While Nero Fiddles, Rome Burns.

It’s Time for Outrage!

by Angie Many 

“How many homes must burn, how many people must lose their valuables, how many lives must be threatened before a couple (of) obstructionists in the Senate will relent and let a bipartisan wildfire legislation be debated and considered?... Americans who live in harm’s way and who love their forests should be outraged.”

How many forests must burn, causing heartbreak and devastation, before we demand that our forests be managed? Photo from http://firepix.blm.gov/nifc

Representative Scott McInnis (R-CO), sponsor of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act  

“Even when the president was talking about the initiative in Redmond, Oregon, with a fire burning behind him, it didn’t seem to sway the people in the Senate, who would rather let our forests burn than do anything to manage them.”

Professor Thomas M. Bonnicksen, Forest Science, Texas A&M University 

According to legend, the mad Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Today, Congress fiddles while our forests and brushlands burn and the fires take with them the homes and priceless memorabilia of Americans, our precious resource of trees, our fish and wildlife, our watersheds, and even human lives.

California is being devastated by wildfires. As of today, October 30, over 600,000 acres have burned. Over 2600 houses have been destroyed. About 80,000 people have been evacuated from their homes. Businesses have closed. Health problems caused by smoke, ash, and stress are putting people in hospitals. And 20 people have died. Are you outraged yet?

In Colorado, our air is hazy and the sun comes up red because of fires in California -- 1000 miles away! Las Vegas is blanketed in what looks like thick fog. How horrible it must be in California!

Anyone who didn’t see this coming was intentionally blind. This is not a new problem. Congress expressed concern in the FY1987 Appropriations hearings that a hazardous fuel situation existed in our National Forests. In 1998, then-U.S. Representative Helen Chenoweth (R-ID) commissioned a GAO report to examine the health of National Forests. “Of the 191 million acres managed by the Forest Service, 70% are located in the dry, interior western United States,” Chenoweth said then. “According to the Forest Service, 39 million of these acres are at an abnormally high risk of catastrophic fire. The GAO calls the region a “tinderbox”.”  

Anyone who believes that the environmental

movement is about the environment is,

quite frankly, a fool.  

Why has nothing been done in 16 (sixteen!) years? Preservationists have buffaloed much of the public and many of our elected officials and convinced them that ‘natural is better.’ Others of our ‘honorable sirs’ are afraid -- afraid! -- of the green vote. They haven’t had the guts to stand up and do what’s right, or the initiative to investigate actual conditions and talk to locals instead of listening only to green lobbyists, so our lands are burning and our people are suffering. Too many of our leaders have been either too afraid or too uninformed to protect our people and lands. Are you outraged yet?

President Bush recognized the danger and developed the Healthy Forests Initiative. Congress still has not passed a bill to initiate the portions of the program that need Congressional approval. The U.S. House passed the Healthy Forests Restoration Act five months ago. In the Senate subcommittee, obstructionists Tom Harkin (D-IA) (who just announced that he’ll allow a floor vote) and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) have blocked efforts to bring the bill to the floor. Too many of our fearful leaders spend their time and our money looking over their shoulders to see the reaction of the Sierra Club and cronies and try to add amendments that restrict management activities to please the greens.

After witnessing the horrific fires of the last three years, anyone who believes that the environmental movement is about the environment is, quite frankly, a fool. How can it possibly be better for ‘endangered’ species for their habitat to be totally destroyed through fire than modified by logging? How can it possibly be better for whole watersheds to be destroyed by fire than for logging roads to have a little erosion? How can it be better for trees to be destroyed by fire than for people to use them? How can it be better for fish and wildlife to be suffocated or roasted than for them to have to adjust to a few missing trees? How can it be better for the air for a thousand miles to be filled with smoke and ash than for logging equipment to emit minimal pollution in the woods?

It can’t. The environmental movement is not about the environment. It’s about control of land and people. It’s about moving people out of rural areas and into cities. It’s about removing people from the land so that it can be enjoyed by the select few who believe that they, and only they, are worthy of communing with Nature. It is anti-people and it is anti-technology. Despite the fact that ‘environmentalists’ drive cars and fly to their numerous conferences and use paper by the truckload, they don’t want the rest of us to do that. (If you have not yet read Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, do so now. He really captures the attitude of these radicals.)

