Forest fires #2

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Counterpunch, June 19, 2002

Nature and Politics
Terry Lynn Barton's Fire?
by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn

If you believe what the Forest Service interrogators say, Terry Lynn Barton
started the big fire in Colorado's Pike National Forest by burning a letter
from her estranged husband. Maybe so, and possibly the jury will be
forgiving when they hear more details of Ms Barton's married life. But a
jury might well be equally forgiving if it turns out Terry Lynn started the
fire by setting fire to her pay stub.

After 18 years of dedicated service Terry Lynn Barton's monthly pay was
$1,485, which tots up to $17,820 a year. Try raising two kids on that in
the greater metropolitan area of Denver. She's being described in the press
as "a Forest Service technician" which is FS-speak for all-purpose manual
laborers cleaning up campgrounds, trail maintenance and kindred grunt work.

Forget the Edward Abbeys, Jack Kerouacs and Gary Snyders of the forest fire
watchtowers, turning out literature while communing with nature and
scanning the ridge lines for tell-tale plumes. The Forest Service, part of
the USDA, has long been notorious for exploiting its bottom-rung workers
more than any other agency. The laborers are often forced to live in
squalid housing under fairly harsh conditions with scant benefits.

These grunts are the ones who have to deal with visitors angered at having
to pay as much as $40 in annual passes for visits to forests in a
particular area. Having ponied up the money these visitors often find
nature's temple criss-crossed with logging roads, scarred by clear cuts or
the new, RV friendly rec sites blessed by recent administrations.

>From the anguish and outrage of Barton's superiors you'd think that you'd
think that that the Forest Service has always regarded fire as the devil's
work.

A little perspective: this particular Colorado fire has so far burned
through something over 100,000 acres. The implication is that all these
acres are blackened zones of ash and carbonized stumps. Not so. Many of
those acres will have suffered minor scorching. And of course healthy
forests need fires as a natural and frequent catalyst to regeneration,
particularly in the conifer forests in Colorado.

But the Forest Service's policy has been to suppress fires. In the middle
and long term this policy leads to huge fuel loads which, when the
inevitable conflagration does come, then burst out into the kinds of large
scale burns that we are now seeing across the West.

Responsibility for fires stretches far higher up the bureaucratic chain
than poor Ms Barton. Since the days of Gifford Pinchot the Forest Service
has seen fire-suppression as a sure way to get a blank check from Congress.
Fire-suppression gets the Service the big ticket items, planes, helicopters
and so forth. Fire suppression is used to justify the Service's road
building budget and even logging programs.

The Forest Service says all fires are bad and need to be suppressed with
the help of huge disbursements from Congress plus public vigilance. All
children have the ursine, self-righteous smirk of Smokey the Bear dinned
into their psyches, said bear being conjured into icon status 60 years ago
after the incredible popularity of that noted fire-fugitive, Bambi.

So the Forest Service needs fires, and diligently sets them each year,
under the rubric, Controlled Burn, or Prescribed Fire. These regularly
surge out of control, as in the Los Alamos forests a couple of years ago,
started by the Park Service in Bandolier National Monument. The Forest
Service bigwigs okay fires and then summon ill-paid fighters to do the
dangerous work. Far more prudent would be to let the fires run, but that of
course would leave idle all the costly fire-fighting machinery and expose
the Forest Service to the wrath of the real estate industry, which has
raised million dollar homes in areas certain to see a blaze some day.

Terry Lynn Barton faces twenty years in prison while the timber industry
licks its lips at the prospect of "salvage logging" the Colorado forests.
"Light it and log it," as the old phrase goes. Once a forest burns,
existing restrictions go out the window, the Forest Service offers up
100,000 acres for salvaging, and in go the timber companies, hauling out
the timber, immune to environmental restrictions. You don't think timber
companies have setting fires for years, often with Forest Service complicity?

We sure hope Terry Lynn Barton gets a good lawyer. He might start by asking
a few pointed questions about her treatment. Is the Forest Service trying
to paint as the John Walker Lindh of Colorado?


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org



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