by Edward Ring
Millions of acres of California forest have been blackened by wildfires this summer, leading to the usual angry denunciations from the usual quarters about climate change. But in 1999, the Associated Press reported that forestry experts had long agreed that “clearing undergrowth would save trees,” and that “years of aggressive firefighting have allowed brush to flourish that would have been cleared away by wildfires.” But very little was done. And now fires of unprecedented size are raging across the Western United States.
“Sen. Feinstein blames Sierra Club for blocking wildfire bill,” reads the provocative headline on a 2002 story in California’s Napa Valley Register. Feinstein had brokered a congressional consensus on legislation to thin “overstocked” forests close to homes and communities, but could not overcome the environmental lobby’s disagreement over expediting the permit process to thin forests everywhere else.
Year after year, environmentalists litigated and lobbied to stop efforts to clear the forests through timber harvesting, underbrush removal, and controlled burns. Meanwhile, natural fires were suppressed and the forests became more and more overgrown. The excessive biomass competed for the same water, soil, and light a healthier forest would have used, rendering all of the trees and underbrush unhealthy. It wasn’t just excess biomass that accumulated, but dried out and dead biomass.
What happened among California’s tall stands of Redwood and Ponderosa Pine also happened in its extensive chaparral. Fire suppression along with too many environmentalist-inspired bureaucratic barriers to controlled burns and undergrowth removal turned the hillsides and canyons of Southern California into tinderboxes.
In 2009, after huge blazes wiped out homes and forced thousands to evacuate, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich observed: “The environmentalists have gone to the extreme to prevent controlled burns, and as a result we have this catastrophe today.”
In 2014, Republican members of Congress tried again to reduce the bureaucracy associated with “hazardous fuel projects” that thin out overgrown forests. True to form, the bill got nowhere thanks to environmental lobbyists who worried it would undermine the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the law that requires thorough impact assessments ahead of government decisions on public lands.
In a blistering report published in the California Globe on how environmentalists have destroyed California’s forests, investigative journalist Katy Grimes interviewed Representative Tom McClintock, a Republican who represents communities in and around the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California. McClintock has worked for years to reform NEPA and other barriers to responsible forest management.
“The U.S. Forest Service used to be a profitable federal agency,” McClintock told Grimes.
Up until the mid-1970s, we managed our national forests according to well-established and time-tested forest management practices. But 40 years ago, we replaced these sound management practices with what can only be described as a doctrine of benign neglect. Ponderous, Byzantine laws and regulations administered by a growing cadre of ideological zealots in our land management agencies promised to save the environment. The advocates of this doctrine have dominated our law, our policies, our courts and our federal agencies ever since.
But these zealots have not protected the forests. They have destroyed them. The consequences are far-reaching.
Decimating the Timber Industry, Disrupting the Ecosystem
Few people, including the experts, bother to point out how overgrown forests reduce the water supply. But when watersheds are choked with dense underbrush competing for moisture, precipitation and runoff cannot replenish groundwater aquifers or fill up reservoirs. Instead, it’s immediately soaked up by the trees and brush. Without clearing and controlled burns, the overgrown foliage dies anyway.
A new activist organization in California, the “California Water for Food and People Movement,” created a Facebook group for people living in the hellscape created by misguided environmentalist zealotry. Comments and posts from long-time residents of the Sierra foothills, where fires have exploded in recent years, yield eyewitness testimony to how environmentalist restrictions on forest management have gone horribly wrong. Examples:
“I’m 70, and I remember controlled burns, logging, and open grazing.”
“With the rainy season just ahead, the aftermath of the Creek Fire will challenge our water systems for years to come. Erosion will send toxic debris and sediment cascading into streams, rivers, and reservoirs, reducing their capacity to carry and hold water. Dirty air, dirty water, and the opposite of environmentalism are on full display right now, brought to us by the environmental posers who will no doubt use this crisis to unleash a barrage of ‘climate change did it’ articles.”
“Many thanks to Sierra Club and other environmental groups. You shut down logging/brush removal and had a ‘don’t touch’ approach to our forests. You shut down access roads and let them get overgrown, so now they can’t be used for fire suppression and emergency equipment. You fought ranchers for grazing, which helped keep the forest floors clean. You made fun of Trump when he said we need to rake the forest. Trust me these forest rakes and logging would have prevented the devastating fires we see now.”
The economics of responsible forest management, given the immensity of America’s western forests, requires profitable timber harvesting to play a role. But California has no commercial timber operations on state-owned land. And since 1990, when the environmentalist assault on California’s timber industry began in earnest, its timber industry has shrunk to half its former size. Reviving California’s timber industry, so the collective rate of harvest equals the collective rate of growth, would go a long way towards solving the problem of catastrophic fires.
