MATTOLE VALLEY, CALIFORNIA — “Fight every battle as if it were
Armageddon, for if you don’t, the next one will be.” That was the
advice, now legendary, imparted forty or more years ago to
environmentalists by David Brower, long-time leader of the Sierra
Club and later founder of Friends of the Earth.
Spoken or unspoken, that dictum drives nearly every legal
maneuver and public relations tactic of the arch-environmentalists
today. Its most recent manifestation is the intense fight they are
waging against efforts to cull underbrush, scrub trees and dead or
dying large trees from national forests to reduce forest fire
danger.
Three things are implicit in that Armageddon battle cry: (1) The
environmentalists are motivated by high moral purpose; (2) The
motives of the other side are base; and (3) There is no room for
compromise.
The latest example of the third point involves a Federal
District Court ruling ordering the National Forest Service to
withdraw a plan to log timber burned in a 1999 fire in Six Rivers
National Forest in northwestern California. The plan involved
removing the dead trees from a 1,050-acre area, creating fuel
breaks in the event of future fires. An environmental group sued to
stop the plan, citing the National Environmental Policy Act. This
is analogous to using the Endangered Species Act to halt
development. When high moral pronouncements are stripped away, the
underlying purpose of the former act seems to be to halt logging of
any kind anywhere.
President Bush was in Oregon late last week, surveying the
largest forest fire in the state’s history. This summer’s wildfires
in several western states have consumed more than six million acres
of timber, about twice the annual average. Fire fighting costs this
year will be approximately $1.5 billion.
Bush announced a plan to reduce the danger of future forest
fires. In Oregon he said, “We need to make our forests healthy by
using some common sense. We need to understand (that when) you let
kindling build up and there’s a lightning strike, you’re going to
get yourself a big fire.” The new plan would allow government
agencies to enter into contracts giving companies that clear brush
and thin forests the right to sell wood products they harvest.
While he was in Oregon, Bush endorsed a compromise forest
management plan worked out by the Clinton administration in 1994.
It called for a reduction of timber sales on federal lands in
Oregon, Washington and California from five billion to 1.1 billion
board feet a year and it set aside 7.4 million acres as old-growth
reserves and for endangered species preservation. Timber sales are
less than 40 percent of the amount envisioned, however, thanks to
government red tape and litigation by environmentalist groups.
Bush’s plan calls for streamlining the permitting process,
something the arch-environmentalists fear because they have
convinced themselves that anyone who wants to cut down one diseased
tree really wants to clear the entire forest for parking lots and
condominiums.
Lost in the environmentalists’ relentless drive to stamp out all
timber harvesting in national forests is the fact that when the
system was created it was to be — unlike national parks —
mixed-use land. That is, timber harvesting, grazing, mining and
recreation were to share the lands.
The 1994 Clinton plan, with Bush’s modifications, won’t provide
100 percent satisfaction to all parties, but compromises never do.
Bush assumes, of course, that each party to the controversy will
come to the table willing to give in order to get. If he is right,
sensible compromise — and fewer forest fires — will be the
result. It is going to be hard to bring off, however, if one of the
parties thinks the bargaining table is the battlefield of
Armageddon.
