With The Election Over, Here Comes Big Green
Even before the last provisional ballot is tallied, the left-leaning media is trying to resurrect the environmental movement from its near death during the campaign. In the lead-up to November, polls showed it ranked in the high teens as an area of concern.
Today's LATimes Magazine cover story picks up the drum beat with a body slam on Smokey the Bear. The Times is hard-left on environmental coverage. It glorifies every environmentalist cause and often goes beyond merely burying quotes from industry sources, and instead, does not run their quotes at all. This is the favorite trick of Elizabeth "So-Green" Shogren, who covers the environment out of DC for the Times.
The piece on the Forest Service by the appropriately named Lee Green is classic LA Times, setting up a Big Environmental Problem that doesn't exist, while ignoring one that does.
What doesn't exist is anything particularly wrong with the fact that the Forest Service allows timber leasing in its forests. Only two percent of US lumber comes from National Forests, so whine and moan as they might, Green and the greens can't get around the fact that they're making a well forested mountain out of a molehill.
What does exist is devastating fires. Just 13 months after the Southern California firestorms, Green uses this piece to argue against thinning forests. Astonishing. That same drumbeat, backed with litigation and Forest Service and Fish & Wildlife Service buy-in have delayed some forest thinning projects for years. Thinned forests cause less damage; unthinned forests, besides being less healthy for wildlife, burn ferociously. That's OK with environmentalists because they don't want houses in their woods anyway.
I have seen pictures taken in the Sierras by pioneer photographers who documented what the forests looked like before there was any intervention by Western man. Guess what? The forests were much THINNER than they are today -- throughout the range! But environmentalists at the Times and elsewere can't accept photo-documented reality if it gets in the way of their mantra of protecting every tree, as if they were ents chock-full of wood elves and fairies.
Green writes that the snowstorm of litigation filed by the environmental litigation industry is evidence that the Forest Service is poorly managed. No, it is evidence that environmentalists, like all liberals, depend on the courts to take what the people of the United States and their elected representatives won't give them. This is a very coy tactic; to take a decently enough functioning bureaucracy, sue it until its budget is squeezed and its programs are suffering, then say the lawsuits are proof that it is dysfunctional.
It's entirely likely the environmentalists went to the LA Times with this story as a first shot of a new campaign against the Forest Service. If that happens, remember, only you can prevent the environmentalists from causing more forest fires.
Today's LATimes Magazine cover story picks up the drum beat with a body slam on Smokey the Bear. The Times is hard-left on environmental coverage. It glorifies every environmentalist cause and often goes beyond merely burying quotes from industry sources, and instead, does not run their quotes at all. This is the favorite trick of Elizabeth "So-Green" Shogren, who covers the environment out of DC for the Times.
The piece on the Forest Service by the appropriately named Lee Green is classic LA Times, setting up a Big Environmental Problem that doesn't exist, while ignoring one that does.
What doesn't exist is anything particularly wrong with the fact that the Forest Service allows timber leasing in its forests. Only two percent of US lumber comes from National Forests, so whine and moan as they might, Green and the greens can't get around the fact that they're making a well forested mountain out of a molehill.
What does exist is devastating fires. Just 13 months after the Southern California firestorms, Green uses this piece to argue against thinning forests. Astonishing. That same drumbeat, backed with litigation and Forest Service and Fish & Wildlife Service buy-in have delayed some forest thinning projects for years. Thinned forests cause less damage; unthinned forests, besides being less healthy for wildlife, burn ferociously. That's OK with environmentalists because they don't want houses in their woods anyway.
I have seen pictures taken in the Sierras by pioneer photographers who documented what the forests looked like before there was any intervention by Western man. Guess what? The forests were much THINNER than they are today -- throughout the range! But environmentalists at the Times and elsewere can't accept photo-documented reality if it gets in the way of their mantra of protecting every tree, as if they were ents chock-full of wood elves and fairies.
Green writes that the snowstorm of litigation filed by the environmental litigation industry is evidence that the Forest Service is poorly managed. No, it is evidence that environmentalists, like all liberals, depend on the courts to take what the people of the United States and their elected representatives won't give them. This is a very coy tactic; to take a decently enough functioning bureaucracy, sue it until its budget is squeezed and its programs are suffering, then say the lawsuits are proof that it is dysfunctional.
It's entirely likely the environmentalists went to the LA Times with this story as a first shot of a new campaign against the Forest Service. If that happens, remember, only you can prevent the environmentalists from causing more forest fires.
posted by Laer at 8:24 PM
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