The tragedy of politicized environmentalism is that the politics is more important than the environmentalism. When push comes to shove, as it always does in politics, politicized environmentalists will sacrifice the environment to gain power. The past few decades of this sort of behavior has repeatedly harmed the environment as well as alienating a large portion of the public.

Western forest environments are an instructive example of the problem and this Salon article is an example of the way politics displaces environmental thinking precluding sensible policy.

The town of Hayfork, which sits in the middle of the Shasta-Trinity National Forest 200 miles north of San Francisco, is similar to thousands of other rural communities in the West that have faced economic crisis over the past decade. Like all other communities situated next to the forest, Hayfork also faces the threat of wildfire every summer and fall. But, paradoxically, fire and a planned shift to forest-restoration-based jobs sparked a ray of economic hope for the town. In 1989, in a move to help rural logging communities become self-sufficient, the first Bush administration created the Economic Action Program. New wood-products industries got money for retraining, technical assistance and marketing so that communities could use smaller, historically "lower-value" trees. Furniture, wood floors and biomass energy were among the fledgling cottage industries, with forest conservation and economic stability the prevailing goal. Along with fire-prevention plans such as an effort at comprehensive fuel reduction in forests, the new industry of forest restoration promised the chance of a livelihood.

But the second Bush administration has undone the work of the first. Even as it has touted its Healthy Forests Restoration Act, billed as a way to reduce wildfires by returning forests to their natural, healthy state, Bush has been wielding a budget-cutting ax. In 2001, the Bush administration slashed EAP funding to the bone. In the three years since, Congress returned some EAP money to the budget, but in 2004 rural communities lost all EAP funding. Hayfork struggled even when it had grants; without them it is teetering on disaster.

Rural forest communities in the West have long held to conservative principles, and Bush has counted them as one of his key constituencies. But that base, estimated by the Western Governors' Association to number over 11,000 communities, is eroding as he cold-shoulders small towns in favor of big business in the growing debate over how to save our national forests. Communities like Hayfork expected to be included in the planning for forest restoration and to receive economic benefits resulting from legislation like the Healthy Forests Restoration Act. But so far the promises of the bill, like the winds that blow ahead of forest fires, have amounted to little more than hot air.

Later in the article the author inadvertently mentions the real issue.

Already this year the total amount of wildfire-burned acreage has surpassed the acreage burned in 2003, including the devastation from the Southern California wildfires that prompted the passage of the HFRA. The 2004 acre burn total is double the average of the past decade. Firefighting occupies the public's mind as the best way to control wildfires, but the reality is that fire suppression doesn't work very well at all. Removing the massive amount of kindling that has built up over the past century is the best way to curb fires and maintain healthier forests. Yet fire suppression continues to suck a huge portion out of the budget compared with fuel reduction, despite the promises of HFRA.

Good environmental management can only be achieved by humans living on and from the land. The current state of the forests demonstrates that eternal truth. Real environmentalists have been saying this for decades while politicized nutters have worked to thwart management efforts. This old Berry essay, pointed to so many times here you should have memorized it by now, says it well.

"If in order to protect our forest land we designate it a commons or commonwealth separate from private ownership, then who will care for it? The absentee timber companies who see no reason to care about local consequences? The same government agencies and agents who are failing at present to take good care of our public forests? Is it credible that people inadequately skilled and inadequately motivated to care well for the land can be made to care well for it by public insistence that they do so?

The answer is obvious: you cannot get good care in the use of the land by demanding it from public officials. That you have the legal right to demand it does not at all improve the case. If one out of every two of us should become a public official, we would be no nearer to good land stewardship than we are now. The idea that a displaced people might take appropriate care of places is merely absurd: there is no sense in it and no hope. Our present ideas of conservation and of public stewardship are not enough. Duty is not enough. Sentiment is not enough. No mere law, divine or human, could conceivably be enough to protect the land while we are using it.

If we want the land to be cared for, then we must have people living on and from the land who are able and willing to care for it. If-as the idea of commonwealth clearly implies-landowners and land users are accountable to their fellow citizens for their work, their products, and their stewardship, then these landowners and land users must be granted an equitable membership in the economy."

The people in towns like Hayfork are indeed the only possible source of effective forest management and the structure of our economy requires that they be assisted to achieve an equitable membership in the economy. But this isn't the problem at this time. The problem at this time is that the forests have been neglected and mismanaged for 100 years and are burning at an increasing rate each year. We don't have another 100 years to slowly improve management and develop local society. The forests will be gone before then.

Forest restoration is a huge, expensive task. Local, state and federal governments can't afford the price and so have done little thus far but bicker in the fashion noted in the Salon article, using this tragedy as a political wedge issue while doing nothing useful. They would be heart broken if the environment was improved since they would lose their wedge and have to find another cesspool to party in.

Use it or lose it. The sensible and effective way to restore the forests is to hire timber companies at reduced rates to do the work and harvest some timber. The timber companies can't do the work of thinning and clean up for the price they'll get for the trees they take so they will have to be subsidized. They'd have to use massively industrialized clear cutting techniques to do it profitably and that's not what we require. The cost of subsidizing them will be far less than the cost of alternative approaches that don't leverage the value of timber. The timber companies get part of their wages as payment in kind.

It won't be cheap and it won't be quick. It took 100 years to make this mess and it will probably take at least a couple of decades to fix it. But it won't stay fixed. That's where the towns like Hayfork come in. We have to both restore the forests and establish management for the future so that we don't get into this sort of mess again. It's not a conflict between local stewardship and timber companies, it's a cooperative effort with each handling part of the task. It may be that some of the personnel are the same, working sometimes for the timber companies and sometimes for themselves. This can provide wages during the restoration period and develop knowledge and skills, some of which is transferable to the ongoing stewardship task.

The political activists that have created this mess and obstructed remediation should be condemned, but so should fellow travelers such as Salon that tolerate and encourage such behavior to advance their political preferences. Sacrificing the environment by opposing sensible policy for short term political gain is vile. It isn't necessary since there are already so many issues that differentiate politicians and allow choice. Vile and unnecessary. It isn't justifiable in any way.