CAPTAIN OZONE'S BASE:

Agent Green: Activists opposed to herbicide use are fighting for a dangerous weed—and increasing forest fire risks. (Stephen Albert and James Dellinger, August 14, 2007, American)

BLM’s job is to manage public lands, protecting them for a variety of uses, including recreation, livestock grazing, and the preservation of wildlife habitat. Invasive vegetation is a major threat to public lands, and the worst weed in the field is cheatgrass. Originally from Mediterranean Europe, it grows up to two feet high in dense patches and quickly develops a root system that chokes out native grasses. Fast-growing cheatgrass also dries out four to six weeks before native plants, becoming incredibly hazardous and providing overwhelming amounts of fuel for rampant wildfires. Moreover, when wildfires ravage forests and prairies in the western states in the summer and fall, cheatgrass is one of the first plants to reappear the following spring.

But when the BLM tries to fight this particularly ruthless weed, it has found opposition from a second foe: the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), an environmental activist group. The Center’s advice: let the cheatgrass grow. Do nothing—even if that leads to more forest fires. The BLM frequently uses controlled fires to manage its lands, but it has found that fire actually increases cheatgrass growth. That’s why it’s resorting to herbicides. On June 29, the agency proposed to triple the number of herbicide-treated acres to 900,000 in 17 western states. It says this will reduce the spread of invasive vegetation while cutting the risk of fires.

Nothing doing, says the Tucson, Arizona-based CBD. The Center promotes an extremist ideology that would sacrifice human needs to the needs of other species, plant as well as animal. The founders of CBD are obsessed with returning Western lands to the wild. Center co-founder Robin Silver has warned urbanites, “We will have to inflict severe economic pain.” Center conservation director Peter Galvin told a reporter, “We’d like to see belly-high grass over millions of acres.”

The pain is their point--it's just self-loathing gussied up as philosophy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 14, 2007 7:46 AM