They'll tell us, in the next few months, that fires are part of nature, and that these fires are so big because they are encouraged by global warming. And that we need a vast new web of regulation, with new taxes calculated to leave middle class families with no disposable income, to be spent by utterly terrifying, super- bureaucrats. This thinking is insane hogwash. Yes, there were huge fires, vast uncontrolled fires reported in tales from pre-history, and recorded all through colonial times to 1900. Then they started to clear underbrush and institute anti-fire proceedings. Remember "Smokey the Bear" and "Only YOU can Prevent Forest Fires?" But since Earth Day 1970, we've been victims of the whopper that pre-1491, America was pristine wilderness and much of it should be turned back to pristine wilderness for our planet's health. Problem is that a new generation of anthropologists and archeologists are saying that "as a matter of cold hard fact, the Americas in 1491 were not a wilderness. They were a huge, special garden, planned and maintained by the active efforts of a wildly diverse range of societies," according to Charles Mann in The Atlantic. The active efforts of a wildly diverse range of societies. Not a giant hyper-bureaucracy in the name of Kyoto, run by never-elected-by-actual-people.

 

SALT SPRING ISLAND - Like everyone else in British Columbia I have been praying for rain. Not that I'm anywhere near the fires, but I own a very small forest, and live surrounded by forest, on the hills of a mountain, which is mostly park and ecological reserve of, guess what, forest, on an island which is, forever, one-third "pristine" forest.

When I bought my small forest 15 years ago instead of a sensible flat in the city I was living in, I thought, when I'd come periodically, to visit it, that it was so beautiful and I was so lucky (if not smart). There were old logging roads cut through and it could be a magical place to leave to my great-grandchildren. Because that's how long it would take to transform what, untouched, would be impenetrable bush.

Which is what it is now. My first year here, I spent a lot of time in the forest, but then -- like the good bourgeois I am -- concentrated on a garden on my clear-cut acre. I couldn't afford to have tasteful trees left when I cleared land for my house (something for which I am now profoundly grateful) and it looked like a bomb site. I was also infected by the widely held feeling that wilderness should be left to itself because of all the invisible living organisms in the earth and bark and whatever which fed life itself. Don't laugh, the founding curator of the Royal B.C. Museum told me that, and I believed him. He's still a leading light in the enviro- crackpot world which spawned these awful acts of God.

Yes, that's exactly what I said. We have the environmental movement to thank for this summer (and last summer's and next summer's) fires. Why my passion? I used to think it was cute that Wiccans held rituals in my forest and left red squares in their fireplaces, or that someone had set up a semi-permanent camping site, and even that someone else was growing pot down there. Now, if I see a rusty old camping van by the side of the road where hippies and students go into my forest, I break out into a sweat and worry until they leave. One spark and I'm finished. My whole life's work, gone.

It's the brush. There's so much of it now, especially given the last three summers of heat, the extreme of a large 14-year climatic cycle accentuated by El Nino which will likely persist for another two summers, according to someone whose science I trust. You want to know the biggest joke? I can't touch, yes, that's right, touch any vegetation on my property, around a water body, even if it's seasonal, without a permit from the Trust. A set of bylaws, hundreds of pages long, passed two years ago, under the consciousness of most citizens, and copied, courtesy of Agenda 21, in tens of thousands of communities across North America, has made my forest untouchable.

Add in parks (so many in this country, that they are way undermanned), vast tracts of Crown land (never visited), "green spaces," extorted from developers (and ignored), "ecological reserves" held for study, (so many that it will take a country of universities a century to study them) and logging tracts (which are so regulated that forestry companies would rather not log than tussle with the many utterly unnecessary but expensive tasks they must perform). The companies used to clear out underbrush. They can't afford to now. The province does. The province is broke.

This is forest policy courtesy of Clayquot. Same in the States. Clinton-era enviros instituted the pristine wilderness fantasy on the one-third of the land held by the States, and as Patrick Moore, B.C. family forester and founder of Greenpeace said in The Wall Street Journal recently, "Millions of acres are choked with dead wood, infected trees and underbrush. Many areas have more than 400 tons of dry fuel per acre -- 10 times the manageable level. This is tinder that turns small fires into infernos, outrunning fire control and killing every fuzzy endangered animal in sight. In 2000 alone, fires destroyed 8.4-million acres, the worst fire year since the 1950s." Till next year.

They'll tell us, in the next few months, that fires are part of nature, and that these fires are so big because they are encouraged by global warming. And that we need a vast new web of regulation, with new taxes calculated to leave middle class families with no disposable income, to be spent by utterly terrifying, super- bureaucrats. This thinking is insane hogwash. Yes, there were huge fires, vast uncontrolled fires reported in tales from pre-history, and recorded all through colonial times to 1900. Then they started to clear underbrush and institute anti-fire proceedings. Remember "Smokey the Bear" and "Only YOU can Prevent Forest Fires?" But since Earth Day 1970, we've been victims of the whopper that pre-1491, America was pristine wilderness and much of it should be turned back to pristine wilderness for our planet's health. Problem is that a new generation of anthropologists and archeologists are saying that "as a matter of cold hard fact, the Americas in 1491 were not a wilderness. They were a huge, special garden, planned and maintained by the active efforts of a wildly diverse range of societies," according to Charles Mann in The Atlantic. The active efforts of a wildly diverse range of societies. Not a giant hyper-bureaucracy in the name of Rio, run by never-elected-by-actual-people people.

I'll tell you one thing. I'm in the market for a serious second- hand tractor with attachments, like a backhoe, because bog-headed, romantic, feeling-based, bad science regulations or not, I'm clearing out the underbrush in my forest. And I devoutly hope that my neighbours will do the same. And you guys who just built in subdivisions near pretty "wilderness" areas? Neighbourhood parties just got purpose.