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The direct cost for fighting this summer's extensive forest and grassland fires on public land will exceed $1 billion, and that doesn't count the losses to the major industry in many Western communities -- tourism.
For some reason, many tourists decided to go elsewhere after seeing our smoke-plumed skies and blazing flames on their evening news.
As for those brave souls who did head for our hills, they often faced disappointment. Camping in the Montana mountains was forbidden after the governor closed all the public lands, and exploring the ruins at Mesa Verde National Park can't happen when the entrance gate is locked on account of fire.
The consequent decline in tourist flow means a reduction in dollars that get spent in motels and restaurants. In the area around Cortez, Colo., a quarter of all jobs depend on Mesa Verde tourism, and during the fires, motel occupancy dropped 80 percent from the preceding year.
Some philosophic types might attribute these fires to a hot summer that followed a dry winter, one of those things that just happens every now and again.
But that's not the American way. We need to blame somebody.
In the Republican parts of the West (approximately 98
percent of the land area), the blame goes to an unholy and
all-powerful trinity of Clinton-Gore-Babbitt.
All-powerful? Well, after hearing about this omnipotent trinity from a GOP candidate, you get the clear impression that Clinton-Gore-Babbitt could have just snapped their fingers, and this summer would have been cool, moist and fire-free, with warm sunshine delivered from noon to 8 p.m. daily, so that free-spending visitors could wander around tourist attractions while campers dried out their gear.
We hear so much about the evil Clinton-Gore-Babbitt troika because this is a presidential election year. If it weren't, we'd be enjoying more plausible theories about the fire season:
· Alien spaceships do not have blast deflectors on the nozzles of their tachyon-impulse rocket engines, and so, just like old-time steam locomotives, they often ignite their surroundings.
The only difficulty with this theory is that the two places which lead the world in reported visits from extra-terrestrials -- Sedona, Ariz., and Crestone, Colo. -- were fire-free this summer.
· The fires were deliberately set by secret agents of the Trilateral Commission to produce smoke to obscure the black helicopters. These machines are staffed by jack-booted United Nations employees, out searching for both World Heritage Sites and suitable locations for resident resettlement camps to be built after the New World Order takes over on Jan. 1, 2001, the real start of the new millennium.
· Mountain West states were tired of playing follower to California the leader, especially in the National Enforced Purity Contest.
So chauvinistic locals started the fires, knowing that some Western governor, like Bill Owens of Colorado, would feel compelled to issue a proclamation banning outdoor smoking. Thus a backwater mountain state could seize the lead from trend-setting California, which has so far managed to ban only indoor smoking in public places.
· In the fall of 1998, the Earth Liberation Front supposedly took credit for starting a fire at Vail that destroyed a new lodge under construction in an expansion of the resort's ski slopes.
Despite an intensive investigation by the FBI and other agencies, the culprits have yet to be identified, let alone arrested or charged.
Now, suppose the ELF observed that industrial tourism was getting out of hand all over the West.
The conclusion is obvious, and it's also a blessing.
People on one side of the political spectrum can blame
extremist radical environmentalists
for the 74,180
fires of the summer of 2000, and those on the other can
blame greedy exploitative capitalists
for provoking
the mysterious arsonists who torched 6,524,274 acres -- an
area larger than the state of Maryland.
This works all around: Everybody's got somebody to blame, and that somebody will never materialize. It's a vast improvement on the Clinton-Gore-Babbitt theory, since wildfires will be with us long after they leave office, whereas the mysterious ELF can be invoked, as necessary, for many generations yet to come.
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