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Fire! Round up the usual suspects! George W. Bush's new "Healthy Forests" plan reads like a parody of his administration's standard operating procedure. You see, environmentalists cause forest fires, and those nice corporations will solve the problem if we get out of their way. Am I being too harsh? No, actually it's even worse than it seems. "Healthy Forests" isn't just about scrapping environmental protection; it's also about expanding corporate welfare. [read more] ---------- President Bush's new plan for reducing the risk of Western wildfires includes nothing to inconvenience the timber industry, and plenty to worry the environmentalists. It would ease important environmental laws designed to protect not only the forests but also the legal rights of citizens who care about them. It proposes to revisit President's Clinton 1994 Northwest Forest Plan designed to protect the spotted owl. It is, finally, curiously unfocused. It devotes far more energy to complaining about red tape than it does to figuring out ways to help local communities move forward with an aggressive strategy of thinning underbrush and fire-prone small trees at the increasingly urbanized edge of many Western forests known as the wildland- urban interface. [read more] |