By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources (www.originalsources.com)
August 25, 2000
According to today's Washington Post, there's feverish activity in the White House as the Clinton Administration draws to a close to try to pin down a legacy before Bill Clinton is out of office. Of course, he already HAS a legacy - Monica and impeachment, but he's looking for something a bit different.
At the Environmental Protection Agency alone, the Post observes "officials have listed 67 regulatory decisions looming before Clinton's second term expires in January. Environmentalists, who generally have supported the Clinton-Gore administration, are pressing the officials to take utmost advantage of their remaining months."
"If they were to accomplish all their goals, it would cement Clinton's legacy as one of the nation's great environmental presidents," said Daniel Weiss, political director of the Sierra Club's Washington office.
Bill Clinton is going to have an environmental legacy alright, but it's going to be in about the same light as the impeachment and Monica legacies. Clinton will be known in the future as the idiot president whose "environmental" policies led to millions of acres of forest lands being burned up.
Gov. Marc Racicot, of Montana said this season's wildfires stand as the "greatest natural disaster in Montana history" and yesterday he ordered more public and private land closed to the public because of fire danger.
"We have not had a catastrophe of this magnitude in our lifetimes," he said. Nearly 20 million acres of public land have been closed, including 17.4 million acres of federal land and 2.1 million acres of state land.
In the words from the Forest Service explanation for those fires, "Decades of aggressive suppression have also contributed to the unprecedented buildup of fuels on public lands across the West, causing fires that burn hotter, longer, and faster than 'normal' fires of the past.""
The "unprecedented buildup of fuels on public lands" has been caused by the Clinton Administration virtually ending logging in the National Forests. I lived on the edge of the El Dorado National Forest in California for almost twenty years during the time that the environmentalists, with the help of Bill Clinton, were shutting down the logging in the forest. They were warned by veteran Forest rangers that the policy would lead to exactly what is going on right now. I reported those warnings in the Reagan Monitor, in 1995, quoting Keith Butts of Placerville, California, who retired in 1994 after working nearly forty years in the woods as a Ranger.
Because his father was a logger in Oregon, Keith had spent most of his life in the forest but things had changed dramatically in the woods by the times Keith retired. The ten million acres of National Forests in California's Sierras produced 1.18 billion board feet of lumber in 1988. By 1994, due to federal regulations to save the Spotted Owl, only 360 million board feed were harvested, an 83% drop. Thousands of logging jobs were lost, the price of lumber and wood pulp for paper skyrocketed.
"Today," Keith Butts told me, "everything in the woods can be used. Nothing needs to be burned. Portable chippers can be brought in to chip up the slash (i.e. branches and underbrush) for waferboard that is used for building. Keeping the underbrush under control would prevent the worst damage of wildfires and fire storms that destroy million of trees, millions of dollars worth of property and sometimes kill firefighters. We are now either burning on purpose or letting wildfires consume millions of acres of trees, yet the Black Forest in Germany has been preserved for hundreds of years by good management that picks up every fallen branch to prevent fires."
Of course, Keith Butts' 40 years of experience in the woods was totally ignored in favor of the opinions of Environmentalists who hardly knew a Spotted Owl from a hawk. In the April 1995 Reagan Monitor I wrote:
"To 'protect' the species, owl advocates claim at least 1000 acres or 43 million square feet per owl couple is needed. However, a report in 1990 noted that 'past fire protection practices in the forests have caused abnormal fuel conditions to develop' and notes that the current practice of protecting snags, dead but standing trees which are favorite nesting spots for the Spotted Owl 'are obstacles to fire suppression.' The report continued, 'current practices are creating forest conditions that most likely will lead to large, high-severity fires.'
I had found a report which showed that the number of owls in the El Dorado National Forest, which should have been dramatically decreased due to thousands of acres of fires between 1985 and 1990 and the Forest Service's demand that contractors clear cut (because of a new theory coming out of the Universities), had INCREASED. The study, entitled "Population Ecology of the California Spotted Owl in the Central Sierra Nevad: Annual Results, 1992, which was funded by the Department of Fish and Game, claimed that the number of young Spotted Owls, counted in the El Dorado National Park Study, rose b nearly 300% by 1992. "Obviously," I wrote, "the owls had not read the environmental studies."
