HT to Powerline. This article by David Shoenbrod, from the Wall Street Journal suggests who was really responsible for the disaster in New Orleans.
After Hurricane Betsy swamped New Orleans in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson stroked its citizens ("this nation grieves for its neighbors") and pledged federal protection. The Army Corps of Engineers designed a Lake Pontchartrain Hurricane Barrier to shield the city with flood gates like those that protect the Netherlands from the North Sea. Congress provided funding and construction began. But work stopped in 1977 when a federal judge ruled, in a suit brought by Save Our Wetlands, that the Corps' environmental impact statement was deficient. Joannes Westerink, a professor of civil engineering at Notre Dame, believes the barrier would have been an "effective barrier" against Katrina's fury.
Now if it were true that this barrier could have saved New Orleans, and that it would have been built but for an environmental group's lawsuit, then "Save Our Wetlands" is much more responsible for the tragedy of New Orleans than the city's mayor, Louisiana's Governor, or President Bush.
This reminded me of an article from the Rapid City Journal.
Three timber-thinning projects on more than 50,000 acres of the Wyoming side of the Black Hills are stalled by environmental appeals. The delays show that, despite changes in federal regulations and a new federal law to speed up such decisions, forest management disputes can still bring logging and thinning to a halt.
There were a number or reasons for the project.
The projects called for a combination of commercial logging, noncommercial timber thinning, prescribed burns and brush removal in mosaic patterns inside the boundaries of each of the three project areas. Much of the land inside the project boundaries would remain untouched, including patches of private land.
Aaron Everett of the Black Hills Forest Resource Association, a timber industry group, . . . contends, along with the Forest Service, that these projects would have reduced the risk of catastrophic wildfires and runaway bug infestation by thinning dense stands of Ponderosa pines. Everett also says thinning, including logging, can improve wildlife habitat and protect streams.
Jeremy Nichols of Biodiversity Conservation Alliance said last week: "Management shouldn't be focused on industrial exploitation." By that, he means commercial logging. . . . Old-growth timber and stands left to die and decay through natural process provide valuable habitat for such species as goshawks, pygmy nuthatches and the fringed myotis (a bat).
The bottom line for most environmentalists is that economic growth is bad because pretty much anything that human beings do or that makes them happier is bad. Trees felled and made into lumber are a crime against nature. Trees burnt to a crisp by fire are a sign of the wonders of nature.
Environmentalists certainly think they know better than the people living in such places as the Black Hills or New Orleans.
Most local residents and virtually every government official in the Black Hills — local, state and federal — oppose Biodiversity's appeals of the three projects.
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