(2 of 5)
Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, a prince of the Environmentalist Church, brawls on Sunday television shows with Montana Governor Marc Racicot, a captain of the Responsible Logging Entrepreneurs. Who is right? Who can be trusted with the land?
The fact that an argument is self-serving does not make it wrong. And the loggers' history of sometimes villainous clear cutting should not necessarily exclude them from the woods now. "This is the worst time not to manage our forests," judges Hamilton. "Management," in the modern loggers' definition, means intelligent logging, culling out dead and dying trees and regenerating the forest. It means, they say, attacking bark beetle and spruce budworm and other diseases.
Environmentalists respond that this is a sort of Vietnam logic--we have to destroy the forest in order to save it. They reason that too much logging over the years removed the big trees that are most resistant to fire and left the woods more vulnerable to a hot general burn. Logging the large trees destroys the forest canopy, so that the forest floor dries out, underbrush flourishes and smaller trees start up, creating what is called a "fuel ladder." But last week the bipartisan Congressional Research Service said it found no connection between reduced logging in the past decade and the current wildfires.
The fires have brought new urgency and anger to the argument that has been raging around the country over Bill Clinton's roadless-lands proposal. His plan--an eleventh-hour legacy builder that would make Clinton, on paper, the greatest conservationist President since Teddy Roosevelt--would ban further road building on 43 million acres of national forest located around the country, mostly in the West. The Clinton scheme would not exactly seal off all that forest (an area roughly the size of North Dakota). But it would make access for logging and mining, hunting, fishing and other forms of recreation much more difficult.
The roadless plan does not entirely please anyone. Environmentalists think it does not go far enough (and they are outraged that it exempts Alaska's 17 million-acre Tongass National Forest). The plan, says Andrew George of the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project, "is political theater, political cover to ignore the public's wish to preserve the forests." In the meantime, loggers, mining interests and many locals consider the initiative ham-fisted interference by a distant, authoritarian Federal Government--of a piece with what they see as Clinton's high-handed use of the 1906 Antiquities Act, creating "national monuments" to set aside 3.1 million acres of land for preservation.
The Clinton road plan might have profound consequences in terms of future forest fires. Some forests in the most flammable condition, says Boise Cascade forest manager Dave van de Graaff, are in roadless areas, and if the additional 43 million acres are made roadless, the thinning needed will never get done; fires there, says Van de Graaff, will endanger other forests.
Take your pick of scenarios: either 1) the failure to build more roads into wilderness will make it harder for loggers to thin the woods and result in future fires even harder to fight; or 2) roadlessness will begin to allow forests to return to natural self-policing cycles, to a pre-Paleface Eden.