Environmentalists’ Lawsuits to Stop Forest-Thinning the Main Cause of Killer Wildfires August 28, 2018 Michael Barnes 3 Comments
Whether you’re a global warming activist or denier, it doesn’t matter if you have rotting wood in the forests…
 Photo by beltz6 (CC)
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) What good are environmentalists when their policies and lawsuits lead to the destruction of the forests they say they’re protecting?
That’s the frustration coming from both the White House and industry groups over California’s devastating 2018 wildfires — much of which could have been prevented, they say, if not for years of radical litigation and activist-friendly laws emanating from perhaps the most progressive state legislature in the country.
According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal-Fire, about 4,168 wildfires have scorched 726,329 acres this year as of August 12th— enough to burn nearly the entire state of Rhode Island to the ground.
When including federal assistance from the U.S. Forest Service, the total number of California wildfires state and federal firefighters responded to jumps to nearly 5,000 along with 1 billion acres of torched wilderness.
Unfortunately, eight civilians and six firefighters have perished this year as a result, amid an estimated $800 million in property damage.
On Aug. 4, the White House declared the situation a national disaster.
While 2018 is setting records, California’s wildfires have been increasing, and abnormally raging for the past five years. Environmentalists say they know the reason: global warming.
But Trump administration officials are pushing back on what they see as tremendous lack of accountability. Worse, they say the forest fire epidemic is the catastrophic consequence of years of short-sighted litigation.
 Ryan Zinke/Photo by Gage Skidmore (CC)
“Whether you’re a global warming activist or denier,” it doesn’t matter if you have rotting wood in the forests, said Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the U.S. Interior Department,at the White House recently.
California environmentalists have been obsessed with blocking the logging industry and restricting residential and commercial growth in recent years, to the extent that they may have created the conditions for the record wildfires.
Creating conditions for wildfires
By the end of last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service and Cal-Fire reported an historic 129 million dead trees in California.
“The dead trees continue to pose a hazard to people and critical infrastructure, mostly centered in the central and southern Sierra Nevada region of the state,” a joint statement said in Dec. 2017.
The warning proved to be prophetic as an extraordinary amount of accumulated forest debris served to fuel the most intense, longest lasting and farthest spreading wildfires on record.
The still-ongoing Mendocino Fire Complex is a series of out of control fires that has burned more than 380,000 acres in 2018, becoming the largest fire complex in the state’s modern history.
Two years ago, a lawsuit filed by the Forest Preservation Society took aim at blocking logging companies from harvesting timber in areas of Mendocino County. It’s an example of the seemingly countless lawsuits filed by such groups in recent years.
The Mendocino County Sierra Club filed an amicus brief in support of the Forest Preservation Society’s effort in Jan. 2017.
“The destruction of the forest will cause many ecological and water quality problems,” said Linda Perkins , an executive committee member. “Our group is very happy to add Sierra Club’s voice and support to the effort.”
Among the lawsuit’s chief complaints was that logging goes “against the state’s efforts to curb carbon emissions and other greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change.”
Creating opportunities for lawsuits
In 2016, the California Legislature committed to reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to below 1990s levels, despite a near doubling of the state’s population. Passing such laws, which many see as being completely unobtainable, creates gaping opportunities for environmental lobbies, lawyers and activists to sue industry groups.
Ditto for Obama-administration environmentalist-friendly regulations.
Not only has clear-cut logging been aggressively attacked in the courts, but so has salvage logging. Salvage logging is the practice of logging trees in forest areas that have been damaged by natural causes, and would be lost with or without human intervention.
Salvage logging is seen by many as a common-sense way to reduce forest debris with an added economic benefit.
In Nov. 2017, a year that saw 4,000 California wildfires and 225,000 burnt acres of forest lands, the U.S. House of Representatives attempted to loosen environmental regulations for salvage logging and other forest-thinning projects on federal lands.
House Speaker Paul Ryan said a bill was needed to protect the nation’s forests “from the kind of devastation that California experienced,” that year, and that a bill “will help us stop forest fires before they occur.”
The House passed a subsequent legislation 232-188, but it died in the Senate.
‘Quarter-century of extremist litigation’
Lawsuits from environmental groups blocked needed logging and forest management efforts in the fire-prone Sierra Nevada mountains back in 2014, a year after the then-largest fire to ever hit the area.
In the aftermath, the U.S. Forest Service proposed a plan to allow logging on 52 square miles of affected wildlands. In agreement, Randy Hanvelt, a Tuolumne County, Calif., local supervisor, urged action to speed up salvage logging and green-tree harvests as a way to reduce fuel for potential future forest fires.
But the Center for Biological Diversity and other environmentalist groups sued to stop the plans.
“Where I come from, I think the process is broken,” Hanvelt later said in a Capitol Hill subcommittee hearing. “I worry about the problem with litigation.”
 Tom McClintock/Photo by Gage Skidmore (CC)
Rep. Tom McClintock, a California Republican whose district encompasses the burned area, agreed.
“There is no doubt litigation has had a profound impact on the Forest Service,” McClintock said, adding that, “a quarter-century of extremist litigation has put our forests at risk.”
The lawsuits have come from a wide variety of environmentalist groups looking for seemingly any reason to block common sense forest management reforms.
Last year, the Center for Biological Diversity partnered with the Earth Island Institute to sue logging efforts over potential damage to Spotted Owl habitats.
Extreme politics
Much of the problem stems from political extremism, rather than practical disagreements.
The Sierra Club — the nation’s largest, most well-funded and politically connected environmental activist group — has morphed in recent years from one focused solely on ecological conservation, to an all-consuming left-wing activist organization, similar to the fate of the once venerated ACLU.
The Sierra Club’s website currently promotes “Resistance” opportunities to protest the Trump administration, as well as partisan talking points regarding U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, among other unnecessary partisan items.
The environmental activist movement also has its supporters in public office.
Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, recently took a swipe at Trump’s Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke for holding sue-happy, radical environmentalists to account.
“That man (Zinke) would sell his grandchildren for the oil industry,” Inslee said. |
