As she ascends to a 4,500-ft.-high ridgeline overlooking the Kern River in the California Sierras, Ruby Johnson Jenkins says she smells trouble. Stretching out before her is a vast panorama of blackened slopes, a grim legacy of the fire last August that burned more than 150,000 acres of the Sequoia National Forest. But it isn't the charred timber that makes her wrinkle her nose. The ill odor, she says, is coming from Washington, specifically from President George W. Bush's controversial plan to increase logging in national forests in the name of reducing the risk of fires.
"There are two battles for...
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