Diary of a Mad Voter: Joan McCarter

If There Aren’t Any Trees Left, How Can They Burn?

By Joan McCarter, 5-27-08

Not all of the Bush administration’s efforts to sell America off to private interests is as blatant as the military contracts that have been awarded in Iraq. Check out this plot hatched deep in the bowels of the Interior Department: slash forest fire prevention budgets, then propose that the shortfalls in budgets be made up by selling off the timber that would have otherwise had to have been protected from fire. That’s a downright clever plan for this crowd.

Here’s the Bush budget proposal for the next year:

Bush’s budget calls for a $150 million increase in federal funding for the U.S. Forest Service to extinguish blazes, bringing the agency’s total firefighting budget to more than $1.14 billion, according to figures provided to the subcommittee.

But the proposal slashes the agency’s preparedness funding by $77 million, including a $13 million reduction in money to remove dead trees and overgrown brush that act as kindling for fires in 155 national forests.

That amounts to more than an 11 percent decrease from last year’s preparedness budget of around $5.9 million.

Meanwhile, the Forest Service budget as a whole keeps shrinking; its budget this fiscal year is $4.13 billion — a decrease of $64.5 million. This is, of course, in keeping with Bush’s “Healthy Forests” plan, overseen by Undersecretary for Natural Resource and Environment Mark Rey, known in his pre-administration days as the nation’s foremost timber lobbyist and key staffer to Sen. “Wide Stance” Craig. A healthy forest is one without all those trees to get in the way, and the best way to achieve that is to force the agency charged with protecting the trees to sell them all off to the timber companies. Impeccable, if twisted, logic.

That plan, at least in one national forest, came to a screeching halt last week, courtesy the 9th circuit court of appeals.

In a resounding repudiation of the Bush administration’s national forest management, a panel of three US judges has ordered a halt to three major logging projects in the Plumas National Forest.

Logging had been set to begin June 1, but now cannot go forward until an environmental impact assessment conforms to a Clinton administration forest management plan, the panel of the 9th US circuit court of appeals said.

Judge John T Noonan Jr wrote the opinion and also a concurrence that says the US forest service has an inherent conflict of interest when it sells large trees to finance fire protection efforts, as called for under the Bush plan.

“The financial incentive of the forest service in implementing the forest plan is as operative, as tangible, and as troublesome as it would be if ... the agency was the paid accomplice of the loggers,” Noonan wrote.

Heh. “As if the agency was the paid accomplice of the loggers.” Good one, Noonan. The repudiated Bush management plan for the Sierra Nevada replaced a 2001 plan developed by the Clinton administration. Bush’s 2004 plan allowed for five times as much logging in the 11 million acres of the Sierra Nevada forests as the Clinton plan, allowed for larger, more mature trees to be cut, and “limited safeguards for forests, water, soil and wildlife throughout the 11 national forests in the Sierra, ostensibly for wildfire prevention.”

The judges neatly summed up the issue in their ruling [pdf].

Sell trees to loggers. Use the money to clear areas of what is potential fuel for fire. The solution has a secondary benefit: what the loggers cut can, at least in part, be timber that was potential for fire. In one sale, a fire hazard can be removed and the USFS paid so that it can remove the fuel of future fires.

Two for one always has an attractive ring. But are there no alternative ways of getting money to do the clearing that is imperative?  Obviously, there may be. First of all, there is the USFS’s own budget. Does that budget contain any funds that could be devoted to fuel removal? Is every one of its activities so necessary and so tightly allocated that no money could be shifted?  We do not know the answer because this alternative has not been explored.

Suppose that the USFS and its parent, the Department of Agriculture, cannot spare a dime. What then? Appropriate appropriations come from Congress. The work of fire prevention is work of the first importance. If the USFS does not have enough, why should not Congress be asked to give it more? Surely the avoidance of catastrophic fire in the national forests must rate a high priority among the needs of the nation.

And there’s the rub, of course. Congress can’t be let of the hook for allowing the administration to continue to starve the Forest Service’s budget to try to force these timber sales. Particularly considering that the public has been aware of the Bush forest shenanigans for years. A Department of Ag IG report from November 2001, [pdf] concluded that the Forest Service was using National Fire Plan funds intended for fire restoration to conduct timber sales in the Bitterroot National Forest.

California’s John Muir project conducted a study in 2003 for the Sierra Nevada forests, those saved by this ruling, finding

that 83% of all projects funded by NFP brush reduction funds in the Sierra Nevada are actually commercial timber sales. Brush reduction funds were supposed to be used to reduce flammable undergrowth adjacent to forest communities in the West; however, not one of projects in the Sierra Nevada focused on the reduction of flammable brush near homes.

The Bush administration has done with fire precisely what it did with terrorism: capitalize on a sense of emergency and fear to set aside existing laws and regulations, all to the benefit of corporate cronies. Every fire season brings more devastation, particularly in Western forests, many of which are overgrown and diseased from decades of misguided fire policy and the effects of global warming. Rather than approach the problem practically and scientifically, the administration seizes the opportunity to cut some good corporate deals.

In this case, the third branch did its job, and because of the nature of the law, hopefully will allow for more public land and timber sell-offs. The case does set aside the Bush plan for the Sierra Nevada in deference to the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clinton forest plan, and hopefully will provide precedent for halting other pending fire sales.

There’s another solution, of course, for easing the Forest Service’s strained fire-fighting budgets. Bring our National Guard troops home from Iraq, and put them back to work doing one of the jobs they originally signed up to do.

Editor’s note: Joan McCarter’s weekly blogs are part of NewWest.Net/Politics’ “Diary of a Mad Voter” feature, a group blog, published in partnership with the Denver Post’s Politics West intended give a glimpse into the hearts and minds of several independent-minded voters and thinkers in the Rocky Mountain West in the ‘08 election cycle. For more columns check in with www.newwest.net/madvoter. And for more information on each of the bloggers, click here.

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