Environmentalists vs. Forestry:
Stopping Attempts to Clean Up Flammable Timber Leads to Wildfires

By William Wade Keye*

Environmentalists have a problem with forestry, which is about engaging nature and trying to make it more useful for human purposes. By philosophy and training, foresters are optimistic about our ability to manage timbered ecosystems with beneficial results.

This doesn't just include cutting and planting trees. Forestry must consider other values, such as maintaining or enhancing water quality and biological diversity. Forest management isn't perfect, but it is science-based and active.

Environmentalism comes from a different philosophical tradition, that of Thoreau and Muir. Nature is viewed as perfect in itself, and therefore any attempts to "make it better'' are seen as arrogant and despoiling. Carried into the political realm, these beliefs have led to the creation of vast national parks and wilderness areas, where forest management is banned.

America's national forests have for decades been a battleground between forestry's desire to engage and environmentalism's need to protect. From 1950 to 1990, commercial forestry and timber production won out. In recent times, the environmental movement turned the tables, using litigation and the government's own bureaucratic tendencies to bring forestry to its knees.

Environmentalism's success in taking control of our national forests, though, led to problems. Whereas in 1990, environmental activists sued to protect old growth and stop clear-cutting, by 2000 they were aggressively appealing and litigating forest thinnings and even thwarting attempts to clean up flammable dead, downed timber. The results, predictably, have been growing incidences of unnaturally hot, catastrophic wildfires.

Enter the Bush administration's Healthy Forest Initiative, a dagger pointed at the heart of environmentalist hegemony over our 191-million-acre system of national forests. By cutting excessive documentation and streamlining the administrative appeals process, the administration is ensuring that pressure groups will no longer have such an easy time gaming Forest Service management efforts.
In addition, HR 1904, passed by the House and currently under debate in the Senate, is designed to move more reforms into place. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 requires federal judges to balance both long- and short-term ecological considerations in weighing the merits of forestry disputes. Legal challenges will be heard and resolved within strict time limits. This should help prevent the repeat of situations where critical forest thinning projects were held up for years, only to be rendered moot by the flames that agency managers were urgently trying to prevent.

Interestingly, environmentalists have been so burned by the fire issue that they have abandoned their longstanding opposition to all forest management. Now, in seeking to influence Congress on HR 904, they say that it is OK for forest fuels to be treated to reduce fire risks - but only in close proximity to settled areas. In other words, prevent houses from burning down but let the rest of the forest go.

That's not acceptable. Rather than hanging onto to the old religion, maybe it's time that organizations such as the Sierra Club rethink their blanket opposition to forest management. After all, entirely apart from the forest health issue is that of timber supply and environmental ethics.

Nowhere is the disconnect between people and the land more apparent than in California, where we consume massive quantities of wood but don't want to cut any trees.

The Golden State now imports, from other states and foreign countries, nearly 80 percent of the forest products that it uses. Our national forests are now almost entirely off-limits to forest management. Importing our wood from distant forests because we are afraid to touch our own represents a hollow victory for the environmental movement.

It's time to dust off our renewable resources and put them back to work. We can do this while protecting critical watersheds, forest aesthetics and wildlife. President Bush's Healthy Forest Initiative is a good start toward achieving a more responsible - and sustainable - blend of the best impulses underpinning both forestry and environmentalism.