My son Alaric, the news junkie, brought this bit of news up to me: the “Healthy Forests” initiative (I see it has also been discussed here and here).

It’s been a bad year for forest fires. We faced one temporary road closure on our recent vacation trip through Montana, and we frequently saw clouds of smoke while traveling through the middle of that state. Even the Olympic rain forest, which is usually dripping with moisture, was brittle-dry. It’s not a particularly good situation.

Bush’s solution, though, is lunacy. He wants to reduce regulatory restrictions on the timber companies, so they can “thin” forests more easily. This ignores the fact that what the timber industries want is easier access to big, healthy, profitable trees, while the root of the fire problem is the accumulation of the scrubby, brushy, unprofitable detritus that is the product of mismanagement and long-term fire suppression. In contrast, the environmentalists’ plan makes more sense: “In addition to making community protection the top firefighting priority, the environmental plan would increase the use of prescribed burns—and naturally occurring, low-intensity burns—to reduce fuel buildup.”

This is so typical of the Bush administration. Ignore the advice of informed scientists and environmentalists who have long term solutions, follow the recommendations of those who will most profit in the short term, and slap a happy and ironic label on the whole affair.