Beyond Energy Starvation: How Green Fanaticism Kills

As I write these lines, vast wildfires are sweeping through my home state of Colorado and other areas of the American west. Last week, two of my employees had to leave work early to rush home to evacuate their families from imminent danger. Hundreds of houses have already been destroyed, and thousands of acres of trees incinerated, and unknown myriads of wild animals burned alive. _Bob Zubrin

A Blind Agenda

Mr. Obama and Mr. Salazar are allowing the wildlands of the US west to burn in order to prove a point: They have the power to control access to energy, access to federal lands, the overall economic prosperity of the private sector, and what lands burn and what lands do not.

From DDT, to nuclear power, to fossil-fuel development, to genetically improved crops, the green movement has used the pretext of nonexistent or grossly exaggerated environmental hazards to block enterprises that would be of enormous benefit to people. _Bob Zubrin

The ongoing conflagration of the US wilderness could have been prevented, with wise land management, and with less of the green fanaticism displayed by Salazar y Obama.

This disaster was predictable, and promises to get worse. Over the past decade, from British Columbia to New Mexico, the world’s most rapid deforestation has been underway in the North American west, with an average of nearly six million acres of forest lost per year — roughly double the three million acres per year rate in Brazil. The culprits here, however, have not been humans, but Western Pine Beetles, whose epidemic spread has turned over 60 million acres of formerly evergreen pine forests into dead red tinder, dry ammunition awaiting any spark to flare into catastrophe.

Yet while the global green movement has made a cause célèbre of the Amazon rain forest, they have done nothing to oppose those destroying our woods. Quite the contrary, they have been doing everything in their power to assist the wreckers. Indeed, over the past decade they have launched over a thousand lawsuits to block every attempt by the National Forest Service or others to take necessary counter measures. _Bob Zubrin

Beetle-killed logs make excellent timber. And if these dead trees -- and the infested intervening trees -- were logged and removed, wildfires would be confined to much smaller areas.

But an even worse mistake by Obama y Salazar in their green zeal: Pine beetles can be killed using a cheap and relatively safe -- but politically incorrect -- insecticide.

Of course, there is another tactic that could be used to save the forests, and that would be to use pesticides. For example, as long ago as the 1940s, it was shown that DDT is extremely effective in countering the Western Pine Beetle. Thus on pages 287-288 of Biology and Control of the Western Pine Beetle, US Department of Agriculture Forest Service Miscellaneous Publication 800, 1960, authors J.M. Miller and F.P. Kern report on numerous studies done in the period from 1944 through 1951 that showed 90 to 96% mortality within hours among pine beetles that came into momentary contact with trees that had been sprayed with 5% dilute DDT solutions.

However, the same environmental groups that have halted western logging regard the idea of using DDT to stop the pine beetle with near hysteria. Rachel Carson’s 1962 tome Silent Spring (which falsely argued that the vital pesticide DDT should be banned because it was killing the birds, when actually it was protecting them — and us — from insect-borne diseases) is virtually sacred scripture to the greens, and the successful campaign to ban DDT that followed from its promotion serves as the core of their proudest creation myth. In enshrining this myth, the anti-technology cult has chosen to heartlessly turn its head away from the massive amount of human misery it has caused through its narcissistic sacrifice of millions of African children to malaria. It must perforce regard the very idea that its object of hatred might be used to save our forests and their wildlife from incineration as nothing short of outright heresy.

From DDT, to nuclear power, to fossil-fuel development, to genetically improved crops, the green movement has used the pretext of nonexistent or grossly exaggerated environmental hazards to block enterprises that would be of enormous benefit to people. However, when faced with a real and catastrophic threat to the wild they have taken the other side — precisely because allowing the necessary protective measures would not constrain human liberty, but expand it, in however limited a way, and this would undermine the central purpose of the “environmentalist” exercise. _Bob Zubrin

Yet another way in which the Obama y Salazar regime is killing the wilderness, is by failing to utilise the most advanced tools of firefighting against the destructive forces.

It is bad enough that the faux environmentalist lefty Luddite green dieoff.orgiast drunken fools are choking the private sector with overregulation, overtaxation, and energy starvation. But when they intentionally devastate vast areas of wilderness in the name of faux environmental purity, ordinary people need to wake up.