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'Let it burn' isn't right I was very interested in the article in last week's journal regarding the effect of the forest fire smoke on the grape crop. Many of us in the county have been scratching our heads for weeks, wondering why tomatoes which were supposed to ripen in July are still showing only tiny, green fruits. It's kind of amazing when you think about it. The Forest Service , with their "burn, baby, burn" policy has actually managed to create its very own ecological disaster. The story gets even more bizarre as you continue to look into it. The leading proponent of the let-it-burn policy is an organization called The Wilderness Society. They've got a national membership of about 365,000 and their stated goal is to have as much land as possible declared as wilderness areas. To that end, they've $2.5 million lobbying politicians over the last few years and have worked extensively with our own Barbara Boxer. Now, the snag in turning all of this land into wilderness areas is that we don't have the money to maintain them. The solution that they came up with is the let-it-burn policy. Rather than aggressively jumping on fires, we should simply let them burn themselves out, thus saving a large amount of money in fire-suppression activities. To that end, they have some interesting proposals. One is to offer financial incentives to fire managers who let it burn. In other words, the more acreage you burn up, the more you get paid. Another is to allow the Forest Service to claim burned acreage as credits toward their fuel-reduction budget. In other words, rather than having to actually go out and clear that pesky brush, the Forest Service can simply burn it up and say they've fulfilled their budgetary obligations for clearing. No one really seems to know the extent to which the Forest Service is implementing these ideas. We do find in their 2008 budget that they want to "promote the increase of wildland fire use, consistent with land and resource management plans and public and firefighter safety and report these acres annually in future Budget Justifications." And in discussing the previous year, they state that they "emphasized increased wildland fire use in land management planning with the long-term objective to increase the utilization of wildland fire use to accomplish resource objectives."
Of course, our local Forest Service press officers deny that they're just letting it burn. Which is technically true, I guess. They're not just letting it burn; they're actively setting it on fire. Your tax dollars at work, folks.
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