Issue Alert from Winningreen A102903a
Sen. Tom Harkin, in Senate debate, displays ignorance of forest management
by Tom Randall
Date: October 29, 2003
Issue: As the Healthy Forests legislation was debated in the Senate, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) took the floor to carry water for extreme left wing pseudo-environmentalists. What he did was make misstatement after misstatement showing his complete lack of understanding of the issues at hand. Since virtually every word of his remarks was either a gross misstatement or distortion of the truth, it can't all be covered here. However, below is a sample of Harkin's positions versus reality.
Harkin: We shouldn't allow trees up to 12 inches in diameter to be cut because they are large trees.
Reality: If Harkin has ever set foot in a western forest, it seems he did not do so with his eyes open. In the western forests, 12 inches constitutes a fairly small tree, usually stunted in growth because the overhanging canopy does not let in enough sun for it to grow.
Reality: Harvesting larger trees is essential to allow light for other trees to grow, prevent disease and allow habitat for species that can't survive in so-called "old growth" forests.
Harkin: The current process of administrative appeals of forest thinning projects does not cause needless delays and provides necessary public input that would be denied by Healthy Forests legislation.
Reality: The General Accounting Office found that 59 percent of eligible forest projects in the U.S. were appealed in FY2001 and 2002; 52 percent of wildland-urban interface thinning projects were appealed; 66 percent of all fuel reduction projects in California were appealed; environmental appeals were found, overwhelmingly, to be without merit -- 161 of 180 eventually being dismissed in FY 2001-2002.
Harkin: Under Healthy Forests legislation, the public would not be allowed to give input on forest thinning projects.
Reality: An ample period of public input is provided for, particularly for those whose input is the most important of all: local communities and professional forest managers. It is only unlimited input from Harkin's pseudo-environmental activist supporters which would not be allowed to hold up projects endlessly.
Harkin: Building of roads for logging and thinning purposes will simply attract people to the forests and cause more fires and other problems.
Reality: This is the typical pseudo-environmentalist mantra: man is the problem. They advocate public access but only "their kind" of public access, which is often none at all.
Reality: If Harkin had ever been on a mountain logging road in the inter-mountain West he would know that these are not for the faint of heart -- scarcely roads at all -- roads which would attract only the most careful and knowledgeable outdoorsmen.
Reality: Fire trucks can't fly. Tanker planes and helos are valuable aids but fires are fought by boots on the ground. Roads get them there.
Harkin: Thinning and fuel removal in 1,000-acre tracts, as allowed by the legislation, would allow the Forest Service to permit logging on one 1,000-acre tract after another, until vast areas are logged. He added that 1,000 acres is a lot of land.
Reality: Harkin apparently didnšt read the legislation. Where cumulative thousand-acre tracts are involved, the requirements for environmental studies continue to apply.
Reality: A thousand-acre tract makes a pretty good sized farm, though very far from the largest in Iowa. But such tracts are pretty small when we have 190 million acres of forest land in need of treatment.
Harkin: There is no clear evidence that thinning forests reduces fire danger.
Reality: It is clear as a bell. As Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) demonstrated after Harkin spoke, when forests are thinned as nature intended, correcting a century of mismanagement, fires burn lower to the ground and more naturally, resulting in little damage or habitat loss. This has been proven time after time where forest thinning has been permitted.
Harkin: Preventing logging and forest thinning protects species habitat.
Reality: In today's forest, just the opposite is true. Many species, such as the ruffed grouse and the Kirtland's warbler, both near extinction, cannot survive in the artificially dense, so-called "old growth" forests that have been created by a century of mismanagement.
Reality: Natural forests contained an average of 30 to 40 trees per acre, not the 400 per acre created by a century of mismanagement. These were quite varied forests, old and young with varying densities, interspersed with grasslands and meadows, providing habitats for all species. We must correct the mismanagement of the past to provide a healthy ecosystem.
Reality: As a result of monster wildfires in Southern California, there are hundreds of thousands of acres of habitat that contain not a single species of any kind not in the air, not in the streams of lakes not on the ground not even under the ground which has been sterilized for many feet down by extreme heat.
Comment: It is a common conceit among Eastern and Midwestern pseudo-environmentalists with limited knowledge of environmental problems to simply "feel" that they know what is best. Part of that conceit is also that people who live in, around and with these problems every day simply want to destroy the environment for some foggy, unarticulated gain. Pseudo-environmentalists seem to have trouble conceiving of the notion that people who live or work in a natural environment have the strongest vested interest in preserving it and probably know more than they about how to do that.
Contact: Tom Randall
Winningreen LLC
3712 N. Broadway PMB 279
Chicago, IL 60613
Phone: 773-857-5086
e-mail: trandall@winningreen.com