Failure to cut old or diseased trees, they have testified, results in an unnatural overabundance of fuel, making catastrophic forest fires more likely. Older trees are also more susceptible to disease and insects. Millions of acres of Sitka Spruce have been lost to beetle infestation as a direct result of Forest Service policy. The beetle is still active in 23 million acres of Alaskan forests, but the Forest Service has yet to act. The Clinton-Gore administration's new roadless policy also means, the dirt foresters say, that more acres of forest will burn.
History bears out their concern.
During the active period of forest road-building from the early 1930s to the late 1950s, the number of acres lost to forest fire dropped from an annual average over 50 million to less than 5 million. Firefighters during that period had continuously improving access to the fires. Under the Clinton-Gore administration, that progress has been halted, and annual losses to forest fires have trended upward. Energy Almost since the first oil well was drilled in northwest Pennsylvania in 1859, alarmists have warned that the world would soon run out of fossil fuels. The alarmists really began to crank up the fossil fuel heat in the 1970s, with a rash of doomsday predictions that look as ludicrous today as today's scares are likely to look tomorrow.