Dems

President Bush’s Healthy Forests Initiative may sound good on the surface, especially to those that are still in shock from past forest fires, but it has an overall devastating effect on the environment and ignores current environmental laws.

The Healthy Forests Initiative excludes most of the proposed timber sales from regulation under the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), which requires environmental impact statements on all projects on federal property.

What Bush calls reducing the “complexity of environmental analysis” is actually bypassing current environmental laws.

So far, about 1,000 acres of timber sales have been excluded from NEPA in the name of fire protection. The actual threat of fire to these forests is uncertain.

Sure the process is simplified, but at the cost that federal agencies are not taking the steps to ensure environmental responsibility.

President Bush also claims that threatened and endangered species will be helped by this policy on his White House Web site. But the reality is plants and animals will suffer.

In this policy, federal land management agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service and the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management will independently assess if the timber sales will affect endangered and threatened species without any input from agencies such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, not to mention conflicts with the Endangered Species Act.

In addition, this policy claims that fuel reduction sales, or timber sales, will benefit endangered and threatened species in the long run.

First, Bush forgets that endangered and threatened species are fragile and that any devastation could jeopardize their long-term survival.

Second, for a policy that boasts to be based on science, there doesn’t seem to be strong scientific evidence showing the long term benefits of timber sales on endangered and threatened species.

This policy is not about science, wildlife or even fires per say.

Sure forest fires will be less prevalent if there are fewer forests, but is that what we really want?

Cutting down forests to stop forest fires is like doing away with laws because the crime rate is too high. This initiative simply makes timber sales carry on without the nuisance of those pesky environmental laws that we put in place.

It is a bad idea not only for the forests but for all of us. The ideal situation of protecting forests and preventing unnatural and devastating forest fires is more complicated.

We have to look at the heart of the problem and find a positive solution.

GOP

I’m sure we can all remember the devastating fire storms in California, Arizona, Montana, Oregon and here in Colorado last year and in 2002.

Certainly the families of the 50 firefighters and 22 civilians who died remember the 147,607 scorching infernos that not only took lives but destroyed 10.8 million acres of land and 6,800 structures.

And yet, some Democrats and groups such as the Sierra Club contend nothing should be done.

President Bush, however, is a man of action and refuses to stand by while both our homes and our forests are destroyed by fires that can easily be prevented.

On Dec. 23 of last year, President Bush signed into law the Healthy Forests Initiative, a controversial act aimed at stemming future fires.

The measure accomplishes this through the removal of unnatural overgrowth and brush in priority areas. There are currently 190 million acres considered to be at high risk for spontaneous and devastating fire storms in America’s forests.

Critics question how the direct removal of trees can possibly benefit our forestlands. But this is shortsighted thinking.

By removing the undergrowth and brush, the fuel that spreads fires over such vast distances has been taken out of the equation.

While it is widely recognized that some fires are indeed necessary for the natural cycle of healthy forests, fires of the kind of devastation we have witnessed recently destroy forests oftentimes beyond anything that can be repaired within 100 years.

It is President Bush’s aim, with collaboration from local, tribal, state, and non-governmental entities, to cease the occurrence of these ravenous forest blazes.

Through this thinning of the unnaturally dense undergrowth, further pollution of water sources, air quality and the destruction of communities can be avoided by the prevention of cataclysmic fires. Such fires that have occurred in the past couple years are not the result of usual patterns, but are the consequence of years of neglect by the federal government to keep our forest healthy.

For years, the federal government has been preventing the thinning of our forests and putting out any and all small fires. The product of this was rapid and uncontrolled growth that’s unnatural and dangerous.

There are other planks of the Healthy Forest Initiative that are rarely mentioned, such as Bush’s plans to regenerate already destroyed forests, protect endangered species that find their habitats in severe danger of these huge fires, and prevent insect infestation of our beautiful standing trees.

Overall, I believe the critics simply don’t wish to admit they have nothing credible to say about the act. While searching around the Sierra Club’s Web site, I found no evidence that anything Bush contends is incorrect; only claims that they think he’s probably wrong.

While cute, their arguments carry no logic and little support.

If you want some real experts, why don’t you ask the firefighters who specialize in putting out the monstrous blazes such as the ones that occurred last year and the year before?

They support Bush’s plan by 83 percent.

Interesting, considering they’re risking their lives on whether they’re right or not.

I trust they looked into the matter with some level of scrutiny.