>From www.cei.org/PRReader.asp?ID=1121
}}>Begin
Contact: Director of Media Relations (202) 331-1010
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Issue Area(s)
Federal Lands "Los Alamos Was a Disaster Waiting to Happen"
Former Interior Dept. Official Calls for Abolishment of US Forest Service
Order Bob Nelson’s A Burning Issue!
Washington, D.C. August 1, 2000- Dr. Robert Nelson, professor of environmental
policy in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland and senior
fellow of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is so critical of the US Forest
Service that he wants it closed down. Nelson, who worked in the Office of
Policy
Analysis at the Department of the Interior for almost twenty years, has recently
released a new book, A Burning Issue: A Case for Abolishing the US Forest
Service. Nelson’s wide experience with land management led him to write A
Burning Issue, which coincidentally was already written and in the midst of
being printed when the fires broke out in Los Alamos.
Nelson, a nationally-known expert on federal land management, testified before
Congress on June 7 about the mismanagement of our National Forests. Addressing a
joint hearing before the House Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health and the
House Subcommittee on National Parks and Public Lands, Committee on Resources,
Nelson drew some strong conclusions:
Forestry experts have been warning the US Government since the early 1990’s that
extremely dangerous fire conditions were escalating in the West.
The response by the Federal Government to these fire warnings, according to
investigations done by the General Accounting Office and others, was woefully
inadequate. As an example, a press release in December 1999 by the Los Alamos
National Laboratory citing “wildfire” as the “greatest threat to Los Alamos
operations,” produced no action.
Sixty percent of all Forest Service lands nationwide, involving 118 million
acres, are beyond acceptable levels of “fuel stocking densities.”
Los Alamos has not been an isolated case; other large fires have ravaged the
West. Nelson believes legislation, which shifts responsibility for national
forest management from the federal to state level, is the answer. “It is ironic
when you compare this disaster to other environmental tragedies such as Three
Mile Island and Exxon Valdez. In those cases, our government was the first to
step to the plate to point fingers and demand answers. Yet when our own
government sets a fire, looses control of it, and destroys over 400 homes and
50,000 acres of forest, there is no accountability.” Concludes Nelson: “If ever
there were a reason to do away with the US Forest Service, the fiasco at Los
Alamos is it.”
Order Bob Nelson’s A Burning Issue!
CEI, a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group founded in 1984, is
dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government. For more
information, please contact Judy Kent or Emily McGee, media relations, at 202-
331-1010 or [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Page 1
©8/3/00 Competitive Enterprise Institute
End<{{
>From http://www.cei.org/OpEdReader.asp?ID=1134
}}>Begin
8/9/00
Issue Area(s)
Federal Lands Fires By Design: Bob Nelson Op-Ed in Washington Post
by Robert H. Nelson
Published in the Washington Post
August 9, 2000
This year's forest fire season in the West may be the worst in 30 years. By
now, an area larger than Connecticut--4 million acres--has burned, and more is
likely to come before the fire season peaks in the weeks ahead.
These fires are not random acts of nature. They are the result of government
policy decisions that have backfired. Washington decision-makers lost a gamble
that the weather would remain wet enough and the winds low enough to avoid
looming catastrophic fire.
The current wave of devastating fires has resulted from an unnatural buildup of
dry, highly flammable excess wood. Before the government began to suppress
forest fires early in the 20th century, frequent small fires cleaned out the
underbrush. Large ponderosa pines often grew in open stands with densities
between 20 and 55 trees per acre. Now, as a result of preventing forest fires,
much smaller trees often grow in the same places with densities of 300 to 900
trees per acre.
When a forest fire does break out today, it burns much more intensely. Fires
like this have nothing to do with the lighter fires that historically were a
natural part of the ecological cycle. They are extremely costly to fight and do
wide damage to the forest environment. According to Forest Service figures,
fully 60 percent of the land in the U.S. national forest system today is in an
unhealthy condition and faces an abnormal fire hazard. The largest part of the
forest acreage now burning is national forest land. The Los Alamos fire in May
started as a prescribed burn on Bandelier National Monument but soon spread to
the Santa Fe National Forest, where most of the actual burning occurred.
Forest experts have long predicted that a fire season like 2000 was only a
matter of time. In 1994, the National Commission on Wildfire Disasters warned
of "an extreme fire hazard from the extensive buildup of dry, highly flammable
forest fuels" across the West. By 1998, there was wide recognition at the
highest levels of government of these grave dangers. Barry Hill, associate
director of the General Accounting Office, testified to Congress that an
"increasing number of large, intense, uncontrollable and catastrophically
destructive wildfires" were being seen across the West. As a result of past
fire suppression, "vegetation [had] accumulated, creating high levels of fuels
and transforming much of the region into a tinderbox."
Even if the Forest Service wanted to address these problems, the agency was
blocked by political pressures and a misguided ideology from taking effective
action. There are three possible ways to reduce the excess wood now contained
in the forests of the West. It can be burned in small, prescribed fires. It can
be removed mechanically by cutting down the trees with chain saws or other
means. Or it can be left to burn in occasional large and unintended
conflagrations, as has been happening this year.
To the extent that it acted at all, the Clinton administration opted for
prescribed burning. Federal forest managers have in fact been under pressure to
raise the levels of prescribed burns, and they have increased them
significantly. But this government response has been altogether inadequate to
the growing fire hazard.
Use of prescribed burning is inhibited by the risk, as seen at Los Alamos, that
a prescribed fire will get out of control, and decades of fire suppression have
greatly increased this likelihood. The weather has to be just right; the total
costs of planning and controlling prescribed fires would run to many billions
of dollars; and the fires often create air pollution problems.
The main alternative is for the Forest Service simply to remove much of the
excess fuels by mechanical means. The Denver Water Board, for example, is
working with timber companies and other parties to cut down trees to restore
forest health in its watershed area.
But mechanical removal is at odds with Clinton administration policy. Since
1989, timber harvests on national forests have fallen from 12 billion board
feet per year to less than 3 billion. Environmental groups see any tree cutting
as a subterfuge for more timber harvesting. Some of the unwanted wood in
western forests could in fact be removed profitably. But the Forest Service
instead is acting to make any such commercial removal more difficult, recently
announcing a moratorium on any road building on 43 million acres of national
forests.
Yet if prescribed burning is not able to do the job, and mechanical removal is
politically unacceptable, the de facto policy amounts to burning the West.
Politicians and the press have rushed to heap blame for the many infernos this
year on the weather, irresponsible campers' fires and mistakes by low-level
government officials. But it was national policy that set the stage for all
these fires in 2000 by permitting huge--and still accumulating--inventories of
wood to develop in the forests.
In many areas the only way to remove the excess fuels is to go in and cut the
wood. If federal forest managers continue in denial of this common-sense
approach, the West can expect to see even worse fire seasons in years to come.
The writer is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of
Maryland and a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
End<{{
A<>E<>R
Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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