The latest issue of The Watershed (PDF)arrived in the mail today. The fall, 2005 edition of Forests Forever's newsletter, like past issues, came with slightly stale news. (I often wonder if the late delivery is a fundraising strategy - a demonstration of their razor focus on the mission, to the detriment of all peripheral functions.) 
It's one of the few environmentally minded non-profit publications I read that doesn't require a lot of interpretation to get the truth. No propagandizing nor vilification of big business and politicians like so many other NPO rags. Apart from the overt editorializing, it's just news about what's happening in California's woods. Sure the news itself condemns those that offend the forests, but in that there's no slight of hand nor deception.
The spirit of John Muir (pictured at right) awakened in me when I read the piece titled Junk Science. As a scientist, Muir presented plenty of data and rationale to deter California from building O'Shaughnessey Dam. Not to mention the emotional plea by he and so many other Americans to save a natural wonder. Yet by 1923 the dam had stopped the Tuolumne and filled Hetch Hetchy Valley. One of the earliest arguments for the dam relied upon the "fear and affectation" ethos that we see dominating public debates today. When the great earthquake of 1906 struck San Francisco, firefighters had difficulty getting water on the blazes that ignited due to broken gas lines all over the city. The city's reservoirs held enough water, but the damaged pipes couldn't deliver water to the hydrants. No supply of water would have improved the situation. But the dam backers seized the opportunity to exploit the hysteria by claiming a pipeline from Hetch Hetchy would prevent a repeat of such a disaster. Never mind that alternate sources offering smaller sacrifice of natural splendor had already been identified. The deceptive arguments made in the wake of the 1906 earthquake and fire set a process in motion whose momentum ultimately carried the pro-dam's agenda through to successful conclusion.
It's this same ethos that the Bush White House has employed in administering its policy. Among the many examples of Junk Science being used to justify its partisan industry and religious biased policy, it's the record on weakening environmentational protection that really exposes the travesty. The Watershed artcile (on p.4) lists a few of the many distortions and suppression of science in the domain of forest protection alone. One that really gets my goat, covered in this piece, is the effort to undermine the Sierra Nevada Forest Plan. Enacted by Clinton in 2001 after 10 years of planning and thorough scientific research, it protects, among other important resources, old growth trees and scarce wildlife habitats. The reason given for weakening the federal plan given by the Bush administration? Forest fire prevention. Despite volumes of scientific data indicating that logging is "a primary cause and intensifier of forest fires," the administration pushed a weakened revision of the plan, claiming that increased logging was necessary to prevent forest fires. See NRDC's excellent chronology of events related to forest management since Bush took office for more info.
Had we the opportunity to rescind the decision 93 years ago to dam the Tuolumne would we? What does our thinking about Hetch Hetchy tell us about the roadless places where ancient trees grow? Are they worth protecting? What would the generations living in 2099 say?
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