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Peace at any cost is a prelude to war!
The 1988 Yellowstone National Park fire provided a frightening look into one
of these supernovas. Massive fuel buildup and an irresponsible, early
decision to "let it burn" left an area larger than the state of Delaware —
over one-third of this crown jewel of the park system — blackened and
smoldering. When officials finally did decide to fight the blaze, it was too
late; even with 25,000 firefighters the $120 million suppression effort could
not contain the inferno. It burned for months until finally dowsed by rain.
"After declining fairly steadily for 75 years," the GAO reported, "the
average number of acres burned by wildfires annually on national forests
began to rise over the last decade, nearly quadrupling to about
three-quarters of a million acres per year. Virtually all of this rise is
attributable to the increasing number of very large fires." Dr. Victor
Kaczynski, a fresh water biologist working on salmon recovery, avers: "No
single forest practice — not timber harvesting, nor road building — can
compare with the damage wildfires are inflicting on fish and fish habitat."
Yet the federal bureaucrats and enviromaniacs most responsible for this
ecological carnage claim to be banishing loggers and cows from the range in
the name of protecting our "endangered" finned friends.
Fruits of Central Planning
So what are the fedgov ecocrats actually doing to rectify their years of
mismanagement? In 1997, the Forest Service announced its goal to improve
forest health by resolving the problems of massive fuel buildup and
uncontrollable wildfires on national forests — by the end of fiscal year
2015! The GAO estimates that the cost to the Forest Service to reduce fuels
on the 39 million acres at high risk could be as much as $12 billion. Has the
Forest Service done anything besides announce its goals? No. In fact,
according to the GAO, the agency "has not yet devised a cohesive strategy" to
tackle the problem. Even worse, it found that Forest Service managers
actually have perverse incentives that are adding to the already appalling
conditions. The managers "are rewarded for the number of acres on which they
reduce fuels, not for reducing fuels on the lands with the highest fire
hazards. Because reducing fuels in areas with greater fire hazards is often
more expensive — meaning that fewer acres can be completed with the same
funding level — managers have an incentive not to undertake efforts on such
lands."
In a summation worthy of a Dilbert comic strip, the GAO reports: "The agency
agrees that it has not advanced a cohesive strategy to treat all 39 million
acres of national forestlands at risk of catastrophic fire but says that it
is committed to developing one in a timely manner...." (Emphasis added.) A
timely manner? As defined by the Forest Service? Then the Tahoe National
Forest will soon join the Malheur, Plumas, Shasta-Trinity, and other national
forests in flame and ruin.
In an important new study, "Forests: Do We Get What We Pay For?" Holly Lippke
Fretwell points out that in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in Northern
California "root disease and bark beetles have reached epidemic proportions,
resulting in tree mortality as high as 80 percent in heavily infested areas."
Discussions, debates, and assessments concerning how best to respond to the
insect and disease epidemics have dragged on for a decade. Meanwhile, the
problem has grown into a real crisis that now threatens the entire system.
The Fretwell study, published earlier this year by the Political Economy
Research Center of Bozeman, Montana, has proven to be tragically prophetic.
Uncontrolled wildfires in July, August, and September have consumed 100,000
acres of the Shasta-Trinity Forest — and are still burning as we write. In
the Plumas National Forest in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, fires
have ravaged 50,000 acres and are still blazing. Much of the once-beautiful
Tahoe National Forest surrounding the famously clear waters of Lake Tahoe has
turned an ugly brown and is almost certain to go up in flames — if not this
year, then sometime soon. Bark beetles and disease have killed more than 80
percent of the trees over large swaths of the forest. When this precious
watershed is destroyed, Lake Tahoe’s mythical, azure waters will be turned to
mud.
What is desperately needed is thinning of the forests through selective
logging, followed by light, controlled burns. It is worse than absurd to
attempt "controlled burns" in unhealthy forests super-stocked with dead trees
and dense undergrowth, as many of the eco-wackos are now advocating. In fact,
thousands of acres (and dozens of homes) in the Shasta-Trinity Forest were
victims of a "controlled burn" by the BLM that got out of hand on July 2nd of
this year.
Millions of acres of our federally controlled forests, parks, wilderness
areas, wetlands, and wildlife reserves are in deadly peril. However, as the
Fretwell study demonstrates with photographic, side-by-side comparisons of
federal lands with state, local, and private-run lands, the omniscient
wizards in Washington do not know everything. Central planning and political
control from the Potomac is not beneficial to people or the environment.
That much, at least, we should have learned from the wretched environmental
record of the Soviet Union and other Communist governments of Eastern Europe.
