SHOW: Fox's "Special Report With Brit Hume"
HEADLINE: R.J. Smith Discusses The Western Forest Fires
BYLINE: Brit Hume
BODY:
HUME: The tribune newspapers of Arizona are reporting that efforts to avoid the kind of devastating fire now raging in that state have been hindered by an environmental group. The papers report that the Center for Biological Diversity filed suit to block the U.S. Forest Service from thinning trees and removing combustible debris and underbrush, and that the ongoing litigation has blocked the Forest Service's efforts for three years.
The environmental group says efforts to blame it are, quote, "sheer scapegoating," and all they were trying to do was to keep forest thinning from turning into logging. So, who's right here?
For one answer, we turn to R.J. Smith, senior environmental scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute here in Washington. Welcome to you, sir.
R.J. SMITH, SENIOR ENVIRONMENTAL SCHOLAR, COMPETITIVE ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: Thank you.
HUME: So, what's going on here?
SMITH: Well, what we've had is a combination of bad policies in the national forest. Essentially, we have not managed our forests. Not only have we not managed them well, we have managed them very poorly. And in most cases, we haven't managed them at all. For a long time, we had a policy...
HUME: When you say manage, what do you mean?
SMITH: ... Of coming in and seeing that we're in a healthy situation. When we first -- when the colonists first went into the west and so on, we found that most of the forests were very few trees, maybe 50 big trees on one acre. Clearly, there had been regular low-intensity fires that swept through the area and cleaned out the underbrush and so on. The Indians burned fires.
HUME: And big old strong trees survived that.
SMITH: Right. Because the pine trees have very thick bark on them and so on. And low-intensity ground fire doesn't hurt them. And it made a healthy forest. It kept out disease and so on.
But when we moved out into the west, we were worried about fires because wood was very valuable us to. I mean, we made our homes from it. Ships, railroads, towns were built from it, whatever. So, we started policies of suppressing all fires.
And, in particular, there were a couple of big fires shortly after the turn of the century that really got the Forest Service thinking we must put out every fire. In 1945, we came up with Smokey the Bear, "Only you can prevent fires." And so, essentially for most of this century, we were putting out every fire that was there.
That meant we changed the whole nature of the forest. There were huge fuel loads building up -- underbrush, deadwood, dying tree, dead trees -- and particularly smaller trees, young trees that grew up underneath the big trees.
HUME: That's right. Acting as, in effect, potential timber?
SMITH: Right. And so when a fire came, not only was it so intense and so hot that it would sterilize the soil, it would kill seeds in the soil, organic material, change the nature of the soil, but the under-story would ladder the fires up into the crowns. And then it would race through...
HUME: Crowns?
SMITH: ... the branches and limbs and all the needles and so on, on the tops of the trees. And then it would kill the trees. Before when it was just a low fire that went along the ground, all it did was sort of scorch the bark of the bottom of the trunk.
HUME: At the base of the tree, right.
SMITH: But when it gets up, a crown fire runs through the tops of the trees, it kills off all the (UNINTELLIGIBLE)...
HUME: We don't have the kind of management to avoid this buildup of underbrush, potential timber, you have these problems.
SMITH: ... So, all of this has been building up, huge amounts of fuel loads, for decades.
HUME: Right.
SMITH: And then when the -- and finally people started to think we had a ticking time bomb.
HUME: How long ago was that?
WILSON: That was, say, in the '70s.
HUME: So, what happened?
SMITH: Well, at the same time, that's when environmentalism came into power and influence.
HUME: Now, environmentalists don't want the forests to burn.
SMITH: No, they don't really want the forest to burn. But they had all these things they decided that we should let nature have her way. They came up with policies called natural regulation, which started about 1971 in Yellowstone. And in '72, they put in a policy called natural burns, natural fires. That meant if nature started a fire, if a lightning bolt started a fire, you had to let it burn because it was natural. So, then they switched back.
(CROSSTALK)
HUME: Wait a minute. But isn't that the very thing that we needed to have happen over time?
SMITH: Well, yes. But not on top of 80 years of the fires...
HUME: Of the fuel build?
(CROSSTALK)
SMITH: So, they were a tinderbox waiting to explode. And we saw what that policy did in 1988 when Yellowstone burned. Half of Yellowstone burned to the ground. In fact, President Reagan at that time came in at that time and said we must end this crazy policy of natural burns.
So, then we finally began to look at this thing. Well, OK, if we can't have natural burns, we have got to come in and have some way to reduce the fuel loads.
HUME: Right.
SMITH: We can either do it with prescribed fires, prescribed burns, where you try to burn a little bit at a time and find a cool time of the year.
HUME: Right.
SMITH: Or you come in and mechanically harvest. You thin it out mechanically.
HUME: Tell me about this particular case, this particular lawsuit, this particular group.
SMITH: OK. What has happened, while probably most people agree that we have to have management of the forest now, we have to get rid of the fuel loads, either by prescribed burns or by mechanical thinning, a lot of the green groups, particularly some of the more radical groups in the southwest -- Southwest Center for Biodiversity, Forest Guardians of New Mexico -- have all stepped in and said, "Well, we don't really want natural burns. And we particularly don't want -- I mean, we really don't want prescribed burns, and especially we don't want mechanical thinning."
HUME: Now, their fear, I presume, is that mechanical thinning will turn into not just removal of brush, but will actually end up simply logging...
SMITH: Cutting down some trees.
HUME: ... cutting down a lot of trees.
SMITH: Because they allow you to only take trees of such a small diameter that most timber companies can't do it at a profit. They lose money because they can't...
HUME: If they don't do it, who does it?
SMITH: Nobody. And so it just sort of sits there. And they came out, the Forest Guardians came out earlier this week, they were interviewed in one of the New Mexico papers, saying, "No, no, this is not true that we're opposed to thinning. We will allow thinning. But we just want to make sure that if anybody does any thinning, nobody makes a profit off it." And so who's going to do it then? And then secondly, that if it's done, it has to be done with solar powered chainsaws.
HUME: Now meantime, while they're fighting over all this in court, of course, everything's the same.
SMITH: Everything is burning. And nothing has changed.
HUME: Mr. Smith...
SMITH: But there are no solar-powered chainsaws.
HUME: Thanks for coming. Nice to have you.
We'll take a quick break here. When we come back, find out what one animal rights advocate has to say about Christianity. The "Grapevine" is coming up next.
