By Muriel Sluyter

Greetings, Gentle Reader,

Once upon a time, we lived in a forest (we really did), and a logger bought the neighboring property. He promptly cleaned his land of fallen and dead tress and brush. When he finished, it was beautiful, and if a fire had come up our mountainside, his part of the forest would have had no "fuel build-up" to feed it. It would have gone around his property and wiped out his neighbors ... including us.

Since he was a smart logger and knew how a forest should be managed, he did a superb job. By the same token, since none of the rest of us were loggers, we didn’t realize we were supplying the fuel that would destroy our mountainside in the event of fire.

Remember when Yellowstone Park went up in flames? That happened because of fuel build-up. So, the Park Service decided to avoid dangerous fuel build-up in parks. But, instead of allowing loggers to come in and clean the land, while marketing the logs they harvested, they decided to do "controlled burns." That way, loggers would not derive profit from "public" timber. It would be burned up — thoroughly polluting the environment — and all would be well ... sort of.

That’s what they did at Los Alamos. Unfortunately, since the government can mess up even the simplest job, they lit the match after being warned of high winds.

Question: Why have we permitted environmentalists to take over our government? They think loggers, miners, ranchers and farmers are all nasty people, who use and abuse the land, the creepy-crawlers and everything else on the face of our "tiny planet."

But, since they are always long on indoctrination, and often short on understanding, they can’t really manage this tiny planet in a way that is beneficial to the environment. Instead, they have set destructive fires all over New Mexico, which will, inevitably, cause flooding if there are cloudbursts this summer. This is management?

Another question: If we were dumb enough to want to devastate this part of Colorado, how could we do it? We probably couldn’t manage a flood, though the Dolores River could overflow its banks in a wet year. I can say with reasonable safety that we would have trouble persuading any hurricanes to come our way. We could get tornados, but almost never do. We could surely dry up and blow away, and sometimes we almost do that, but we don’t have any say over that.

There is one thing we could do; we could let the Park Service or another government service set us on fire. They were going to burn Lower Boggy Draw and some of Haycamp Mesa, and some other local places, all of them too close for comfort. Can we trust them to burn the forest without burning us?

More to the point, is there a better way to do this? They say it is to "improve forest health, reduce risk to stands of trees from disease and insects, improve wildlife habitat, reduce danger of wildfire, and return the forest to a more natural state." But, a forest in its natural state is always a fire trap ... except right after it has burned.