Environmentalism causes fires

(The Patriot Post) - As fires destroyed homes and charred the landscape around Lake Tahoe, California, this past week, area homeowners had no question of whom to blame. They didn’t point the finger at heat or drought—not even global warming or President Bush—but rather at the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA), a bi-state environmental land-use agency that oversees the area’s resources. Environmentalist-driven policies hindering the removal of dead trees have made the area a virtual tinderbox. As government agencies and environmentalists have butted heads over how to thin forests to reduce the threat of fires, the level of fuel in the Tahoe Basin crept to critical heights.

The same environmentalists who panic at global warming, fuel emissions and the evils of corporate pollution are strangely silent when it comes to disasters of their own making. In the eloquent words of one Tahoe area resident, “What a joke!”