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You Can't Have a Forest Fire if There are No Trees

BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
by Christian Livemore

To the list of things that run downhill, we can now add a new item: stupidity.

The L.A. Times reported last week that the Bush Administration is drafting a proposal that would increase logging in the 11 national forests in the Sierra Nevada to levels not seen in a decade. The new plan would scrap an elaborate set of environmental protection guidelines known as the Sierra Plan, written by the Clinton Administration and adopted in 2000.

The reason? The U.S. Forest Service is complaining that the rules are too complicated.

The Sierra Plan, adopted after years of study and analysis, restricts timber cutting and increases protections on old-growth trees, wildlife river and stream systems, which scientists had been warning were in peril. At the same time the plan calls for prescribed burning to prevent forest fires.

The conservationists love it, but naturally the timber industry hates it, since it prevents them from cutting down trees at will and instead forces them to follow more environmentally responsible, if more time-consuming, procedures.

Matt Mathes, spokesman for the Forest Service in California, told the L.A. Times that the rules are so complicated that they put the Forest Rangers "in a box."

The new plan would allow cutting of trees as large as 30 inches in diameter and would permit clear-cutting of areas as large as two contiguous acres.

All with the Forest Service's approval.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the U.S. Forest Service's job to PROTECT the forests?

You gotta love the logic behind the new plan.

The argument is that it's better to let loggers cut down huge swaths of trees in order to prevent forest fires. But that's what the Sierra Plan was created to do in the first place, and it does it without gutting the forests.

Now I'm no scientist, but I think it's fairly simple that you can't have a forest fire if there are no trees.

But there's another thing you can't have when there are no trees: Air.

Great, Bush's logging friends make some money in the short run and we all have paper towels and coffee tables. But the severe reduction in the number of oxygen-producing trees down the road reduces air quality. Combine that with the hole in the ozone layer (which has, by the by, split in two and will keep multiplying like shmoos if we continue to ignore scientists' warnings) and the fact that the polar ice cap is melting faster than Michael Jackson's nose, and in a few generations, nobody will be around to spend all that money.

Just as Nero fiddled while Rome burned, Bush concerns himself with gutting the Sierra Plan in favor of more profit for the loggers and giving massive tax cuts to the wealthiest one percent of Americans, while in the process creating the largest deficit in American history, pursuing a war in Iraq to obtain its oil while ignoring the protests of the international community and a much more dangerous and looming threat from North Korea's recently revived nuclear program, and oh yeah, where's Osama bin Laden?

And that is the problem with Bush's thinking (such as it is) on a number of topics. He sees one step down the chess board, when his knight takes the rook. And that rook is always money: money for the logging industry, money from tax cuts, money from cutting school lunch programs.

The trouble is that he can't see the whole board. He can't see two moves away, when his knight is taken by the bishop, whether that bishop is greenhouses gases or rising deficits or al-Qaeda retaliation for war in Iraq.

And he can't see the checkmate. And with Bush in charge, that includes a whole new world of possibilities.

But Bush can't see it. Or he doesn't care. I'm not sure which is more frightening.

So it looks like the right-wing's much-loved Trickle Down theory does work. Not with economics, of course, but it seems that Bush's lack of curiosity, intellectual laziness and greed, at least, are all trickling down through his administration.

So while we're wringing our hands over the imminent war in Iraq and Bush looting the Treasury, we'd better also keep an eye on what he's doing to the environment.

It's kind of like a knife to the stomach, a traumatic head injury, and a gunshot wound. Any one of them will kill you, so you have to treat them all.

BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY