Some 1.5 billion trees are planted in the U.S. every year, about 5 trees for every American.

Annually, U.S. forestland owners plant about 6 trees for every tree harvested.

About one-third of America's original forest - some 300 million acres - have been converted to other uses, principally agriculture.

There are 26 million more acres of forestland in the Northeast than there were in 1900.

Today, forests blanket about one-third of the U.S. land base and about half the U.S. East.

U.S. annual growth rates have exceeded harvest rates since the 1940's.

Timber harvesting is forbidden on 50% of all National Forest lands in the U.S.

National Forests account for 20% of the nation's forestlands and 19% of its timberlands.

National Forests hold 46% of the nation's softwood timber inventory but only provide 6% of the annual harvest.

Since 1986, the harvest of timber from America's national forests has declined 70%.

In the West, 34% of all forestland and 54% of all timberlands are in national forests.

National forests in the Pacific Coast and Intermountain West regions hold 68% of the nation's softwood timber inventory, but provide less than 28% of annual harvest.

Forest density has increased 40% in the U.S. over the last 50 years.

The skies have cleared over northern Arizona and New Mexico, marking the end of the worst Southwest forest fire season in anyone’s memory.

Montana Gov. Judy Martz, chair of the Western Governor’s Association, says national forests are public assets—and don’t belong to special interest groups

This year, the first big dance began at Show Low, a lovely resort community in northern Arizona’s big pine country. On June 23, the Rodeo and Chediski fires blew together west of Show Low, creating a 50- mile-wide wall of flame that eventually destroyed 468,000 acres of forest and rangeland and 423 homes. Thankfully, firefighters were able to save the town when the fire slowed after it entered an area that had been previously thinned.

At this writing (August 11), southwest Oregon is on fire and Colorado is still burning, just as it was in May. Idaho, Montana and Wyoming have dodged the big bullets this year, though September is often the worst forest fire month in these states.

Next year the big dance will be somewhere else. No one can say for sure where, but with some 73 million national forest acres at risk no great skill is required to pinpoint the location. A dartboard in the outline of the 11 western states will do just fine.

The Rodeo-Chediski Fire added substantially to an already sizeable body politic demanding federal intervention in at-risk national forests. But public outrage in the aftermath of big forest fires is fleeting. Here today. Gone tomorrow. Come spring, black turns to green, television news crews flock to the scene and the public swoons over the seeming miracle. Life is good again. And the time bomb ticks on.

But this post-fire outrage differs from past cries in one very important aspect: radical environmentalists have not been successful in explaining away the damage done or the reasons why. The “It’s natural” argument no longer flies. Neither does the “Blame it on logging” assertion. Like the little boy who cried “Wolf!” once too often, radical environmentalists have run out of good stories. And the public has run out of patience.

Society’s felt necessities—those atfirst gentle urgings that eventually become overwhelming public mandates—are also changing. Our once utilitarian view of forests has been replaced by a near reverence for all of nature’s wonders. As a society, we quite likely feel closer to nature than we ever have before. No wonder we don’t want our forests to burn to the ground if we can prevent it. And we clearly can.

This new felt necessity—a by-God certainty that caring for the West’s desperately ill national forests beats standing by helplessly while they burn to the ground— has been a long time coming. Our own experience dates back 15 years to the 1987 Silver Fire—a southwest Oregon monstrosity that destroyed more than 200,000 acres of old growth pine and fir. Long before the smoke had cleared Oregon environmentalists declared, “Not one black stick would be harvested because [in their words] harvesting firekilled timber is like mugging a burn victim.”

Over the last 15 years the public has had ample time to autopsy the remains of some pretty big forest fires. And there has been plenty of time to consider arguments for and against thinning in forests that have become so dense and decadent they are firetraps. In at least three recent surveys of registered voters westerners have signaled a strong preference for thinning before murderous wildfires kill everything in sight.

Given growing public anger over the terrible damage wildfires are doing— and a rising fear about where the next fire might occur and what damage it might do to any of an estimated 6,000 at risk communities—we weren’t surprised to see so many elected officials line up to criticize radical environmentalists for appealing and litigating restoration and fuels projects designed to help reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona, no doubt spoke for many in a July 10 opinion piece he wrote for the Arizona Republic (“Sensible Environmentalism Has a Place in Managing Forests”).

“[How] do we explain a case filed by the Center for Biological Diversity in 2000 that sought to stop forest restoration and fuel reduction efforts at the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, which was the site of a wildfire which recently incinerated 465,000 acres of that forest,” he wrote. “Ground crews estimate that as much as 90 percent of the trees that were to be treated under the plan are now destroyed by the Rodeo-Chediski Fire. Or what about three separate appeals filed by the Sierra Club, the Southwest Forest Alliance, Forest Guardians and other groups to stop a restoration project at Fort Valley in the Coconino National Forest that enjoyed widespread public involvement and comment and was endorsed by the Grant Canyon Trust?”

The Senator’s comments—and earlier criticism from Arizona Governor Jane Dee Hull—prompted angry denials from several environmental groups. Among them: the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society and the Center for Biological Diversity. “It would have been good if the governor had gotten her facts straight before spouting off,” sniffed the Sierra Club’s Sandy Bahr, citing a GAO report that less than one percent of hazardous fuels reduction projects had been appealed.

But as it turns out, Governor Hull did have her facts straight. In a subsequent interview the report’s author, Barry T. Hill, GAO Director of Natural Resources and the Environment, said, “The numbers are being misrepresented.”

Mr. Hill told Holly Fretwell, a researcher with PERC: The Center For Free Market Environmentalism that the GAO report did not consider projects that had already been through the environmental assessment and appeals processes. Suffice it to say, his clarification jibes with a new Forest Service report that 155 of 326 proposed hazardous fuels reduction projects were appealed in fiscal 2001 and 2002. That’s 48 percent of all proposed projects, not less than one percent as originally reported by GAO.

Twice this summer the Wall Street Journal has weighed in with incisive editorial comments concerning both the underlying causes of the West’s increasingly ferocious wildfires and the role radical environmentalists have played in thwarting science-based efforts to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire.

“If there’s been any benefit to these awful fires, it’s the education they’re providing to suburban voters,” the Journal wrote in a July 2 editorial. [“Greens Go Up In Smoke”]. “Their anger is spilling over into this year’s election campaigns, and is causing the greens to deny their own handiwork. As Colorado Governor Bill Owens told us recently regarding the need for more forest management: ‘The debate is largely over’.”

Of course, the West’s wildfires teach many lessons. Among them: nature’s indifference to human need. Also, the unintended environmental consequences of the public’s still widely supported policy of excluding wildfire from forests. Despite the ecological benefits of fire, most Americans see big wildfires as serious threats to the nation’s economic and environmental future. Moreover, fire ecologists have repeatedly warned that there is nothing natural about the wildfires that are roaming the West’s forests today. Worse, there is ample evidence that our most at-risk forests also provide critical habitat for many threatened species: grizzly bears, spotted owls, goshawks, salmon and bull trout. What possible benefit could there be in letting fires destroy these forests—as some environmentalists continue to insist we do?

With their increasing frequency and ferocity these wildfires have exposed profound philosophical change within many marquee environmental groups. Not so many years ago the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, the National Wildlife Federation and the Audubon Society were among the most respected conservation groups in the country. Not anymore. Today, it’s hard to figure out what these groups stand for, but it certainly isn’t conservation. How to explain groups that claim to love forests and wildlife but find nothing wrong with firestorms that incinerate both animals and their hiding places?

Fortunately new environmental groups that aren’t the least bit interested in defending the indefensible are stepping in with well-reasoned science-based solutions. Among them: the Greater Flagstaff Forests Partnership and the Environmental Economics Communities Organization. Having conquered the moral high ground, both groups are hard at work on strategies for marketing small diameter trees and biomass residues the Forest Service and the public would like to see removed from national forests before inevitable wildfires strike.

From this vantage point—and before this god-awful fire season is gone and forgotten—we’d like to restate some points we’ve made on these pages in past issues.

First, limiting the diameter of trees that can be harvested from the Southwest’s forests is a prescription for disaster. Trees of every age should be harvested, especially if they are diseased. It makes no sense to remove young healthy trees but leave old dying trees just because they have reached a certain diameter.

Consider for a moment the survivability of a community composed only of old people. Without young people, what future is there for this community? Where will the next generation come from? Who can carry forward this town’s rich history? Without seedlings, saplings, pole-sized trees and middle-aged and older stands —the literal and the figurative—forests and communities cannot sustain themselves through time.

