Editorial: Enviros Keep Putting Burrs Under Our Saddle

Natural disasters provided a lot of news in 2005. Among them were the tsunami, hurricanes and tropical storms, devastating rains, fires and floods in California, fires in Texas and Oklahoma, and winter storms that took down thousands of telephone poles, leaving thousands powerless. Forecasting aside, we usually find ourselves caught off guard by natural calamities. On the other hand, we can predict with uncanny accuracy that radical environmentalists will keep putting burrs under our saddle.

The problem with the environmental movement is not that it is always wrong. Surely after Katrina we can see that saving the Gulf Coast wetlands would have done much to hold off the storm surge. But they are not always right either. Sometimes when they are wrong, they are dealing with matters of life and death. Many radical members of the movement just don’t care about human life.

The problems the world is experiencing relate mostly to population growth, which feeds our immense appetite for all kinds of services and products that grind away at our natural resources. Oil is a big one. Oil provides energy and is a feedstock for the production of thousands of household products we refuse to do without.

The environmental laws, as restrictive as they are (with no wiggle room) have allowed radical environmentalists to stop progress at every turn. No one in government seems to have what it takes to force a showdown and make sense of enforcement. As a result, too many people suffer because vitally needed projects are not allowed to move forward. The cost is tremendous.

As it relates to oil, we have oil all along our coastal regions but we will not permit drilling. Instead we go to the Middle East for oil. In some areas we will not allow the burning of coal—our most available energy source—despite the fact that clean-coal technology has come a long way. We are aware of the value of hydroelectric power, but we still have environmentalists fighting to have the Snake River dams demolished. We put a damper on nuclear power.

Among the greatest failures of the U.S. government, however, has been its reluctance to rein in radical environmentalists. One area for example is the diminished capability of the Park Service to protect our forests. Scientifically it is pretty well established that forests need to be kept clean. Thinning, brush removal and even controlled burns are acceptable tools in forest management. But common sense, particularly when it comes to public lands, has been tossed out the window. Valuable fire-burned and dying timber is left to rot, while lumbermen are not permitted to salvage it. It is said that millions of board feet of salvageable timber went to waste after the Mt. St. Helens eruption.

The December 29, 2005, issue of The Wall Street Journal reports on the “Death of a Sawmill.” Jim Hurst at Eureka, Mont., auctioned off his sawmill there last August because he simply could not buy sufficient timber. This despite the fact that 10 times as many trees as he needed die annually every year in the nearby Kootenai National Forest. He could see the dead and dying trees from his office window, but they might just as well have been “standing on the moon,” the WSJ said.

Being resourceful, Hurst managed to survive the past five years by buying fire- and bug-killed trees salvaged from Alberta provincial forests. Says the WSJ, “Such salvage work is unthinkable in our national forests that, news reports to the contrary, remain under the thumb of radical environmental groups whose hatred for capitalism seems boundless. Americans are thus invited to believe that salvaging fire-killed timber is ‘like mugging a burn victim’.”

When it comes to straightening out this mess, members of Congress are wimps! Perhaps many even buy into environmentalist claptrap, though, according to the WSJ there is no peer-reviewed science that supports it. In fact, many of the West’s great forests are products of past salvage and reforestation projects.

We are convinced that one day in the forthcoming decade, those involved in recovery of the U.S. Gulf Coast will be able to say, “There, it’s almost done. We did it.” But the environmental plague that has invaded our country for the past 35 years goes on and on, and Congress twiddles its collective thumbs when we suggest fixing environmental law to make room for common sense.

We know war against the terrorists is costly. We know there are U.S. locations that need costly recovery from natural disaster. But the radical environmentalists just keep right on putting burrs under our saddle by hamstringing business and leading Congress around by the nose. That involves a terrible cost, too.

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