By Robert
Zubrin
As I write these lines, vast
wildfires are sweeping through my home state of Colorado and other areas of the
American west. Last week, two of my employees had to leave work early to rush
home to evacuate their families from imminent danger. Hundreds of houses have
already been destroyed, and thousands of acres of trees incinerated, and
unknown myriads of wild animals burned alive.
This disaster was predictable,
and promises to get worse. Over the past decade, from British Columbia to New
Mexico, the world’s most rapid deforestation has been underway in the North
American west, with an average of nearly six million acres of forest lost per
year — roughly double the three million acres per year rate in Brazil. The
culprits here, however, have not been humans, but Western Pine Beetles, whose
epidemic spread has turned over 60 million acres of formerly evergreen pine
forests into dead red tinder, dry ammunition awaiting any spark to flare into
catastrophe.
Yet while the global green movement has made a cause célèbre of the Amazon rain forest, they have done nothing to oppose those destroying our woods. Quite the contrary, they have been doing everything in their power to assist the wreckers. Indeed, over the past decade they have launched over a thousand lawsuits to block every attempt by the National Forest Service or others to take necessary counter measures.
There is one word that sums up
the required course of action: logging. The beetles have been
spreading uncontrollably because continuously connected and extremely thick
forests densely populated with mature trees provide the ideal environment for
their proliferation. Logging to thin the forests of mature trees that afford
the beetles their favorite homes would slow their growth considerably. Logging
out tree-free gaps between sections of forests would impose quarantine limits
on the epidemic. Logging out trees that have already been killed would remove
fuel for the otherwise inevitable conflagration.
These facts are well-known, and in many places there are those who would be delighted to do the logging (not everywhere, unfortunately, as the shutting down of 90% of the American timber industry by the environmentalists over the past two decades has forced many local sawmills to shut down) because pine beetle kill wood is fine timber. Indeed, its striking blue stain endows it with beauty prized by many carpenters for ornamental purposes. Yet time and again, plans to allow controlled preemptive logging to proceed have been blocked by spurious lawsuits from a multitude of self-described environmentalist groups, who additionally have used these suits to bilk the taxpayers [1]of billions of dollars.
The arguments that the
putative environmentalists have used to justify their campaign have been
risible. For example, in a legal brief filed August 29, 2011, on behalf of
itself and several other groups, the South Dakota-based Friends of the Norbeck
said:
Yes, bark beetles are killing many trees, but that won’t necessarily lead to large fires. Even if it did, there’s not much humans can do directly to forests to influence fire risk, except to begin reducing human causes of climatic change. Logging the forest will not significantly influence fire spread, and removal of dead trees has many negative impacts on forest ecosystems.
While as recently as this May,
the allied “Native Forest Council” issued a statement saying,
Insects, fire and disease are part of nature. They keep our Commonwealth of forests healthy and alive. They did so until the white man came and began liquidating them, using them up because they were there. Nature’s insect, fire and disease don’t destroy forests. Man, chainsaws and greed destroy forests. Man, scientists, even foresters have never grown a forest, let alone a “like kind or better” forest. They don’t know how. They never have and they never will.
The illogic of the antihuman
sentiments behind these, and endless numbers of similar statements put forth by
the beetle’s Green apologists over the past decade, is incredible. Limited
harvesting that would save the forest (and incidentally reduce damage to
forests elsewhere, such as the Amazon, by driving down the global price of
wood) is to be shunned — precisely because it would create jobs, useful
products, and commerce. At the same time, vast depredations that destroy tens
of millions of acres of wild habitat, kill countless numbers of terrified
animals in the most horrible way, and throw millions of tons of smoke, pine-tar
gas, and other pollutants into the atmosphere are discounted as
irrelevant and unimportant by those who claim to care so deeply for nature and
all its creatures.
Of course, there is another
tactic that could be used to save the forests, and that would be to use
pesticides. For example, as long ago as the 1940s, it was shown that DDT is
extremely effective in countering the Western Pine Beetle. Thus on pages
287-288 of Biology and Control of the Western Pine Beetle [2], [3] US Department of Agriculture Forest Service Miscellaneous Publication
800, 1960, authors J.M. Miller and F.P. Kern report on numerous studies done in
the period from 1944 through 1951 that showed 90 to 96% mortality within hours
among pine beetles that came into momentary contact with trees that had been
sprayed with 5% dilute DDT solutions.
However, the same
environmental groups that have halted western logging regard the idea of using
DDT to stop the pine beetle with near hysteria. Rachel Carson’s 1962 tome Silent
Spring (which falsely
argued that the vital pesticide DDT should be banned because it was killing the
birds, when actually it was protecting them — and us — from insect-borne
diseases) is virtually sacred scripture to the greens, and the successful
campaign to ban DDT that followed from its promotion serves as the core of
their proudest creation myth. In enshrining this myth, the anti-technology cult
has chosen to heartlessly turn its head away from the massive amount of human
misery it has caused through its narcissistic sacrifice of millions of African
children to malaria. It must perforce regard the very idea that its object of
hatred might be used to save our forests and their wildlife from incineration
as nothing short of outright heresy.
From DDT, to nuclear power, to
fossil-fuel development, to genetically improved crops, the green movement has
used the pretext of nonexistent or grossly exaggerated environmental hazards to
block enterprises that would be of enormous benefit to people. However, when
faced with a real and catastrophic threat to the wild they have taken the other
side — precisely because allowing the necessary protective measures would not
constrain human liberty, but expand it, in however limited a way, and this
would undermine the central purpose of the “environmentalist” exercise.
To those seeking environmental
pretexts for enhanced control over society, all changes to nature effected by
humans, no matter how beneficial, must be portrayed as criminal. Thus global
warming and carbon dioxide emissions are denounced, despite the fact that they
lengthen the growing season, increase rainfall, and accelerate plant growth.
Thus no actions may be taken to save the forests.
By the light of a burning
wildness the truth may be perceived. The purpose of the green prosecution is
not to protect nature, but to put shackles on humankind.
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