From:
http://www.originalsources.com/OS8-00MQC/8-25-2000.1.html
Charred, Barren Land is Clinton's "Environmental Legacy" in our
National Forests
High Severity Fires Destroying Millions of Acres Due to Clinton
Logging Policies
By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources
(www.originalsources.com)
August 25, 2000
According to today's Washington Post, there's feverish activity
in the White House as the Clinton Administration draws to a close
to try to pin down a legacy before Bill Clinton is out of office.
Of course, he already HAS a legacy - Monica and impeachment, but
he's looking for something a bit different.
At the Environmental Protection Agency alone, the Post observes
"officials have listed 67 regulatory decisions looming before
Clinton's second term expires in January. Environmentalists, who
generally have supported the Clinton-Gore administration, are
pressing the officials to take utmost advantage of their
remaining months."
"If they were to accomplish all their goals, it would cement
Clinton's legacy as one of the nation's great environmental
presidents," said Daniel Weiss, political director of the Sierra
Club's Washington office.
Bill Clinton is going to have an environmental legacy alright,
but it's going to be in about the same light as the impeachment
and Monica legacies. Clinton will be known in the future as the
idiot president whose "environmental" policies led to millions of
acres of forest lands being burned up.
Gov. Marc Racicot, of Montana said this season's wildfires stand
as the "greatest natural disaster in Montana history" and
yesterday he ordered more public and private land closed to the
public because of fire danger.
"We have not had a catastrophe of this magnitude in our
lifetimes," he said. Nearly 20 million acres of public land have
been closed, including 17.4 million acres of federal land and 2.1
million acres of state land.
In the words from the Forest Service explanation for those fires,
"Decades of aggressive suppression have also contributed to the
unprecedented buildup of fuels on public lands across the West,
causing fires that burn hotter, longer, and faster than 'normal'
fires of the past.""
The "unprecedented buildup of fuels on public lands" has been
caused by the Clinton Administration virtually ending logging in
the National Forests. I lived on the edge of the El Dorado
National Forest in California for almost twenty years during the
time that the environmentalists, with the help of Bill Clinton,
were shutting down the logging in the forest. They were warned by
veteran Forest rangers that the policy would lead to exactly what
is going on right now. I reported those warnings in the Reagan
Monitor, in 1995, quoting Keith Butts of Placerville, California,
who retired in 1994 after working nearly forty years in the woods
as a Ranger.
Because his father was a logger in Oregon, Keith had spent most
of his life in the forest but things had changed dramatically in
the woods by the times Keith retired. The ten million acres of
National Forests in California's Sierras produced 1.18 billion
board feet of lumber in 1988. By 1994, due to federal regulations
to save the Spotted Owl, only 360 million board feed were
harvested, an 83% drop. Thousands of logging jobs were lost, the
price of lumber and wood pulp for paper skyrocketed.
"Today," Keith Butts told me, "everything in the woods can be
used. Nothing needs to be burned. Portable chippers can be
brought in to chip up the slash (i.e. branches and underbrush)
for waferboard that is used for building. Keeping the underbrush
under control would prevent the worst damage of wildfires and
fire storms that destroy million of trees, millions of dollars
worth of property and sometimes kill firefighters. We are now
either burning on purpose or letting wildfires consume millions
of acres of trees, yet the Black Forest in Germany has been
preserved for hundreds of years by good management that picks up
every fallen branch to prevent fires."
Of course, Keith Butts' 40 years of experience in the woods was
totally ignored in favor of the opinions of Environmentalists who
hardly knew a Spotted Owl from a hawk. In the April 1995 Reagan
Monitor I wrote:
"To 'protect' the species, owl advocates claim at least 1000
acres or 43 million square feet per owl couple is needed.
However, a report in 1990 noted that 'past fire protection
practices in the forests have caused abnormal fuel conditions to
develop' and notes that the current practice of protecting snags,
dead but standing trees which are favorite nesting spots for the
Spotted Owl 'are obstacles to fire suppression.' The report
continued, 'current practices are creating forest conditions that
most likely will lead to large, high-severity fires.' I had found
a report which showed that the number of owls in the El Dorado
National Forest, which should have been dramatically decreased
due to thousands of acres of fires between 1985 and 1990 and the
Forest Service's demand that contractors clear cut (because of a
new theory coming out of the Universities), had INCREASED. The
study, entitled "Population Ecology of the California Spotted Owl
in the Central Sierra Nevad: Annual Results, 1992, which was
funded by the Department of Fish and Game, claimed that the
number of young Spotted Owls, counted in the El Dorado National
Park Study, rose b nearly 300% by 1992. "Obviously," I wrote,
"the owls had not read the environmental studies."