Instead, California’s environmentalists only redouble their nonsense arguments. Expect these fires to justify even more “climate change” legislation that does nothing to clear the forests of overgrown tinder, and everything to clear the forests, and the chaparral, of people and towns.
Expect these fires to fuel a new round of legislation containing urban growth while mandating suburban densification, with increased rationing of energy and water.
Expect the “climate emergency” to accelerate in synergistic lockstep with the pandemic emergency and the anti-racism emergency. Expect all three of these emergencies to become issues of public health, thereby eliminating inconvenient constitutional roadblocks to swift action.
Misdirected Union Priorities
Meanwhile, tragically, expect California’s politically powerful firefighters’ union to do little or nothing to support the timber industry or rural inhabitants who don’t want to move into urban condos.
As Steve Greenhut explained in a recent column in the Orange County Register:
Frankly, union power drives state and local firefighting policies. The median compensation package for firefighters has topped $240,000 a year in some locales. California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection firefighters earn less, but their packages still total nearly $150,000 a year. The number of California firefighters who receive compensation packages above $500,000 a year is mind-blowing.
No wonder firefighters are overwhelmed during California’s wildfire season. The state can’t afford to hire enough of them.
And when these firefighter unions could have been pushing for legislation to clear the forests back in 2019, where instead did their leftist leadership direct their activist efforts? They marched in solidarity with the striking United Teachers of Los Angeles. The teachers’ unions have done to California’s public schools what environmentalists have done to California’s forests.
If an honest history of California in the early 21st century is ever written, the verdict will be unequivocal. Forests that thrived in California for over 20 million years were allowed to become overgrown tinderboxes. And then, with stupefying ferocity, within the span of a few decades, they burned to the ground. Many of them never recovered.
This epic tragedy was the direct result of policies put in place by misguided environmentalist zealots, misinformed suckers who sent them money, and the litigators and lobbyists they hired, who laughed all the way to the bank.
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Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness and co-founder of the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013.
While Edward Ring blames environmentalists for the “destruction of California forests,” echoing Trump’s criticism of California’s forest management practices, both Ring and Trump fail to point out that the federal government owns 47% of all California land:
According to the Congressional Research Service, the state of California has a total acreage of 100.2 million acres. Of that total, 47.70 percent, or 47.8 million acres, belongs to the federal government.
These lands are managed by the U.S. Forest Service (43%), U.S. National Park Service (16%), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (0.6%), U.S. Bureau of Land Management (32%) and the U.S. Department of Defense (8%).
Accordingly, much of the blame for any deficiencies in forest management rests with the Trump administration, now nearing its fourth year in office. While the administration has unilaterally changed land management practices in Utah and Alaska, opening federal lands to private oil companies, it has done nothing to reduce the fire hazard on federal lands in California. Why has the administration not similarly opened up federal forests to selective timber harvesting? As Mr. Ring points out, the Forest Service operated as a profit center selling timber to the private sector. So why haven’t they used profits from harvesting timber to pay for clearing the underbrush and controlled burns? Is this just another manifestation of President Trump’s antipathy toward liberal California?
While Messrs. Ring and Trump are busy blaming environmentalists for California’s plight, the blame more properly rests with the administration for its inaction in modifying its forest management practices in half the state, and, even more fundamentally, for failure to address (or even acknowledge) climate change as the root cause of the wildfires.
David L. Smith
Mr. Smith,
Your attempt to blame the massive fires in Oregon & California on President Trump is way off-base. Having worked with the U. S. Forest Service, BLM (Bureau of Land Mgt), Fish & Game Commission in addition to actually living in Oregon in the 70’s & 80’s I can tell you the massive fires you see today are a direct result of environmentalists “over-reach”. Admittedly there were changes that needed to be made regarding lumber companies harvesting trees. The practice of “clear-cutting” needed to be stopped and it was. Unfortunately the restrictions regarding harvesting dead or diseased trees were excessive and created the present conditions.
Forests, like any other crop, need attention. They need constant selective care in order to remain healthy. What you see today is a direct result of neglect due to restrictions imposed by the misinformed/ignorant environmentalists. You pointed out that Federal Lands/forests had been opened to oil exploration which in part is true but that has nothing to do with the incredibly restrictive regulations regarding the timber industry which have been piled on for the last 60 years.
Climate change, global warming or whatever current code name is in use today, has nothing to do with these fires. The fires are “Mother Nature’s” way of thinning the forests since we didn’t do it for her.
Progressives ruin everything they touch. In a one-party state of ideologues with virtually unlimited power, the once Golden State will continue to decline. George Soros has ordered the Sierra Club not to oppose massive immigration, another major threat to environmental sanity. If the Club doesn’t comply, he’ll withdraw his money. The Sierra Club is not an environmental group. It’s a cabal of ideologue morons.