It’s Part of Their Plan

Preservationists love these fires. This is exactly what every forest policy they’ve put in place has led to. They got what they asked for, and the heck with the people they ruin. These fires run people out of ‘their’ woods, and some won’t return. On October 15, the Associated Press reported that Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, one of the most radical of the environist groups, filed a lawsuit to force the U.S. Forest Service to stop routinely fighting wildfire. “The thesis of our case is that fighting fires is what has gotten us into the trouble we’re in,” said Andy Stahl, executive director of the group. “It’s time to end the war against fire and learn to live with fire and manage it, rather than fight it.” Go and tell that to the folks in southern California, Andy. I dare you.

Preservationists have already limited how the agencies can fight fire. There are restrictions against dropping retardant near bodies of waters -- even though every fish in the stream might be boiled by the fire. They have made our fire-fighting agencies hesitant to use bulldozers to fight fires. They might leave ruts, which are evidently worse than the wholesale erosion that results from the fires. They have agencies so fearful that firefighters died last year because no one was willing to take the initiative to dump retardant near a stream that had ‘endangered’ minnows in it -- even though the firefighters had radioed for help. They have caused access roads to be closed. And they are directly responsible for much of the fuel buildup in our forests.

Are you outraged yet?

The massive wildfires currently burning in California are a stark and horrible reminder that forests and brushlands burn, and when they do, tragedy can strike for hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people and untold numbers of wildlife. Such fires, while not always avoidable, can be minimized by land management. The failure to manage lands makes it easy for one lightning strike or one nut with a book of matches to destroy hundreds of thousands of acres, kill fish and wildlife, incinerate homes and memories, and murder people.

This catastrophe could have been avoided. We can’t usually stop fires from starting. But we can usually stop them from spreading faster than firefighters can control them -- if we plan ahead. 

We no longer have the mill capacity

anywhere in the West to process

the trees that need to be harvested.  

Much of the California wildfires have burned in chaparral ‘brush country’. It is not timberland. However, it could still be treated to reduce the risk of uncontrollable wildfire. The County of Los Alamos, New Mexico learned a little late, but two years after the fire that destroyed 400 residences and part of the National Lab buildings and lands, the county is currently removing brush from its desert scrub land and trees from its forests that endanger the locale. It is expensive, but the cost is minuscule compared to the costs of suppressing and controlling wildfires, dealing with eroded watersheds, and rebuilding homes and towns.

Some timberland in California is on fire, and that danger increases as the fire moves north into heavily-treed areas. The San Bernardino area is full of bug-killed trees and debate has been going on for several years about what to do with them. Much of California’s forests -- like those across the West -- are overstocked and full of dead and dying trees. Congress has fiddled for 16 years, despite the fact that for the last three years, the West has been burning.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who has obstructed forest management for years, was recently quoted in NewsMax.com as saying: “With the drought, the devastation caused by the bark beetle and the dangerous buildup of dry tinder and undergrowth, I feared that California could face a devastating season of wildfires. Sadly, that seems to be happening now,” she said. Now she is urging her fellow Senators to pass the act. A little late for your state, Dianne.

On October 28, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), was quoted in the Los Angeles Times: “It’s very important that when we have a bill that relates to our forests that... we make sure what we do will, in fact, help the communities... not the big logging [companies].” She and other of our illustrious Congressmen are so concerned that loggers will make a profit (which they should!) that they have delayed forest management bills while forests burn. Try to get your plumber to work without making a profit, Barbara.

Are you outraged yet?

During the Clinton years, one of the Forest Service’s main activities seemed to be closing forest roads and trails, the access that firefighters need to take quick action against the fires -- and to escape from the infernos if necessary. It’s time to reopen the roads.

Who Is Responsible?

The Healthy Forests Initiative is a start, but it’s not enough. We need to thin in the urban-wildland interface, but we need more than that. If fires get big enough, thinning around residences won’t stop them. One gust of wind can carry millions of embers. We need to remove dead and dying and overstocked trees wherever they occur, starting at inhabited areas and working as far out into the forests as is necessary to improve their health and safety.

