and the skeletons start blowing over, littering the landscape and blocking (and perhaps closing) the road -- if they don't go up like a torch first. A moonscape will follow, destroying the views from the million dollar homes nearby and driving many winter visitors to more bucolic settings.
Riding the chairs at Keystone, on a very windy day, I worried that the brown giants nearest the lift line could snap and fall, bringing disaster. It was frightening and depressing. And it's happening everywhere in Colorado, and in many Western states.
Yet the vocational activists who profess to love the forests most -- the tree hugging industry -- stand mute and passive in the face of the devastation, creating chaos and paralysis by playing their usual games in court and blaming a man-made crisis on natural causes or climate change. And worse, they want to severely restrict access to a third of these forests, impeding any possible response, through their roadless agenda.
But perhaps roadless areas serve a secondary purpose for gang green now. This way, fewer Americans will be able to venture far enough onto the "public" lands to see the destruction all this pointless conflict, all this costly litigation, all this paralysis, all this stupidity has wrought. They'll be able to hide this scandal, and their culpability in it, from the public eye.
Out of sight, out of mind. Right?
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