Burn, Baby, Burn

If you want healthy forests, that is:

We're in the seventh year of drought in the Northern Rockies, with precipitation deficits running about 20% annually. At the same time poor management of the regional national forests has left them brush-choked and bark beetle-ravaged and susceptible to wildfire. The Bush Administration's 2003 "Healthy Forests Initiative" is designed to prevent these conflagrations by streamlining the bureaucratic "analysis paralysis" when processing timber sales. But the scope of the problem is such that these conditions will remain for years to come. In this year, the centenary of the United States Forest Service, the woods are a wreck. How did our national forests get into this predicament?

For a century it's been the policy of the U.S. Forest Service -- simply put -- to fight forest fires. This seems like sound practice, but in the end it has disrupted the natural benefits of small fires -- usually caused by lightning strikes in remote areas -- that are useful to keep brush and ground fuel down. This constant fire suppression over a century has been detrimental to forest health.

Near my home in Cody, Wyoming, is the "Buffalo Bill Cody Scenic Byway," running 52 miles from Cody to the East Entrance of Yellowstone National Park. The last twenty miles to the Park are beetle-infested and the dying trees are purple-tinged. Tourists remark on this, thinking the colorful woods are beautiful. In reality, there is nothing for these trees to do but burn, probably the result of one of those errant lightning strikes. It's not a case of "if," but "when."

Thanks to the recent Terri Schiavo case, we've been hearing much in the media about an "out-of-control" federal judiciary, a court system that seems to have usurped the legislative authority plainly spelled out in the U.S. Constitution. The American people (that minority actually paying attention) are appalled by this outrage. But here in the West we're not surprised. Here, environmentalists for the past thirty years have manipulated the courts and relied on activist liberal judges to obstruct the "multiple-use" models on the national forests, such as logging. Say what you want about logging, but for years commercial timber harvest provided firebreaks that checked the spread of wildfire.

And for outside-the-box thinking, why not sell off 50% of national forest acreage to timber companies and other developers?

Social Security would be stabilized overnight and the property would be better managed to boot.