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
