Powerful Environmentalists, Hurting the Environment?

They imagine that top-down, big-government mass dictates are the most efficient and effective way to combat environmental degradation, when in reality, the many artifices of big government are some of the environment's worst offenders. True conservationists, who actually know a damn thing or two about how ecosystems work, understand that a slow-moving bureaucracy operating with imperfect knowledge and politically-influenced fiat does a reliably poor job of environmental stewardship.

Federal forest-fire policy, for example, has inflicted terrible harm upon the temperate deciduous awesomeness that is America's wildnerness, as the LA Times reported this week. Environmentalists tend to think that the more trees you have, the better, and that if you just leave forests be, they'll thrive on their own through time immemorial. That couldn't be further from the truth, but the environmentalist-laden Department of Interior continues to drag its feet on logging permits, at the expense of both unemployment in the timber industry and water scarcity in the West.