Can't see the forest for the smoke

An editorial from the Victorville (California) Daily Press:

The timing is all too disturbing. As the United States Senate weighs President Bush's Healthy Forests legislation — legislation that would, among other things, spur thinning of the nation's forests to minimize the danger of wildfires — Southern California is being scorched by another season of devastation.
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Part of the reason for intensity of the fires, of course, is that the forests have been allowed to grow unimpeded over the course of the last decade or so, and the accumulated fuel — underbrush, dead trees and the like — has just been waiting for a spark. This particular spark, firefighters believe, was provided by an arsonist, but it could just as well have been lightening or a thrown cigarette or an untended campfire. The result is the same: miles and miles, and acres and acres, of blackened wildlands, the loss of homes, the deaths of countless wildlife, and the loss of hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of board feet of lumber that should have been harvested by commercial loggers.
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The Bush Administration, to its credit, is doing everything it can to end that cycle of tragedy. It is pushing for the Senate to pass H.R. 1904, the "Healthy Forests Restoration Act," a bill designed to streamline logging projects to reduce the risk of catastrophic Western wildfires such as the one we've all been watching burn for a week now. But, typically, resistance has been growing. Last week, two senators — both, not surprisingly, Democrats — moved to block the bill by demanding hearings on a compromise amendment that would provide protections for "old-growth forests" (big trees). Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), are the culprits.
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As the Colorado Springs Gazette noted in an editorial reprinted in this space last week, it would make enormously good sense for the Senate to approve the bill, and at the same time give some leeway to commercial loggers to help offset the cost of the recommended thinning of the forests. Those loggers, in a better world, would sell some of the timber they cut, would realize a profit from the cutting, and thus the taxpayers wouldn't have to directly fund the thinning. The two Democrats want to avoid using proceeds from timber sales to pay for fuel reduction projects by authorizing $760 million annually. From taxpayers.

Meanwhile, the far leftists in the environmental movement keep wailing about saving all those "old growth" trees for "future generations," even as all that "old growth" goes up in smoke.

The environmentalists won't be happy until there is no logging, no mining, and no oil and gas drilling in this country. Which reminds me of this Wall Street Journal editorial (paid subscription required) from last Friday - Of Mines and Men:

Everybody in Congress claims to be worried about the paucity of new jobs, so we can only assume they are all delighted with Interior Secretary Gale Norton's decision late last week to help create some, specifically in the U.S. mining industry.

This is a tale worth telling because it shows how much government willfully does to destroy jobs. Ms. Norton reversed a Clinton-era opinion that had all but sent the domestic mining industry down an airless shaft. In 1997, an obscure Interior solicitor named John Leshy looked at the 1872 Mining Law and decided that 100 years of consistent interpretation were wrong. He issued a new opinion claiming the law limited each 20-acre federal mining claim to a single five-acre mill site. Mill sites are the land on which companies put offices, equipment and waste rock from mines.

Mr. Leshy's intention was to bar companies from public lands, and he succeeded. Physics made it impossible for companies to fit their rock and infrastructure into that tiny space. U.S. mine exploration spending has since declined by two-thirds. The number of metal mining jobs dropped 41%, to 29,000 today from 50,000 in 1997.

It's hundreds and thousands of "little" decisions like this by fifth columnists in the government that advance the wingnut agenda. Lynx hair anyone?

Predictably they aren't too pleased that this one is being reversed:

The usual green suspects are yelling that the Norton reversal is one more Bush scar on Mother Nature. What they don't mention is that of the 260 million acres of Bureau of Land Management lands, just 0.06% is affected by mining. The charge that companies can now dump more "toxic" waste is also bizarre. Companies with more mill sites will still have to follow federal environmental laws (Clean Air, Water, you name it).

If our environmental lobbies want to eradicate domestic mining and manufacturing, then they and their political friends ought to say so and we can all debate it. They shouldn't be able to hide behind bureaucratic opinions that evade the will of Congress and throw tens of thousands out of work without accountability.

Indeed.