I tracked down the professors and environmentalists who wrote the studies and had orchestrated the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs to "save" the Northern Spotted Owl in California which, they claimed, would only survive in "old growth forests." None of them had an explanation for the increase in the owls. I asked Keith Butts, who had operated a bulldozer for many years as a major part of his job in the forest, why the number of owls had increased when their habitat was destroyed. Keith smiled and said:
"It's the food chain. Owls eat field mice and other small mammals. Mice eat seeds. Old growth forests have little open space where seed producing grasses and weeds grow. When an area is cleared and the hard groud is disturbed by a bulldozer, weeds and grasses are able to grow and they attract mice to the area."
Actually, in old growth forests, the scarcity of grasses LIMITS the number of young owls that can survive. Keith pointed out that the Spotted Owls were not anything like the shy creature the environmentalists claimed. One was spotted nesting in a K-Mart sign in the city. And, they learned to follow his bulldozer, like swallows follow ships, because they found that the bulldozer turned over old logs sending the mice scurrying for cover.
By 1992 seasoned Forest Rangers had already concluded that the aggressive fire prevention in the forests was not a good policy. They also realized that the best protection against the kind of large, high severity fires that are wiping out millions of acres of forest land, and along with the loss of trees is the loss of wildlife. In 1996 I attended a hearing on the subject conducted by Rep. John Doolittle and Rep. Helen Chenoweth in which a representative from the U.S. Forest Service warned that, unless the "no logging" regulation was rescinded and an aggressive policy implemented of logging and clearing underbrush, it was not "if" the forests would burn with dangerous, high severity fires, but WHEN.
Of course, the policy was not rescinded. Destructive "environmentalism" in the forests was greatly EXPANDED during the Clinton/Gore administration. The Washington Post reports:
"Clinton has signed more than 450 executive orders and proclamations, which don't require congressional approval. Many involve minor matters. But some are dramatic and controversial. This year, for example, the president invoked the Antiquities Act to create the Grand Canyon-Parashant, Giant Sequoia, Agua Fria and California Coastal national monuments, all in the West. Many western residents and politicians objected, calling it an unwarranted intrusion into land policy decisions, and just yesterday Republican vice presidential nominee Richard B. Cheney raised the possibility that some of the new monuments created by Clinton could be rescinded by a Bush administration. ..."Opponents of White House environmental policies say they fear more last-minute maneuvering of the kind that enabled the administration to issue controversial water pollution rules last month. Lawmakers had passed a "rider," or spending bill amendment, to block the regulations, which require states to undertake extensive water surveys over the next 15 years as a step toward controlling polluted runoff.
"But the EPA effectively sidestepped Congress by rushing the rules into print just days before the spending measure was signed into law. Sen. Tim Hutchinson (R-Ark.), co-author of the rider, called the maneuver 'a tremendous thumb in the eye to the United States Congress.'
"Other environmental initiatives undergoing final grooming could stir similar controversy:
"Roadless" policy: The U.S. Forest Service is preparing to issue final rules to ban new road construction in the service's last remaining parcels of undisturbed wilderness. The ban would affect about 40 million acres, roughly a fifth of the Forest Service's 192 million acres. The timber industry and off-road vehicle enthusiasts are among the strongest opponents."
Of course, the "roadless" area s can NOT be protected from fire. That why the roads are IN the National Forests is to enable fire fighting equipment to get to fires when they break out. What the Post reports today is a blatant power grab by Bill Clinton:
"The president is determined to get as much as he can done for the American people through executive action, as he has for the last eight years," said Bruce Reed, Clinton's top domestic policy adviser. "We're approaching the next six months the same way we've approached the last 71/2 years: To try to pass legislation with Congress, and to make use of the president's existing authority to get things done. . .‚. We work with Congress. But just because they've ground to a halt doesn't mean the executive branch should."
That power grab and the resulting fires are your "environmental" legacy, Mr. Clinton. You will be known not only as the most corrupt president in American history but the most destructive in your environmental policies.
To comment: mmostert@originalsources.com
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