The Failed Presidency.

I've always marvelled at the determination of folks who populate lowlands in floodplains. They rebuild after damned near every flood. Hell, its big news if it suddenly dawns on someone that the town shouldn't have been built there in the first place.

I favor clean air and clean water and accessible open land and vigorous forrests and the protection and promotion of wildlife.

By evidence of Western Wildfires and our continuing reliance on fossil fuel for the production of electricity, along with the inadequate state of our electrical power distribution infrastructure, I am forced to conclude the same cannot be said of most so-called environmentalists, who's very actions have inflicted this mess upon us all.

I've always marvelled at the determination of folks who populate lowlands in floodplains. They rebuild after damned near every flood. Hell, its big news if it suddenly dawns on someone that the town shouldn't have been built there in the first place.

Wanna elaborate on that?

Press-Enterprise

Careful steps to cut fire risk

11:54 PM PST on Saturday, November 8, 2003



Now that the horrendous fires in the San Bernardino Mountains are over, the crisis in the forest has everyone's attention ...
... Even Democrats, usually friends of the environment, are saying environmental regulations tied the government's hands.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, in a speech on the Senate floor, blamed forest mismanagement and called for new laws.

"For decades we have put out the ground fires that would otherwise clear out the brush," she said. "The result is huge fuel loads of small trees and brush that is the perfect kindling for a catastrophic fire."

North Coast Times

Compromises will have to be made. It would be a good idea too if some members of the Board of Supervisors cut out the political grandstanding and finger-pointing, which will only be counterproductive. To make our county and cities safer will require cooperation from environmentalists, builders, homeowners, fire officials, elected officials, scientists and common citizens. We will all have to do it together.

BayArea.Com

"They're people with urban values, urban expectations, urban aesthetics," Pyne said. Instead of living on the land, he said, "this urban outmigration is leaving it alone."

A study of wildfire danger in San Diego County found the call to remove brush was often ignored for a variety of reasons: Some didn't want to touch native plants for environmental or aesthetic reasons. Others didn't have the time or money.

NBC4TV

New Terror Threat: Environmentalists
An NBC4 Team 4 Reports

POSTED: 12:40 p.m. PST November 6, 2003
UPDATED: 6:30 p.m. PST November 7, 2003

LOS ANGELES -- Terror comes in many forms. It can be a plane into an office building or a bomb on a boat driven into an aircraft carrier. Now, right here in Southern California, a new kind of terrorism has surfaced. It is just as violent, and just as deadly and is for the most unlikely of reasons: to protect the environment.

NorthCoast Times

Fires stoke forest debate

By: TED HILLOCK - For the Californian

The eight major Southern California fires destroyed 745,829 acres and 3,373 homes, and killed 20 people. The fires, which quickly turned into raging infernos fueled by years and years of forest mismanagement, were much worse than they should have been, and consequently the loss to all was much worse than it should have been.

The high degree of combustibility caught virtually nobody by surprise. In 1994, the National Commission on Wildfire Disasters stated, "millions of acres of forest in the western United States pose an extreme fire hazard from the buildup of dry, highly flammable forest fuels."

Many others locally were saying the same thing, including Richard Minnich, a professor of earth sciences at UC Riverside and a specialist on the Lake Arrowhead forest. The problem was simply that the forests were getting too overgrown. The tree population was so dense that it became ridge-to-ridge combustible fuel. This density also contributed to the infestation of the bark beetle that killed millions of trees.

How were the forests allowed to become overgrown when every forest manager would tell you it is unhealthy for forests to be so overgrown? Well, as Minnich said, "You couldn't even cut the limb off a damn tree without getting a permit. These people wanted to save every leaf."

"These people" are, of course, the highly sensitive and caring environmentalists who think they know better than the trained and experienced forest managers on how best to "save" a forest.

After three-quarters of a million acres went up in smoke, I think we can safely say that the environmentalists were wrong and the professional forest managers can say I told you so.

Every time the forest managers tried to properly manage our combustible environment they ran into a brick wall of environmentalists. The Center for Biological Diversity filed more than 180 lawsuits during a four-year period whenever forest thinning or the defensible space distance was proposed.

But finally it appears that the massive loss to the environment and the human suffering is now about to place the management of the forests into the hands of professionals.

President Bush is proposing the "Healthy Forest Initiative," which would allow for the thinning of the forests, some by logging companies. Stay tuned for the debate on that. Even with the damage so obvious as a result of overgrown forests and shrubs I am sure the Center for Biological Diversity will not move from its "nocompromise" position, so getting approval to properly manage the forest will still be easier said than done.

Monica Bond with the Center for Biological Diversity in Idyllwild indicated as much when she said, "We think some people are shamelessly exploiting this tragedy as an excuse to log big trees in remote areas. There is no need to do that."

That type of comment from the CBD shows whose safety they feel is more important. Let's hope that these type of people no longer dictate life-or-death policies in the management of our resources.

BayArea.Com
He noted, however, that a recent report by the General Accounting Office found that environmental groups appealed 40 of 61 fuels-reduction projects in 2001 and 2002 in California national forests, mostly in the Sierra. And he said the Sierra Club and others had opposed the Bush thinning plan, as well as a compromise by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., on the grounds that it would allow too much logging away from towns.

