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>
> To:  Sierra Club leaders
> Fr:    Carl Pope
>
> Congratulations, thank you, please keep it up!
>
> We have just finished an intense, exhausting week of
> lighting our own
> back-fire to President Bush's non-plan to deal with
> the threat of wildfire
> to rural communities near National Forests.
> Environmentalists knew they
> would face a major assault from Senator Larry Craig
> and other timber
> industry allies after Labor Day.  But thanks to a
> conversation Club staff
> member Julia Reitan had on an airplane with an
> Interior Department staff
> member, we learned last Friday that Bush himself was
> going to launch an all
> out assault on our Forests in Oregon this Thursday.
>
> Club volunteers and staff worked ceaselessly and
> managed in five days to
> pull together and obtain agreement from a variety of
> other environmental
> groups on the first pro-active environmental plan to
> protect communities at
> risk from fire while enhancing ecological health on
> our forests.  At the
> heart of the plan is a recognization of a few key
> realities:
>      o we need to restore fire to wild forestscapes,
> but after 100 years of
> fire suppression and at least fifty of dramatic
> overlogging, this is
> complex, slow, and uncertain.  We know enough to
> begin the process, but not
> enough to finish it.  We need to start, but humbly.
>      o  this kind of an approach doesn't accomodate
> communities.  Whatever
> the original fire cycle of American forests was, it
> didn't include
> communities in the woods.  Now that we have such
> communities, they require
> special attention. The fire ecology of a wild forest
> in many, perhaps most,
> conceivably all cases, can't be restored in the
> immediate vicinity of
> communities.  BUT, while he community safety problem
> cannot be solved with
> fire policies that may work for the rest of the
> forest, it is equally
> absurb to apply to t he rest of the forest solutions
> designed for
> communities.
>      o  after 40 years of Smokey the Bear, Americans
> perceive fire as a
> problem to be solved, and in the fire debate,
> finding fault with bad
> solutions is a sure fire strategy for defeat.  We
> must offer better
> solutions, those solutions must fit the activist
> culture of the issue, and
> if we allow ourselves to be put in the posture of
> critics of the ideas of
> others, we will most likely lose.
>
> Based on these realities, the Club and other groups
> have put forward a
> Community Protection Fire Plan, which is,
> fundamentally, the National Fire
> Plan agreed to by Western governors a year ago --
> but on steroids.
>
> The plan has seven major elements:
>
> ·    Do the most important work first. Make
> protection of communities from
> firs the Forest Service's Number One Priority.
> ·    Provide meaningful funding. This program should
> be a minimum of five
> years and funded at $2 billion a year to go directly
> to fireproofing homes
> and removing hazardous fuels in the Community
> Protection Zones.
> ·    Match personnel to work. Shift Forest Service
> personnel skilled in
> preparing brush clearing and thinning projects from
> backcountry, low
> priority areas to the Community Protection Zones.
> ·    Carry out immediately the vast majority of fuel
> reduction projects in
> the Community Protection Zones that raise no
> significant environmental
> issues.
> ·    Restore natural fires to have natural forests.
> Prescribed burns can
> help to reduce fuel buildup and restore healthy
> forest habitats.
> ·    Protect our ancient and wild forest from
> logging and logging roads.
> ·    Stop the attack on forest protection safeguards
>
> The plan was simultaneously released Wednesday in
> Portlan, Oregon, Phoenix
> Arizona, Denver Colorado and Washington, DC.  It
> forced the White House to
> leak their own plan -- which will do nothing protect
> rural communities and
> everything to fatten the pocketbooks fo the timber
> industry -- a day early,
> and ensured that the media, in covering Bush's
> initiative, gave prominent,
> extensive coverage of the environmental opposition.
>
> So, through extraordinary effort, we have kept
> ourselves in the game, and
> gotten out the fact that there is a controversy here
> about what to do.  But
> what we have not yet done is to convince the
> American people that we have a
> plan, and the President does not.  His approach, if
> you are worried about a
> forest fire destroying your town, is not a plan, but
> a prayer.  And a
> prayer that ignores the concept that God helps those
> who help themselves.
>
> Bush's plan doesn't make community protection a
> priority; it doesn't fund
> it; it doesn't allocate Forest Service personnel to
> do the work.  In fact,
> by making it easier to do "fuels management" in the
> back country, Bush
> actually ensures that communities at risk will get
> even less protection
> than under present policies. It's a formula to burn
> down dozens of
> communities around the country.  We need to make
> that clear.
>
> The media would like to ignore the fact that we have
> a plan,.  They woudl
> like to jump straight to our point seven, and say,
> "environmentalists say
> the President is attacking forest protection laws
> and standards."  Well he
> is, and we do need to say that.  But we also need to
> educate the public
> about the first six points of our plan. The public
> needs to know that they
> can have more fire protection and more envrionmental
> protection, that in
> fact attacking forest protections will make the fire
> problem worse, not
> better.
>
> We all need to talk to our neighbors,  We need to
> write letters to the
> editor,  We need to talk to city councils and
> members of Congress. We need
> to show up at public hearings.  And when we do, we
> need, before we blast
> the President, and the timber industry, and the
> Forest Service, TO LAY OUT
> OUR POSITIVE VISION.  The details are on our web
> site.  The temptation will
> be to jump immediately to point seven, and blast the
> President.  That
> misses the educational opportunity offered by the
> first six points .... and
> again, after 40 years of Smoky the Bear, the public
> needs education, and if
> we don't provide, the Administratiom most certainly
> won't step up to the
> plate.
>
>
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