Do CA’n policymakers care about our forests?

California Policy Center’s Edward Ring analyzes the devastating Californian wildfires. To prevent future disasters (see: ongoing Oak Fire, currently disrupting Bay Area air quality), experts warned that CA must routinely thin its forests and revive our timber industry. However, politicians’ unhelpful environmental priorities (including electric car mandates) suggest that they aren’t taking our forests’ issues seriously. Politicians should consult timber industry representatives and create evidence-based plans to cultivate forests, asserts Ring. To receive daily updates of new Opp Now stories, click here.

The logic of these steps seems impeccable. Thin the forests. Restore them to ecological health. Adopt time tested modern logging practices and revive the timber industry. Build biomass power plants on the perimeter of the forests. Reissue grazing permits for additional cost-effective brush thinning. Prevent ridiculous, costly, horrific, tragic wildfires. Help the economy.

But these steps have been known for decades, and nothing was done. Every time policymakers were close to a consensus on forest thinning, government bureaucrats obstructed the process and the environmentalists sued to stop the process. And they won. Time and time again. And now we have this: millions of acres of scorched earth, air so foul that people couldn’t leave their homes for weeks, and wildlife habitat that in some cases will never recover. If this failure in policy doesn’t leave Californians livid, nothing will.

The forest management policies adopted in California have decimated California’s timber industry, neglected its biomass industry, turned millions of acres of forest into scorched earth, and are systematically turning mountain communities into ghost towns. This is tyranny, and perhaps even worse, it is tyranny that lacks either benevolence or wisdom.

If the goal was to have a healthy forest ecosystem, that was violated, as these forests burned to the ground and what remains is dying. If the goal was do anything in the name of fighting climate change and its impact on the forests, and do it with urgency, that too was violated, because everything they did was wrong. Even now, instead of urgent and far reaching changes to forest management policies, we get more electric car mandates. That was the urgent response.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe. Read the whole thing here.

Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity

Image by Wikimedia Commons