|
|
Epistle Environmentalism in Flames by
Robert H. Nelson The fires of 2002
burned more than trees.
The forest fires that raged this summer across the West
threatened more than homes. The environmental movement's 30-year claim to the
moral high ground in American policymaking may have ended in the tinderbox
forests of the western United States.
| | Robert H.
Nelson's most recent book is "Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to
Chicago." |
|
As the fires were burning, we witnessed the astonishing spectacle of prominent
environmentalists denying that they had strongly opposed the mechanical thinning
of western forests — the most effective means to reduce fire hazards. The
truth is more nearly the opposite. For the past ten years, environmental groups
have waged a total war on forest thinning.
Several years ago, the Sierra Club began to oppose all further commercial
removal of wood from the national forests, thinning or otherwise. In northern
California, the "Quincy Library" agreement was blessed by an act of Congress,
despite fierce opposition from national environmental groups. The main purpose of
the agreement among local environmentalists, government officials, and timber
representatives was to reduce fire hazards resulting from excess fuel loads in
nearby national forests. The agreement finally collapsed in the face of the
unremitting hostility of leading environmental organizations.
Throughout the West, environmental court suits, administrative appeals, and
other opposition has been so fierce that in most areas a sensible forest planner
would never even bother to propose a thinning project in the first place.
Environmentalists argue that prescribed burning should instead be used to
accomplish the necessary fuels reductions. Yet, prescribed burning is often
impossible where physical structures are located or where existing fuels buildups
are already too combustible. In many areas the actual choice is between
mechanical thinning and the acceptance of periodic (if unpredictable)
conflagrations such as seen in the Colorado and Arizona fires this past
summer.
Environmentalists have in effect opted for the latter. However, they cannot
say so officially. When pressed by critics, their only escape has been to lie
about past actions. How has this demoralizing turn of events come about?
The fierce passions aroused by the environmental movement often reflect an
underlying religious inspiration. It is the flawed "theology" of the
environmental movement that has led to the current impasse. The core value of the
environmental movement is to protect and, where possible, to restore "nature."
The Wilderness Act declared the purpose to set aside areas that are "untrammeled
by man." Even when it is not explicitly invoked, this ideal of naturalness is in
the background of most environmental policy thinking.
The basic problem is that it is often literally impossible to do anything that
is "natural." Like other past utopianisms, the pursuit of an impossible
naturalness is bound to yield confusion and policy failure, as seen now in the
national forests of the West.
|
| It is the flawed theology
of the environmental movement that has led to the current impasse.
|
|
When Europeans arrived, many of these forests had already been manipulated for
thousands of years by Native Americans, mainly through the setting of fires. If
"untrammeled by man" recognizes Native Americans as human beings, the goal of
"natural" means the restoration of the forest conditions of at least 10,000 years
ago. The alternative is to yield to implicit racism, putting Native Americans in
the same category as wolves and grizzly bears. Europeans may have lived fallen
lives of sin since the transgression of Eve but environmental theology now
seemingly says that Native Americans were left behind in the Garden.
In the early Massachusetts colony, Cotton Mather saw Indians as the heathen
agents of the devil; current environmentalism inverts this thinking but is no
less discriminatory. As the historian of forest fire, Stephen Pyne, writes,
current environmental thinking amounts to "stripping American Indians of the
power to shape their environment"; it is an act that "is tantamount to dismissing
their humanity."
In their current stressed condition, a "restoration" of even Native American
patterns of forest management can be accomplished only through heroic management
actions. The historic norm for the widespread ponderosa pine forests of the
interior West is 30 to 60 large trees per acre; today, many of these same forests
contain 300 to 600 small ("kindling") trees per acre. Setting a torch to these
forests is like lighting a torch to a bonfire. The result would be historically
unprecedented and environmentally damaging in many ways; it would be no more
"natural" than the all-out harvesting of timber through clear-cutting.
Indeed, the only way to restore a Native American fire regime is to
mechanically cut down most of the small trees now present on the forests, thus
negating the consequences of a century of Forest Service fire suppression and
more recent non-management policies. Once the excess wood loads have been
removed, it might then be possible to re-establish a long-term regime of frequent
prescribed burns at low intensities — mimicking the historic lightning and
Native American fires that existed before the modern era of suppression.
However, it is still a fantasy to suggest that such an outcome would be
"natural." If an original Rembrandt painting is destroyed, it is lost forever.
Even a perfect replica — indistinguishable to anyone but the most
accomplished art historian — is not the real thing. To pretend otherwise is
to perpetrate a fraud. Yet, environmentalists are now engaged in something very
similar. Any future shape imposed on the national forests will have been created
by human action. So long as the Forest Service manages the forests, they cannot
be "wild." They are special type of "garden," a colonial Williamsburg of original
nature. Nothing can change this, however much some people might wish otherwise.
| Like other past
utopianisms, the pursuit of an impossible naturalness is bound to yield confusion
and policy failure, as seen now in the national forests of the West.
|
|
The national forests have today become grist for the scriptwriters of
environmental fantasies. A cynic might say that this "Disneyland management" of
our national forests is their actual highest and best use. Fantasy sells and
there are millions of people in New York, Los Angeles, and other urban centers
who enjoy images of the Garden of Eden of the national forests. By contrast, the
rural people in the West who are directly affected by the livestock grazing,
hiking, hunting, timber harvesting, and so forth on these forests constitute a
small (and less moneyed) minority.
However, the downside to Hollywood management of the national forests became
apparent in the summer of 2002. Even many distant urban dwellers were upset at
the spectacle of Western homes burning to the ground on their TV sets. The
residents of Denver found "natural" management less attractive when it meant
choking in the smoke of nearby forest fires.
The ultimate problem with the use of the national forests as a fantasy
playland is the potential for contrary images to arise. When Hollywood filmed the
life of John Nash in "A Beautiful Mind," it took large dramatic license. This is
fine for a movie. But no such license can be granted for the environmental
scriptwriters for our national forests. If the current Hollywood management is
exposed as such, the viewers' pleasure will be undermined as well. Large sums of
federal money — and other large costs borne by the local people who live in
close proximity to the national forests — will simply go down the drain.
Indeed, that is what was happening this summer in the raging forest fires of the
West.
As a religion, modern environmentalism has been a form of fundamentalism, in
part a protest — like other fundamentalisms — against the uglier
elements of "the modern project." Environmentalism seeks to defend "nature" in
the face of scientific and economic assaults. But no modern Thomas Aquinas has
carefully worked out the intellectual logic and defended the theological
coherence of the environmental value system. Indeed, like other fundamentalisms,
the environmental version may work as a popular religion (it has in fact
succeeded spectacularly in the past quarter-century) but it is weaker on
scientific and historical grounds — and thus is also a poor basis for public
policy.
That is the dilemma faced today by the environmental movement. It is caught
between inspiring the faithful with a popular faith versus maintaining its
theological coherence and policy effectiveness. The fires raging across the West
this summer may finally require environmentalists to opt for more careful
thinking. If that means the end of environmental religion, or the shift to a
brand new phase, so be it.
|
| | |
|
