00:00Without loggers, there was no one to clear overgrown forests or to treat areas that were
00:06increasingly beginning to look like fire dangers.
00:10And even if there had been foresters available, laws like the Endangered Species Act may have
00:15prevented the work.
00:17By 1990, they were saying, listen, we don't want to do any management.
00:22And so we could see even then that we were headed on a disastrous course that was going
00:28to have impacts for hundreds of years, if not thousands of years.
00:33Along with the Endangered Species Act, environmentalists were able to add additional constraints on
00:38logging and development in the forests, like NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act.
00:45Oftentimes we hear that the Forest Service can't get anything done because NEPA is in
00:49the way and it's taking too long.
00:51That law is there for a very good reason.
00:52We do want to be sure that we have environmental protection.
00:55While this can protect forests, in cases where it is applied overzealously, doing any
01:00management of the forests, including wildfire management, becomes difficult.
01:05Starting with the onslaught of environmental legislation and protective policies, we now
01:12have millions of acres of wilderness areas.
01:15So nobody can go in there.
01:17That puts 70,000 forest products industry companies out of business.
01:22With fewer loggers in the woods, even less land area is actively managed each year.
01:28Once the loggers were gone, the fuel loads grew dramatically, and without fire to regularly
01:32clear them, the forests were reaching a breaking point.
01:37In 1987, we had 2,300 lightning strikes strike the West Coast.
01:45And they started thousands of acres of fires.
01:49And in those days, there were loggers in the woods logging, and we probably put out
01:54three quarters of the fire.
01:57Then by 1990, they were saying, listen, we don't want to do any management.
02:03We started losing a lot of those natural fire cycles that cleared out, you know, a lot of
02:08the underbrush and those kinds of things.
02:11There's data that estimate that even back in the early part of the 1900s, somewhere
02:17between 30 and 50 million acres of land would burn every year.
02:21And then as we move into World War II, and certainly past World War II, that number really
02:28falls off.
02:30Let me put this in perspective.
02:31You have the National Park Service, you have the National Wildlife Refuge Service.
02:36Forest Service is bigger than both the park system and the refuge system combined, 193
02:42million acres.
02:43It was set up to have forests managed.
02:47Pre-cutting, businesses, et cetera, were foundational elements of the management.
02:55And that's changed over time as more and more preservation, hands-off philosophies, ranging
03:04from smoking the bear, I mean, you got to put out every fire, to you can't cut a tree.
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