Most of the acreage burned last week was not in forests, but on brushy chaparral where logging is not an issue. In the Lake Arrowhead area, development on private land limited forest thinning for aesthetic reasons in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

``There's no question that the homeowners associations required you get a permit to cut any tree. It was very difficult,'' said Tom Bonnicksen, a professor of forest science at Texas A&M University, who has worked in the area for more than a decade.

Environmentalists were not entirely hands-off in the area. Forest Service officials say two smaller organizations, the Center for Biological Diversity and the John Muir Project, have dogged them in the south as they have tried to reduce fire risk by cutting trees.



Daniel Macon, who works for a sub-office of the United States Department of Agriculture that advises private property owners on fire proofing their property, said that controlled burns face a number of regulatory hoops and are often squelched by local air quality resources boards.

Indian Country OnLine

"The problem with this," Macon said, "Is when there is a catastrophic fire like the ones we just had in Southern California, that is far more harmful to the environment."

Macon's reasoning is that when things like homes and cars are engulfed it allows far worse chemicals to get into the air than would be produced by grasses and woody plants.

Cato
California's Fires and Environmentalists
by Steven Milloy

Steven Milloy is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and the author of Junk Science Judo.

"Our forests are detonating like napalm bombs. We need to remove dead and dying bug-killed timber," said Rep. Wally Herger, R-Chico.

Is this Monday-morning quarterbacking spurred by the wildfires now raging in California? Hardly.

The Northern California congressman uttered those words in August 1994 as part of his demand that Congress declare a state of emergency in federal forests to permit quick removal of dead trees, fallen branches and other debris that fuels wildfires - like those that burned 3 million Western acres and killed 14 firefighters that year.

A spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council responded at the time by calling Rep. Herger's demand "a pretext for accelerated logging in the Sierra Nevada."

Nine years later, though, Rep. Herger is looking pretty prescient.

More than 700,000 acres have burned so far this year in California alone; 20 people have died and 2,600-plus homes been destroyed. Last year, wildfires burned nearly 7 million acres, killed 23 firefighters, destroyed more than 800 homes and cost taxpayers over $1.5 billion.

So what do the environmentalists have to say?

A spokesperson for the Natural Resources Defense Council calls President Bush's proposed plan to prevent forest fires by thinning excess growth "a Trojan horse" for sneaking through logging projects.

As the Western forests burn - and people die and homes are destroyed - environmentalists and their allies in Congress only seem concerned that some "old-growth" trees may be cut in the process of thinning the nation's tinder traps. Their nonsensical opposition to thinning only makes it easier for wildfires to spread out of control.

White House Puts Limits on Queries From Democrats

Washington Post
Friday, November 7, 2003
The Bush White House, irritated by pesky questions from
congressional Democrats about how the administration is using
taxpayer money, has developed an efficient solution: It will not
entertain any more questions from opposition lawmakers.
The decision -- one that Democrats and scholars said is highly
unusual -- was announced in an e-mail sent Wednesday to the staff
of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. House
committee Democrats had just asked for information about how
much the White House spent making and installing the "Mission
Accomplished" banner for President Bush's May 1 speech aboard
the USS Abraham Lincoln.
The director of the White House Office of Administration,
Timothy A. Campen, sent an e-mail titled "congressional
questions" to majority and minority staff on the House and Senate
Appropriations panels. Expressing "the need to add a bit of
structure to the Q&A process," he wrote: "Given the increase in the
number and types of requests we are beginning to receive from the
House and Senate, and in deference to the various committee
chairmen and our desire to better coordinate these requests, I am
asking that all requests for information and materials be
coordinated through the committee chairmen and be put in writing
from the committee."
He said this would limit "duplicate requests" and help answer
questions "in a timely fashion."
It would also do another thing: prevent Democrats from getting
questions answered without the blessing of the GOP committee
chairmen.
"It's saying we're not going to allow the opposition party to ask
questions about the way we use tax money," said R. Scott Lilly,
Democratic staff director for the House committee. "As far as I
know, this is without modern precedent."
Norman Ornstein, a congressional specialist at the American
Enterprise Institute, agreed. "I have not heard of anything like that
happening before," he said. "This is obviously an excuse to avoid
providing information about some of the things the Democrats are
asking for."
Campen's e-mail wording suggests the policy may extend to other
inquiries about the functioning of the Executive Office of the
President, but the immediate targets were the spending committees.
For years, those panels had a strong bipartisan tradition in which
the majority party generally joined the minority in tough oversight
of the administration.
Brookings Institution government scholar Thomas Mann said the
Democrats have little ability to challenge the decision. "This is just
one of many instances where Republicans have a legal basis for
what they're doing, but it violates long-standing norms," he said.
All the Democrats can do, he said, "is carp."
The White House said it is in discussions to reach an amicable
compromise. "There have been staff-level discussions about ways
to better coordinate requests from Congress," said spokeswoman
Ashley Snee. "It was not the intent to suggest minority members
should not ask questions without the consent of the majority."