Last month, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Congressman Tom McClintock notes several facts about healthy forests. First and frankly the most poignant fact is that “Excess timber comes out of a forest in two ways: it gets carried out or burned out.” McClintock notes that timber harvested from federal lands has declined by 80% since the 1970’s while the acreage destroyed by fire has increased proportionally creating annual carbon emissions from wildfires estimated at nearly 300 million tons. It’s not climate change responsible for devastating forest fires so much as bad management forced on us by environmentalist lawsuits.