It’s true that for a time big old ponderosas dominated most forests in northern Arizona and New Mexico. But scientists aren’t completely sure why this was. It may have been the result of a once-in-eons combination of weather patterns and forest growth cycles. In other words, a natural condition that is not likely to occur again anytime soon.

Second, hazardous fuels reduction work—the removal of brush and dead trees next to homes and communities— is critically important. But is must not be confused with restoration forestry. Radical environmentalists support fuels reduction work because they know opposing it would be ridiculous. But with their allegiance to “Zero Cut” they routinely appeal large-scale thinning projects in forests that lie beyond communities. By their own admission, they fear a return of the timber industry they despise. But the old industry is long gone—and unlikely to reappear because the federal timber sale program that was its economic lifeblood is also long gone and unlikely to reappear.

Third, community based collaborative forestry—the driving force behind all of the startup wood processing businesses local governments are incubating in the Southwest—needs some help from Congress. Unless a way can be found to limit forest appeals to matters of scientific substance, these businesses won’t survive. And if they don’t survive —and prosper—forest restoration is itself doomed. The record here is clear.

Look at the lack of progress collaborative forestry has made in California, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. Radical environmentalists will continue to argue that these local groups cannot be trusted to make the right decisions where national forests are concerned. But there is no evidence to support this assertion. There is, however, ample evidence to support the opposite conclusion: that radical appellants are undermining the cause of forest restoration all over the West.

Fourth, cottage industries—vital though they are to forest restoration hopes in the Southwest—cannot begin to consume the enormous amount of wood fiber that must be removed from the region’s desperately ill forests over the next 25 years. But there is yet some undefined level of public resistance to recruiting manufacturing complexes large enough to efficiently process and market large quantities of low quality wood fiber. These apparent objections need to be probed and clearly understood. Until then, there is little chance that wary investors or lenders will risk capital on politically unacceptable manufacturing ventures. If the public could get comfortable with the idea of two or three large facilities—say a pulp or paper mill, an oriented strand board plant or several strategically positioned sawmills of some size—their presence would spawn many more cottage industries that could indeed prosper.

The list of products that can be made from small diameter trees that have no other apparent commercial value is huge. Given the West’s energy woes, it’s only natural that biomass-fired power plants are getting lots of play in the press, but energy is but one of perhaps hundreds of uses for processed fiber. Composite building materials that blend wood fiber and recycled plastic also hold huge potential. So, too, do bioengineered products including wood preservatives. But the key to profitability lies in understanding what sawmill owners have known for years. Put simply, wood is heavy. You can’t afford to haul it very far and expect to make any money. This argues in favor of positioning new processing plants in often-remote communities that really need an economic shot in the arm. Once value is added through manufacturing, higher transportation costs can be justified.

Fifth, the regulatory and administrative processes that are supposed to guide the way the U.S. Forest Service makes planning and management decisions is in shambles. Witness the fact that the agency now spends well over half of its entire annual budget putting out forest fires and defending itself in court. At this writing, the agency’s $321.3 million annual firefighting budget is nearly gone. We are spending $3.87 million a day battling fires in the West’s national forests. If only we were spending this amount on a long-term thinning and fuels reduction program.

We will soon be treated to yet another example of just how flawed the Forest Service’s bewildering regulatory maze has become. The agency wants to salvage about 75,000 acres of timber killed by the Rodeo-Chediski Fire. But radical environmentalists are already lining up against the proposal, alleging that salvage logging would do more environmental harm than good. Trouble is, there is little evidence to support this claim. Yes, any salvage effort can go bad, but the vast majority of such projects are successfully completed. The record here stretches back more than 50 years. And post-salvage monitoring programs put in place in recent years confirm the benefits. Among them: minimal soil erosion, improved water quality, better insect and disease control and less risk that a re-burn will do even more damage. As evidence we cite the fact that one of the areas least impacted by the Rodeo-Chediski Fire was a White Mountain Apache forest that had been salvaged logged after an earlier fire. Before the site was replanted logging debris was removed and the area was burned to eliminate more woody debris. Most of the replanted trees survived Rodeo-Chediski.

The governors of Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Utah put the entire process problem in perspective in a June 24 letter to Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth, a man who is intimately familiar with the West’s wildfire crisis.

“Dale, time is of the essence,” they wrote. “Simply put, the process is broken. We spend too much time litigating the finer points of process and not enough time focusing on creating, restoring and maintaining the health of our forests. We simply cannot promote the health of our forests, the health of our wildlife, the health of our citizens and the safety of our property by letting our forests burn to the ground.”

