<a href="http://www.plastic.com/article.html?sid=02/08/25/17265351;mode=nested">We Must Cut Down the Forest to Save It</a> on <a href="http://www.plastic.com/">Plastic</a> talks about Bush's recent burst of environmentalism. You can check the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/">NY Times</a> article, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/21/politics/21CND-FOREST.html">Bush, Citing Fire Hazards, Wants Logging Rules Eased</a> or the <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020822-12959862.htm">Forest thinning has Bush support</a> article at the <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/">Washington Times</a> (whose article title should have elicited a deafening "duh!" from its readers). Bush must have been dancing once he saw this wonderfully facile reason for opening up national forests to his buddies in logging. Because that's really what this is, folks. You and I aren't going to benefit from logging national forests. No, in fact, our air gets worse, there's fewer places to travel to, the percentage of forests left from 100 years ago drops below 5% and some of Bush's friends (or Cheney's friends) get even richer. But we don't see a dime of it. We won't see a single benefit from this benevolent <i>reaping</i> of shared national resources. If you scan through the article, you'll see lovely little gems like this factoid <iq>Forests today are in some cases 25 times as dense as they were before Western settlement. Today's fires are much more catastrophic because the forests are more dense and the fires burn hotter.</iq> This is a quote from an "official". This isn't a fact; this is a nugget of pseudo-science from an unelected official who probably knows nothing of scientific process or hypothesis. Oh, but doesn't it sound convincing? We need to log the forests for their own good. That's what has Bush dancing. He knows we're going to go for it (or at least Congress will, because our opinions won't matter, until, briefly and in an entirely cursory fashion, they matter just a little bit in November). Another problem is that the Bush administration (and its corporate backers) want the <iq>greater leeway to cut commercially valuable trees</iq>, but those aren't the trees causing forest fires. It's the <iq>dense but commercially worthless underbrush and tinder-dry saplings</iq> that cause forest fires; and it's hard to believe that this administration is going to go in, out of the goodness of their hearts, to clean the forest and keep the fires manageable. The heart of Bush's proposal is that he's <iq>... likely to ask Congress to waive provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act, which dates from 1970, in order to streamline approval of what proponents call a necessary forest-thinning.</iq> This would, of course, remove provisions that allow environmental groups to combat the big logging companies and keep them from simply logging anywhere they please. That's the aim of this whole charade. The whole &this is an emergency" thing has worked so well at ripping our rights away in the name of fighting terrorism, why not try to repeal some laws in the name of the safety of the forest? A comment at Plastic, <a href="http://www.plastic.com/comments.html?sid=02/08/25/17265351;cid=13">Reason vs. Vitriole and Ignorance</a>, asks the extremely observant questions: <iq>Why are politicians being allowed to decide the fate of ecosystems? Shouldn't there be forums between the public, scientists and policymakers to disseminate information and debate the proper solution path?</iq> This is an extremely good point. Why on Earth does George Bush, who didn't even graduate from college when he went, get to decide on an extremely complex, scientific issue that people who've dedicated their entire lives to can't even give a succinct opinion on? Why do his band of cronies, who have little to no scientific experience, get to decide policies like this? Alone? As the comment continued: <bq>... I doubt that a religious zealot, whose view of the complexity of life consists of an ill-founded and completely unsupported belief that the earth (and possibly the rest of the universe) was created a few thousand years and is populated by the descendents of pairs of animals that were herded onto Noah's ark not long after that, could possibly imagine the enormous complexity of our biosphere or the implications of our residency.</bq> (applause) Because people, and, more and more, the media, need quick answers. If the answer isn't provided quickly, in an easily digestible sound-bite that relies on logic your 8 year old can easily follow, then the message is too "complex" and relegated to the dustbin. Bush knows this (or, more accurately, his handlers know this) and knows that people will accept his logic if only because it lets them feel better about giving in and letting corporations steamroll them and steamroll the forests, which they were going to do anyway, so why give yourself grief about it. Oh well, that's just life. The point is that we too quickly give up our rights to these issues. We leave it to the greens to fight, but then demand all sorts of things that require the greens to lose. And those demands are hand-fed to us by the large corporations through their media arms and their talking-head government officials that they've paid for. We need to stand up and say that it doesn't make sense, even if you fight for it because you're not personally benefitting rather than, because, for example, <iq>the building of roads for loggers to drive huge trucks through national forests ... [is] ... ugly, disruptive to the way animals and plants move around, and they cause erosion.</iq> You don't have to be an altruist to believe that there's more to life than money. The government leads you to believe that the only intrinsic value something has is what it's worth to the highest bidder. Things have environmental and asthetic value as well. <a href="http://www.plastic.com/comments.html?sid=02/08/25/17265351;cid=17">We Have Met the Enemy</a> very eloquently argues a good point about Bush's priorities. Given his pro-corporate and anti-environment stances (and that is just a pathetic understatement), it's far more likely that <iq>Bush is not proposing good land management practices; he's proposing expanded logging.</iq> Looked at from the ever-popular and deeply-flawed neoclassical economic model, in which eternal growth is a necessary prerequisite (as, of course, are infinite resources), <iq>Forest fires cost money, even when they only occur in and damage wilderness. Bush sees forests as profit centers, if they're logged, and cost centers if we just leave them alone - don't build in them, don't log them.</iq> That kind of view fails to take into account any other value than a purely abstracted value of "what can I sell this for?". As far as stopping man-made forest fires...it seems that while <iq>[t]hinning and brush-clearing would reduce the potential for devastating forest fires</iq>, this isn't really the problem. Most commercial thinning creates extremely managed forests, with a lot of space between trees and no underbrush to clog them up. That's not exactly the best fire deterrent. All that air space makes for a fantastic chimney that burns much hotter and faster when fire actually hits it. And if fire is brought in by human hands rather than lightning, as we've had this year, since <iq>[a]t least two of the major fires this year were caused by 1) an irate girlfriend Forest Service employee, and 2) an underpaid smokejumper looking for an extra paycheck.</iq> So while perhaps better forest management <i>might</i> prevent some fire damage, <iq>[s]o would getting arsonists and idiots off the employment rolls of the Forest Service</iq>. Bush's solution, which will make sense on the surface to the facile, ovine public, just coincidentally toadies up to a big corporate lobby; surprise, surprise.