Unfortunately, we no longer have the mill capacity anywhere in the West to process the trees that need to be harvested. And since few people would be crazy enough to invest in a sawmill now after watching those businesses be slowly starved to death over two decades, much of the material removed will have to be turned into ground-cover chips, while we continue to import our lumber from Canada, Venezuela, and Chile, and a dozen other countries. Are you outraged yet?

It’s time to attach some liability here. The problem was identified 16 years ago, and almost nothing has been done to solve it. Every environist group that has appealed and stopped forest management should be sued for the costs of the fires in the areas that they appealed. Every Congressman that fails to support forest management should be voted out. Should the government be financially liable for the destruction caused by uncontrollable fires that start on its unmanaged lands? Probably so, although the money to recompense victims would have to come out of our pockets. FEMA money has already been promised to the state for the rebuilding and rehabilitation process -- our tax dollars at work, just as in Los Alamos.

Who else must assume responsibility? We must. Everyone who is reading this paper, everyone who knew the dangers in our forest. All of us who knew what was going to happen and did nothing about it except to grouse to friends. It’s time to stand up and be counted. It’s time (past time!) to show up and refuse to go away.

We’re past the stage of asking Congress or urging Congress. It’s time to demand. It’s time to write letters to the editor to ten newspapers every week and call ‘talk shows’ every day. It’s time to bombard our two Senators and our U.S. Representative with calls, e-mails, and faxes and demand that they protect our people and start taking care of our trees, our wildlife habitat, and our watersheds. It’s time to show up at their local offices, and at D.C. if possible, with 50 friends and relatives and the media and demand that action be taken. It’s time to show up at our local Forest Service Supervisor’s offices with those same people and the media and demand that action be taken. It’s time to show up en masse at our county commissioner’s meetings and demand that they assume the powers that they have. It’s time to show up en masse at our governors’ offices with the media and demand that the states assume the powers that they have. It’s time to attend our state legislature sessions and demand that they take action. It’s time to show officials that they have the support of the public. We cannot wait any longer.

Turn on the Pressure -- NOW!

Our hearts go out to the friends and families of those who have died, to the people who have lost everything that they couldn’t get into their vehicles, to those who will suffer health problems because of the smoke and ash, to those who will lose time at work, and to those who must deal -- for years -- with the aftermath. Wholesale erosion will destroy roads and choke streams and reservoirs. Danger trees must be removed. Grasses must be reseeded and trees must be replanted. Where the fires burned hot, ground will be sterilized. Hardpan soil will form, resulting in flooding. Insects will swarm to the area and kill stressed trees that survived the fire. Wildlife will starve.

This catastrophe will cost Californians the most, but it will cost us all financially as the federal government helps California to rehabilitate their lands, rebuild their communities, clean their streams and reservoirs, processes that will take years and our tax dollars. It will cost us all as insurance companies raise their rates. This is money that we’re spending unnecessarily. In the timberlands, we the taxpayers would have been paid by the loggers thinning our forests. Schools and roads would have received the ‘25% funds’ from timber revenues instead of from taxpayers. Aren’t you tired of paying for preservationists policies that are destroying our forests and communities? Aren’t you outraged yet?

Start today to turn on the pressure. Start shouting from the rooftops, in chorus with everyone that you know, in any way that you can, getting media attention whenever possible:

!!! We are angry that our forests are unnecessarily burning.

!!! We are fed up with watching our trees die from beetle infestations and overcrowding.

!!! We are tired of losing watersheds, wildlife, and wildlife habitat because of the policies instituted by the very groups purporting to save them.

!!! We are saddened at having viewsheds of blackened poles.

!!! We are sickened by having burned hillsides slide every time it rains.

!!! We are tired of worrying about whether our houses will burn.

!!! We are furious at the unnecessary deaths and destruction that has resulted from ‘environmental’ policies.

!!! And we are outraged at our governments for letting special interest groups destroy our people and our lands.

!!! We want it stopped, and we want it stopped today. We want loggers and thinning crews back in our forests. We want money spent on prevention instead of on suppression and rebuilding. We want it now -- and we’re not taking ‘no’ or ‘maybe’ or ‘next year’ for an answer.