Analysis: Extreme “green” policies are killing CA’n trees

Edward Ring of the California Policy Center takes to the Epoch Times to examine how progressive environmentalism has destroyed our woodlands. Relegating true concerns as secondary to politically motivated “special interests,” local leaders’ decisions to block important projects have effected overcrowded and dying forests — leading to superfires.

The counterproductive impact of environmentalism defies reason. It’s not just the colossal, destructive footprint of supposedly renewable products or sources of energy. It’s land management. Thanks to environmentalists, in California’s forests and woodlands, in order to log, graze livestock, do controlled burns or mechanical thinning, property owners confront an obstacle course of regulations and permit requirements coming from several agencies at once. Many of the regulations are in conflict with others; it is an expensive and protracted process that very few can navigate. And so the overcrowded forests burn.

This is perhaps the most egregious example of counter-productive environmentalism. Bigger than their war on nuclear power and natural gas. Maybe even bigger than their success in making California unaffordable and inconvenient for all but the super rich. For the last 30 years, as CalFire snuffed out every small fire they possibly could, every practical means of thinning the forests to compensate for fire suppression was made nearly impossible. Thank an environmentalist.

Firefighters work on extinguishing the Coastal Fire in Laguna Niguel, Calif., on May 11, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

California’s forests are approximately seven times as dense (pdf) as they have historically been for millennia prior to these atrocious circumstances. In previous centuries, because they weren’t overcrowded, the forests survived droughts more prolonged than the ones we experience in this century. But today, the rain we get can’t even percolate into the ground. The crowded trees desperately absorb every drop, and it still isn’t enough, because where one tree used to grow, seven trees are competing for the same nutrients and moisture. This is why the trees are dying. This is why we have superfires.

This article originally appeared in the Epoch Times. Read the whole thing here.

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Image by Forest Service, USDA