An interesting article I found Dating back to 1999. Undated in 2001.
Seems it is Mainly the greenies especially the Sierra Club who has stopped the cleanup management of our National Forests.
[PushBack] Now They Have Burned Los Alamos
Many experienced foresters and scientists believe that a long-term program of constructing fire breaks and conducting controlled burns during off-peak fire season (late fall or early spring) is the only way we can clean up and protect our national forests and avoid their eventual destruction by “unnaturally” intense forest fires during peak fire season.
Ironically, many national groups that call themselves environmentalists opposed a bill in congress that would thin the forest and build large fire breaks in national forests in northern California. This plan is called the Quincy Library Group plan. It was formulated by local environmentalists, experienced U.S. Forest Service officials, and lumber industry representatives meeting in Quincy, California, over several years. A bill to implement this plan was approved overwhelmingly in the House of Representatives by both parties. In press reports, then President Clinton praised the plan as an example of what he wanted when he asked for compromise, not confrontation over the issue of managing our national forests.
Nevertheless, national environmental groups such as the Sierra Club lobbied selected U.S. Senators such as Barbara Boxer from California to stop the bill in the Senate because these groups claim that approval of any activity by man in our national forests will lead automatically to expanded exploitation of the forests. But they, the self-styled environmentalists, are quite willing to watch these same forests go up in smoke! They know that all our forests, even the few remaining old growth forests that they claim they are protecting, eventually will be burned to blackened stumps if there is no way to stop unnatural forest fires or at least limit their extent during peak fire season.
To protect our national forests and parks until they can be returned to fire equilibrium, firefighters must have defensive fire breaks. Adequate fire breaks require only thinning excessive numbers of small trees and removing the brush, not removing the big trees, just as nature once did with natural forest fires. Then controlled burns can be safely attempted in isolated sections and lightening fires can be allowed to burn in off-peak times because they will be limited in area by the surrounding fire breaks. Eventually, large areas of the entire forest become fire breaks because they have been returned to fire equilibrium. This is the only sensible and sane “let forest fires burn” policy that congress should allow. This is the Quincy Library Group plan.
The Quincy Library Group plan was finally approved by in the Senate in the fall of 1998 and signed by then President Clinton. It is called the Feinstein-Herger bill (full name: The Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Forest Recovery Act). However, after signing the bill, there were soon indications that the Clinton White House would buckle [see fifth paragraph in previous link] under to the power-hungry, so-called environmental organizations, such as the Sierra Club, and resist implementation of the law, as it soon did [see letter from the House to Dan Glickman]. The Sierra Club headquarters has vehemently opposed the Quincy Library Group plan, even though local Sierra Club members helped formulate the plan. The Sierra Club officially insists that all human activity in our forests is bad. According to them, any logging, even to thin the forests and build firebreaks, will lead to the cutting of all the trees. They advocate that only “natural fires” can cleanse our forests and renew them.
The opposition groups and officials who call themselves “environmentalists” have not told the public or the press that most western lumber mills have retooled their machinery to process small trees and make good lumber out of the small trees that are needlessly burned and wasted by the governments’ insane “controlled burn only” projects. Allowing private companies to salvage this resource for our economy also provides the money to clean our forests and return them to healthy fire-tolerant condition for our future generations—instead of officially burning them to the ground as Nero fiddled over Rome.
Then Vice-President Al Gore was given charge over all environmental policy in the Clinton Administration. He consistently enforced the radical policies demanded by the so-called environmental groups such as the Sierra Club. The heads of the Dept. of Interior, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Forest Service are all adherents to the Sierra Club official policy of eliminating all man and machine operations in our national forests and closing all access roads in our forests. This will lead to the destruction of all of our major forests that are not in fire equilibrium, including the last stands of old-growth forest and wilderness areas that are the most explosive and inaccessible. Lightning alone will eventually set fires in all these forests. Firefighters and equipment must be able to reach any fire that breaks out during high fire season. Otherwise, massive crowning wildfires will quickly spread out of control and totally destroy the entire ecology as happened in Yellowstone.
The present government policies on forest management will guarantee that there will be many more Yellowstones in the next three to five years. The next ones will likely be highly populated areas such as the Tahoe Basin where the forest around the lake is clogged with tens of thousands of dead trees due to the recent seven-year drought. Hundreds if not thousands of homes and businesses will be destroyed here and in other
dry forested areas in the west when lightning fires are allowed to burn—or stupid summertime “controlled burns” deliberately set by government agents get out of hand.
How about that? Al Gore and Sierra Club who thinks that they should never be managed,just let it burn.
Twenty years of unmanaged brush and undergrowth and trees .
The very same Sierra Club that AZ. fought with over the San Pedro River.