I tracked down the professors and environmentalists who wrote the
studies and had orchestrated the destruction of hundreds of
thousands of jobs to "save" the Northern Spotted Owl in
California which, they claimed, would only survive in "old growth
forests." None of them had an explanation for the increase in the
owls. I asked Keith Butts, who had operated a bulldozer for many
years as a major part of his job in the forest, why the number of
owls had increased when their habitat was destroyed. Keith smiled
and said:
"It's the food chain. Owls eat field mice and other small
mammals. Mice eat seeds. Old growth forests have little open
space where seed producing grasses and weeds grow. When an area
is cleared and the hard groud is disturbed by a bulldozer, weeds
and grasses are able to grow and they attract mice to the area."
Actually, in old growth forests, the scarcity of grasses LIMITS
the number of young owls that can survive. Keith pointed out that
the Spotted Owls were not anything like the shy creature the
environmentalists claimed. One was spotted nesting in a K-Mart
sign in the city. And, they learned to follow his bulldozer, like
swallows follow ships, because they found that the bulldozer
turned over old logs sending the mice scurrying for cover.
By 1992 seasoned Forest Rangers had already concluded that the
aggressive fire prevention in the forests was not a good policy.
They also realized that the best protection against the kind of
large, high severity fires that are wiping out millions of acres
of forest land, and along with the loss of trees is the loss of
wildlife. In 1996 I attended a hearing on the subject conducted
by Rep. John Doolittle and Rep. Helen Chenoweth in which a
representative from the U.S. Forest Service warned that, unless
the "no logging" regulation was rescinded and an aggressive
policy implemented of logging and clearing underbrush, it was not
"if" the forests would burn with dangerous, high severity fires,
but WHEN.
Of course, the policy was not rescinded. Destructive
"environmentalism" in the forests was greatly EXPANDED during the
Clinton/Gore administration. The Washington Post reports:
"Clinton has signed more than 450 executive orders and
proclamations, which don't require congressional approval. Many
involve minor matters. But some are dramatic and controversial.
This year, for example, the president invoked the Antiquities Act
to create the Grand Canyon-Parashant, Giant Sequoia, Agua Fria
and California Coastal national monuments, all in the West. Many
western residents and politicians objected, calling it an
unwarranted intrusion into land policy decisions, and just
yesterday Republican vice presidential nominee Richard B. Cheney
raised the possibility that some of the new monuments created by
Clinton could be rescinded by a Bush administration. ...
"Opponents of White House environmental policies say they fear
more last-minute maneuvering of the kind that enabled the
administration to issue controversial water pollution rules last
month. Lawmakers had passed a "rider," or spending bill
amendment, to block the regulations, which require states to
undertake extensive water surveys over the next 15 years as a
step toward controlling polluted runoff.
"But the EPA effectively sidestepped Congress by rushing the
rules into print just days before the spending measure was signed
into law. Sen. Tim Hutchinson (R-Ark.), co-author of the rider,
called the maneuver 'a tremendous thumb in the eye to the United
States Congress.'
"Other environmental initiatives undergoing final grooming could
stir similar controversy:
"Roadless" policy: The U.S. Forest Service is preparing to issue
final rules to ban new road construction in the service's last
remaining parcels of undisturbed wilderness. The ban would affect
about 40 million acres, roughly a fifth of the Forest Service's
192 million acres. The timber industry and off-road vehicle
enthusiasts are among the strongest opponents."
Of course, the "roadless" area s can NOT be protected from fire.
That why the roads are IN the National Forests is to enable fire
fighting equipment to get to fires when they break out. What the
Post reports today is a blatant power grab by Bill Clinton:
"The president is determined to get as much as he can done for
the American people through executive action, as he has for the
last eight years," said Bruce Reed, Clinton's top domestic policy
adviser. "We're approaching the next six months the same way
we've approached the last 71/2 years: To try to pass legislation
with Congress, and to make use of the president's existing
authority to get things done. . .,. We work with Congress. But
just because they've ground to a halt doesn't mean the executive
branch should." That power grab and the resulting fires are your
"environmental" legacy, Mr. Clinton. You will be known not only
as the most corrupt president in American history but the most
destructive in your environmental policies.
To comment: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
=================================================================
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
