Colorado faces a crisis, but Ritter plays it cool

The governor seemed resigned to defeat after a recent aerial tour of beetle-ravaged parts of the state, almost as if he were a mortician comforting the bereaved rather than an emergency room doctor fighting to save a life. A more fitting response to the devastation would be anger, defiance and vows to take dramatic action.

Half a year after taking the job, Gov. Bill Ritter last week apparently woke to the fact that Colorado is confronting a forest health crisis of massive proportions, with potentially catastrophic aesthetic and economic consequences. But rather than responding with an action plan, and demanding that state and federal agencies do more to save what forests they can, Ritter seemed to shrug it off as an unavoidable natural calamity.

“(Ritter) said the epidemic can’t be stopped, only managed to reduce the risk of wildfires,” reported The Associated Press. “It’s part of a natural cycle that our kids and grandkids will probably experience,” Ritter said.

There is a natural component to what’s occurring. Drought has increased the vulnerability of our forests to insects and diseases. But there’s a man-made component to this slow-motion disaster as well. A century of short-sighted federal fire suppression policies helped turn forests into unnaturally dense thickets, prone to fire and infestations. Logging left uniform stands of the same tree species, creating a banquet for bugs that feed on them. And federal agencies, when confronted with the looming crisis, were too slow to sound the alarm and too lethargic in response, bogged down as they are in red tape, “analysis paralysis” and constant legal battles.

This natural disaster is man-made, and a scandal that for some reason hasn’t been recognized as such. Blaming it all on natural forces, and writing it off as inevitable, is a sly way of skirting blame for what’s happening and avoiding the responsibility to respond. And that simply won’t do.

The devastation might still be contained if Ritter and other politicians would stop wringing their hands and take action. It’s rather pathetic for Ritter to be focusing on how thousands of acres of dead trees might fit into his pie-in-the-sky renewable energy plans, instead of preventing more trees from dying.

All the governor can point to in the way of a state response is $1 million legislators set aside last session for “pilot projects” that reduce fire hazards. That’s a joke, given all the other things he and Statehouse Democrats found money for. Instead of frittering away time and resources on gimmicky ways to create Colorado’s “new energy economy,” a responsible governor would be focusing like a laser on ways to save Colorado’s present economy from the ravages it will suffer when visitors, turned off by hiking and skiing through moonscapes, go elsewhere.

It’s not too late to go on the offensive, despite Ritter’s defeatist tone. But that will mean making this a priority, raising Hell with Washington and temporarily waiving the legal and regulatory restraints that hamstring agencies. It also means ignoring the pleas of gang green, whose hostility to tree cutting and non-interventionist ideas are part of the problem. And a governor with a little more fire in the belly might help.

Write to Paige c/o The Gazette, P.O. Box 1779, Colorado

Springs, 80901, by fax at 636-0202, or by e-mail at opinion@gazette.com.