To the list of things that run downhill, we can now add a new item: stupidity.
The L.A. Times reported last week that the Bush
Administration is drafting a proposal
that would increase logging in the 11 national
forests in the Sierra Nevada to levels not
seen in a decade. The new plan would scrap an
elaborate set of environmental protection
guidelines known as the Sierra Plan, written
by the Clinton Administation and adopted in 2000.
The reason? The U.S. Forest Service is complaining that the rules are too complicated.
The Sierra Plan, adopted after years of study
and analysis, restricts timber cutting and
increases protections on old-growth trees, wildlife
river and stream systems, which scientists
had been warning were in peril. At the same time
the plan calls for prescribed burning to
prevent forest fires.
The conservationists love it, but naturally the
timber industry hates it, since it prevents them
from cutting down trees at will and instead forces
them to follow more environmentally
responsible, if more time-consuming, procedures.
Matt Mathes, spokesman for the Forest Service
in California, told the L.A. Times that
the rules are so complicated that they put the
Forest Rangers “in a box.”
The new plan would allow cutting of trees as large
as 30 inches in diameter and would
permit clear-cutting of areas as large as two
contiguous acres.
All with the Forest Service’s approval.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the U.S. Forest
Service’s job to PROTECT the forests?
You gotta love the logic behind the new plan.
The argument is that it’s better to let loggers
cut down huge swaths of trees in order to
prevent forest fires. But that’s what the Sierra
Plan was created to do in the first place,
and it does it wthout gutting the forests.
Now I’m no scientist, but I think it’s fairly
simple that you can’t have a forest fire if there are no trees.
But there’s another thing you can’t have when
there are no trees: Air.
Great, Bush’s logging friends make some money
in the short run and we all have paper towels
and coffee tables. But the severe reduction in
the number of oxygen-producing trees down the
road reduces air quality. Combine that with the
hole in the ozone layer (which has, by the by,
split in two and will keep multiplying like shmoos
if we continue to ignore scientists’ warnings)
and the fact that the polar ice cap is melting
faster than Michael Jackson’s nose, and in a few
generations, nobody will be around to spend all
that money.
Just as Nero fiddled while Rome burned, Bush concerns
himself with gutting the Sierra Plan
in favor of more profit for the loggers and giving
massive tax cuts to the wealthiest one percent
of Americans, while in the process creating the
largest deficit in American history, pursuing a war
in Iraq to obtain its oil while ignoring the
protests of the international community and a much more
dangerous and looming threat from North Korea’s
recently revived nuclear program, and oh yeah,
where’s Osama bin Laden?
And that is the problem with Bush’s thinking (such
as it is) on a number of topics. He sees one step
down the chess board, when his knight takes the
rook. And that rook is always money: money for
the logging industry, money from tax cuts, money
from cutting school lunch programs.
The trouble is that he can’t see the whole board.
He can’t see two moves away, when his knight
is taken by the bishop, whether that bishop is
greenhouses gases or rising deficits or al-Qaeda
retaliation for war in Iraq.
And he can’t see the checkmate. And with Bush in charge, that includes a whole new world of possibilities.
But Bush can’t see it. Or he doesn’t care. I’m not sure which is more frightening.
So it looks like the right-wing’s much-loved Trickle
Down theory does work. Not with economics,
of course, but it seems that Bush’s lack of curiosity,
intellectual laziness and greed, at least, are all
trickling down through his administration.
So while we’re wringing our hands over the imminent
war in Iraq and Bush looting the Treasury,
we’d better also keep an eye on what he’s doing
to the environment.
It’s kind of like a knife to the stomach, a traumatic
head injury, and a gunshot wound.
Any one of them will kill you, so you have to
treat them all.