Only You Can Prevent Idiots

We Americans love our forests. We haven’t always treated them well, but we didn’t always treat our high school sweathearts very well, either. Some things you just have to learn. But the love is surely there.

We spent our childhoods climbing trees in our forests.

We buy tents and go camp in our forests.

We buy huge four wheel drive SUVs so we can get alone in our forests.

We spend millions on special stoves so we can cook in our forests.

We lionize (ahem) Smokey the Bear, who helps take care of our forests.

Then our forests catch fire, and we damn the people who started it.

But as it turns out, the people we really need to damn are the environmentalists who claim to love our forests more than we do.

“The policies that are coming from the East Coast, that are coming from the environmentalists, that say we don’t need to log, we don’t need to thin our forests are absolutely ridiculous,” Arizona Governor Jane Dee Hull said recently. “Nobody on the East Coast knows how to manage these fires and I for one have had it.”

That’s from the editorial page of today’s OpinionJournal, and I suggest you read the whole thing.