As the Iron Curtain lifted in the early 1990s, the rest of the world began to
get a glimpse of the massive environmental destruction that is an inescapable
feature of collectivism. But not even ecological horror stories of
apocalyptic proportions, as related in Ecocide in the USSR, by Murray
Feshbach and Alfred Friendly Jr., or the mind-boggling environmental
desolation photographically recorded in "East Europe’s Dark Dawn," in the
June 1991 issue of National Geographic, could disabuse eco-socialists in the
West of their romantic and misguided notions of enviro-statism.
Heedless of the sorry lessons of environmental history in these socialist
lands and of the abysmal ecological results of centralized planning in our
own country, the eco-totalitarians shamelessly push for more and more enviro
controls from Washington. They cheered when President Clinton signed his
"Invasive Species" executive order on April 3rd of this year. An embryonic
cousin of the Endangered Species Act, this executive order (No. 13112)
directs the federal green constabulary to direct its regulator gaze at plant
and animal species not "indigenous" to North America. Anyone who thinks this
directive may be aimed at eradicating the yellow star thistle and other
noxious weeds obviously has no idea how the environmental game is played.
Green Gestapo
Professor David Schoenbrod of the New York Law School is one who definitely
knows how this insidious game is played. In an important confessional essay
in the March 1999 PERC Reports, entitled "Legislating Ideals," Dr. Schoenbrod
admits his own role as an early apostle of environmental statism.
"Around 1970, the government began to go beyond enforcing society’s norms and
began imposing intellectually generated ideals on society," says Schoenbrod.
"As a graduate of Yale Law School in 1968, I was a part of this process. My
contemporaries and I were instrumental in helping to launch the
[governmental] Environmental Protection Agency, as well as the [private]
Natural Resources Defense Council and other ‘public interest’ environmental
groups. We felt entitled to remake society. We wanted new kinds of statutes
that would force agencies to bend society to our ideals on a timetable. One
of the first of the kind of statutes we wanted was the 1970 Clean Air Act. It
became the prototype for many statutes regulating both the environment and
other fields."
"As my generation of petulant young elitists came to understand the ways of
power, we learned the trick of using the magic wand of idealism to obtain
power," Schoenbrod explains. "The trick was to put off the hard choices to
another time or place. Thus, the 1970 Clean Air Act could be enacted because
neither clean air nor the laws needed to produce it would have to be produced
now. The deadline was instead, 1977...." The enviro activists knew, of
course, that the standards and the deadline would be impossible to attain.
That was part of the plan. "So, in the Clean Air Act of 1977, the EPA and its
allies allowed the 1977 deadline to be eased to 1982 for some pollutants and
1987 for others, in exchange for vast increases in the EPA’s power." Good
trick, no? Those deadlines, too, proved impossible to meet, so the EPA
permitted extensions to the deadlines to stretch out as far as 2010 "in
exchange for still greater increases in power." Under this scheme, the EPA
will hold the power to determine on a case-by-case basis whether cities and
states will get more time to comply with its dictates. "Thus, the EPA and the
president will have tremendous leverage on governors and mayors."
"The growth in the EPA’s power," notes the professor, "can be roughly gauged
by the growth in the length of the Clean Air Act — from 8 double-spaced typed
pages in 1965, to 76 pages in 1970, to 272 pages in 1977, to 718 pages in
1990." "The Clean Air Act, and many other statutes modeled on it," says
Schoenbrod, "allow a federal agency to run major segments of civil society on
quasi-military lines running from Congress down through the EPA to states and
ultimately the regulated entities. Operating this chain of command entails
compiling a great mountain of statutes, regulations, guidance documents,
plans, permits, and reports." Yes, the federal leviathan is becoming a Green
Gestapo.
Dr. Schoenbrod realizes full well that environmental idealism is a cover for
more ulterior motives. "The point of this system is power, not environmental
quality," he states. Thank you, professor, we have been saying that for
decades.
How do we stop this power grab? Deny further encroachments by the government
envirocrats — federal, state, and local — on private property, and roll back
the already dangerous and stifling levels of government ownership and
control. "Let the people have property," observed Noah Webster, "and they
will have power — a power that will forever be exerted to prevent the
restriction of the press, the abolition of trial by jury, or the abridgement
of any other privilege." This was a principle well understood by America’s
Founding Fathers, and by the coercive utopians who would steal our freedoms.
Justice Joseph Story, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by President
James Madison and became one of America’s most revered jurists, put it this
way: "That government can scarcely deemed to be free, where the rights of
property are left solely dependent upon the will of a legislative body
without any restraint. The fundamental maxims of a free government seem to
require the rights of personal liberty and private property should be held
sacred."
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