I just had to excerpt some of that Worldnet article. It's a classic example of the battle between public and private market failure:
worldnetdaily.com
"The damage having been done, there is only one reasonable course: permit logging companies to henceforth thin the forests. Granted, huge swaths of this government-owned land is covered with diseased and decaying trees that are useless for the logging industry. That's also thanks to government regulations. But permitting loggers to start the thinning process would at least get us on the right track.
So what does the Clinton administration propose? Not private logging but a huge new government program that will put the government in charge of thinning forests at a cost of hundreds of millions to the taxpayer! Instead of permitting private enterprise to make money to clean up the government's disaster, the Clinton administration proposes to steal our money to thin out the forest themselves. And no doubt the government will botch the job as it botches everything.
A draft being circulated within the Forest Service imagines a 40-year project to clear out underbrush in 40 million acres over 15 years, tossing out the small trees and leaving the big ones. And what will this cost in dollars and manpower? Nearly 1 billion per year, and that's only the first round of estimates. Count on it being five and ten times as much. We are talking about a full-scale, Soviet-style centralized industrial plan to do what loggers would gladly do at a profit.
The insanity of this idea just boggles the mind. Why doesn't the Clinton administration consider allowing private enterprise to do the job of clearing out forests? First, it's a matter of pride, since it was these lunkheads and their pals who first came up with the idea that forests should be "preserved" in their pristine state. Second, they are socialist puritans consumed with fear that someone, somewhere, might be making a profit. Third, they are captured by environmentalists whose strange religion exalts nature above man. (do we know anyone on this discussion thread who resembles this description?)
But as these fires show, government intervention can unleash terrors undreamt by central planners. Who knows what kinds of demons will be unleashed by the proposed government thinning plan?
Ironically, if this central plan is to be stopped, it will likely be due to counter-lobbying by the environmental groups that can't admit to themselves that their ballyhooed plan to save the forests through conservation has actually ended up destroying them. For example, the Flagstaff, Ariz., effort to permit limited logging for purposes of thinning has come under heavy criticism from people who see it as a veil to permit a capitalist ravaging of mother nature."
On the other hand maybe Pezz is right about human threats to our wilderness and wildlife. But the greatest human threat is the failure to properly understand and play by nature's own rules. Namely, for every living creature on earth, there exists a predator trying to eat it. It may be a wolf hunting Caribou in the Alaskan tundra, or the ebola or HIV preying upon humanity. And that these predators don't exist for the purpose of terrorizing their cute and cuddly prey, but for the purpose of culling their herds and counteracting the natural reproductive traits that within a short time lead these herds to outstip the capability of nature to support their quantities.
When a predator, whether animal or plant, is removed, that void must be artificially filled in order that that specie is no devastated by its own hyperactive reproduction and overgrowth. And that is the role filled by hunters and loggers.
They cull the excess and manage these resources in such a way that they are able to avoid natual conflagrations such as the current forest fires, or mass starvations by deer and antelope in the midst of winter.
Regards,
Ron |