Forest Service chiefs have for years pleaded with Congress to streamline these processes, but environmentalists have resisted changes that would make it more difficult for them to litigate management proposals. A new Forest Service study, “The Process Predicament,” explains the problem in heartbreaking detail, citing numerous examples of proposed restoration projects that never got off the ground. While lawyers argued over which “I’s” should have been dotted and which “T’s” weren’t crossed, forest fires settled the matter once and for all.

Montana Governor Judy Martz, who chairs the Western Governors’ Association, got it right in a late June interview. Lost amid the court fights and the doomsday rhetoric is the fact that national forests are public assets. As such, they belong to everyone and no one in particular, just like all of the nation’s public treasures: the Capitol, the Lincoln Monument, the Vietnam Wall, the Declaration of Independence and many of our country’s finest museums and art galleries. We would never allow any of these assets to fall into disrepair, much less burn to the ground. So why are we allowing a small but very vocal minority to block efforts to thin forests before they burn? The public’s forests do not end in firebreaks cut through the woods at the edge of town. They extend thousands of miles across the West. Why are we ceding this vast treasure to groups that oppose forest restoration? In has taken six months to complete this report.

In that time the Southwest’s national forest have continued to metastasize. The football field-sized mile-high pile of wood that grows in the region’s forests every year now stretches another half mile into the sky. Time has run out. We have but two choices: we can side with “Zero Cut” advocates and watch our treasured national forests burn to the ground or we can join the “New Pioneers” in their quest to restore our forests before they burn.

- Jim Petersen, Editor, Evergreen

On July 25 we learned that South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle had managed to exclude thinning and fuels management work in his state’s Black Hills National Forest from appeal and judicial review. The exclusion, tucked away in a defense supplemental spending bill the House passed the night before, has raised the ire of western solons who want the same exemption for national forests in their states.

Arizona Rep. J.D. Hayworth was furious on hearing news of Mr. Daschle’s clandestine circumvention of environmental laws that have hamstrung national forest managers in the Southwest.

“It certainly can only be described as blatant hypocrisy on behalf of the Senate leader to claim on one hand to be the champion of the environment and then, on the other hand, cut a special deal for his home state,” he declared. “We’re trying to rebound from the worst fires in our history —hundreds of homes and thousands of lives shattered. Believe me, if we had the option to take advantage of this for Arizona, you better believe we would have.”

Sen. Daschle attempted to explain his actions in an August 7 Wall Street Journal Letter to The Editor in which he said his amendment “implements an agreement negotiated by local stakeholders, including the timber industry and environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society.”

But out-of-state groups have successfully appealed many similar local agreements forged over the last decade in Arizona, New Mexico, California, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. Mr. Daschle’s legislative end run exempts the Black Hills National Forest from such chicanery—and 15 of his Senate colleagues are not happy about it.

“If it can happen in South Dakota, it can happen all over the West,” they declared in a joint August 1 press release.

Among the signers: Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico; Jon Kyl, R-Arizona; Ron Wyden, D-Oregon; Gordon Smith, ROregon; Diane Feinstein, D-California; Mike Enzi, RWyoming; Craig Thomas, R-Wyoming; Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colorado; Conrad Burns, R-Montana; Larry Craig, R-Idaho; Mike Crapo, R-Idaho; Frank Murkowski, RAlaska; Ted Stevens, R-Alaska; Blanche Lincoln, D-Arkansas and Chris Bond, R-Missouri.

Today, August 22, President Bush was in Medford, Oregon. Amid cheers from a crowd that has been choking on smoke from the Biscuit fire for more than a month, he referenced Sen. Daschle’s end-up, saying that what’s good enough for South Dakota ought to be good for Oregon and the rest of the West as well.

To build bipartisan support for hid forest health initiative, which would both expand the accelerate the thinning process in at-risk forests, the President also called for implementing the Clinton Administration’s 1994 Northwest Forest Plan—a never implemented proposal that enjoyed the enthusiastic support of environmental groups that worked on it with Vice President Gore.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Bush’s peace offering sparked a coast-to-coast round of doomsday rhetoric from radical environmentalists. There were even well orchestrated and well-covered street riots in Portland. At long last, the West’s national forest crisis has made its way on to a very public stage. Let the debate begin; radical environmentalism on one side and society’s felt necessities on the other