American Inferno: Greens fiddle while forests burn.(environmentalists' policies responsible for wildfires)

Acts of God spark most forest fires, but the actions of men and their governments share responsibility for the fact that fires have in recent years reached "biblical" proportions. In this country, decades of government mismanagement of public lands have created a forest crisis of unprecedented dimensions, with an estimated 70 million acres of public forests vulnerable to wildfire and tens of millions more under all-out assault from insects, disease, and invasive species. But in an excruciating irony, environmental groups that most loudly proclaim their love for the forests have become the single greatest obstacle to saving them.

To understand why this is so, readers must suspend for a moment all they think they know about the hinterland. The problem today isn't too few trees, for instance; it's too many. That's because 90 years of systematic federal suppression of the small and moderate-sized fires that benefit forest health -- following the fire-phobic dictates of Smokey the Bear -- have turned many public forests into overgrown tangles that are ripe for wildfires and hasten the spread of disease and infestation. To most people, a dark and densely wooded forest may be aesthetically pleasing -- but biologically, it may be choking itself to death.

We had fair warning of this emerging crisis after sections of Yellowstone National Park burned in the late 1980s. But federal land agencies were prevented from taking any serious action -- indeed, they even adopted non- management as their prevailing mode of "stewardship" -- under pressure from environmentalists, who oppose virtually all human meddling in forests. The tactics of protest and litigation perfected by an army of vocational activists not only brought the U.S. wood-products industry to its knees -- as intended -- but tied land agencies up in procedural knots that often prevented any harvesting of trees, even when it was necessary to improve forest health.

But now the battle has been joined, set off by monstrous fires that are rousing Americans to the nature of the threat. Many western politicians are blaming the enviros, and the enviros -- unaccustomed to being on the defensive and suddenly short on moral superiority -- are lashing back or changing the subject. They have been pointing to a "report" issued by the General Accounting Office last year supposedly showing very few instances in which environmental groups had blocked wildfire-mitigation efforts. While more than 1,600 such mitigation projects were funded in fiscal 2001, the report purportedly indicates, environmental groups were only involved in 20 legal appeals.

But, according to a Capitol Hill source, numbers soon to be released by the Forest Service will paint a far different picture. An internal review indicates that in some Forest Service regions where the wildfire threat is highest, as many as 60 percent of wildfire-mitigation efforts have been appealed since the National Forest Plan was instituted in August 2001. "They're using the report to put out an exceedingly false picture," the source says of environmental groups. "But when that picture is seen in its entirety, it won't be a pretty one for them."

The now-famous GAO "report" in reality is a GAO "letter," a quick and preliminary answer to a fairly narrow inquiry from members of Congress; in this case, Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho and Rep. Scott McInnis of Colorado. It consists of little more than a catalogue of 1,671 mitigation projects funded in 2001, listed by geographic region, followed by a brief synopsis of 20 instances in which projects were appealed by environmental groups. There is no context provided, with which a casual reader could glean the document's deeper meaning or deficiencies. And that redounds to the benefit of the green groups brandishing it. Sources inside GAO and on Capitol Hill caution that the letter provides only a one-year snapshot, taken at an unrepresentative time of transition when the National Fire Plan was just getting up and running; it in no way tells the whole story.

One expert ...