Wilderness suffers under Bush’s plan

Mark York Staff Writer

Doc, it hurts when I do this,” goes the old joke. “Then don’t do that,” the Henny Youngman-like doctor delivers in the punch line. That is the prescription we need for our national forests if they are to regain the vitality and diversity they had at the conception of the system by President Teddy Roosevelt and his Yale-educated first Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot.

Faced with a bountiful and vast collection of forest ecosystems and a rapidly growing population, Roosevelt knew from his travels that something must be done to control overexploitation if the resources were to last for future generations.

Roosevelt realized the concept of sustainability, and that some areas are just too special to have any allowable level of intrusion for economic benefit.

But Roosevelt had more than one interest to consider, and Pinchot saw the need for a multiple-use management policy on the national forests, where no such activity was allowed in the parks. Timber would be harvested, and new trees planted in their place.

This is as it should be in the proper place, and level, but soon the uses quickly evolved into abuses. Economic greed combined with a demonized view of wildfires, present in healthy natural landscapes for millions of years, soon created a nightmarish scenario.

After a disastrous season of firestorms in 1910, the federal policy was to put out any fire as fast as possible at all costs. But the real cost was the forest it sought to save for the lumberman’s saw.

For years we have studied these problems and known the cause but have refused to accept it, because we are the cause.

President Bill Clinton joined Roosevelt in conservation history by setting aside nearly 62 million acres of forest land for posterity with the “Roadless Area Conservation Rule.” This land was targeted as having unique and diverse ancient forest qualities, not just the breathtaking rock and ice of the designated wilderness permanently off-limits to development because at those altitudes the resources aren’t economically desirable anyway.

It was a good first step in the forward-thinking plan to hang on to this remnant that has more value as “natural capital” held in trust than it would if defiled for the short-term to gain a few. It is based on sound scientific study. But this is not the result many want. Unfortunately, the Bush administration leads the pack in choosing not to follow this historic lead.

“Forests generate most of the water in the country, providing two-thirds of all the precipitation runoff — the water that comes from the sky — in the 48 contiguous states,” Michael Dombeck, former Chief of the U.S. Forest Service in the Clinton administration, wrote in a December 2003 New York Times op-ed piece. “Some 14 percent of all runoff comes from the roughly 190 million acres of our national forests, which take up only 8 percent of the land.”

Recently, the White House issued its proposal for a “Healthy Forests” plan. It seeks to streamline the logjam of legal challenges forest conservationists have to fight because the administration refuses to listen to its own scientific conclusions. They do so at their own peril and ours.

Science doesn’t operate from ideology, but politics does. Scientists go where the facts take them, not look for the answer they happen to like regardless of what the evidence says. Removing considerations for watershed health, endangered species and overall forest health, when the current rules do little more than postpone the inevitable is not the right path to sustainability — just a faster lane to the gutter.

We have an incredibly diverse planet capable of sustaining all species in perpetuity if we stop doing the things that jeopardize this potential future. If we cut the self-serving agenda and move forward, we can restore America’s forests to their once-mighty bounty.