This is Floyd Wynne with THE VIEW FROM HERE 7/22/04

It all reminds me of the Shakespeare play.....Much Ado About Nothing.

I’m speaking about the Congressional hearings this past week on the Endangered Species Act.

Anyone with an ounce of common sense agrees that the Act is not just working the way it was originally intended. Environmentalists have captured it and turned it into an anti-economy weapon.

Blindly they continue to list various specie, many of which no one has heard, but they get them endorsed as endangered regardless of the consequence to the economy of an area or an industry.

Let’s take the case of the Spotted Owl which resulted in the decimation of the timber industry in Southern Oregon. Immediately, our forests were un-cutable and they accumulated the underbrush that would prove tinder for forest fires.

Little scientific evidence was ever introduced as to the nesting habits of the spotted owls. It was merely claimed that they roosted only in old growth timber.

Later events have proven that the owl roosts in other than old growth also...and that the owl is nearing extinction because another owl....the barred owl....is breeding them out of existence.

Yet...the Spotted Owl is still on the endangered list....and it is being used to prevent cutting of old growth timber.

Over the weekend....I visited the northwest corner of our state, around Astoria. To my surprise....logging is big business there. You not only see huge piles of logs, but log trucks busy hauling to the mills.

They also are loading ships for foreign ports with some of the same logs.

I commend Congressman Greg Walden and the other Congressional members from Northern California on their desire to inject some common sense into this diabolical act, but that hope has almost always died aborning on the House floor.

If the House should be able to pass a bill changing portions of the act, it will die in the Senate.....as it has before.

The environmental groups....and there are a number of them....have had a stranglehold on the Congress on this issue. Any effort at changing the act runs against a stonewall.

The hearings held here, it seems to me, resulted more in simply a rehash of the water problems rather than an effective discussion of the merits or lack thereof of the Endangered Specie Act.

The Eastern U.S. mentality seems to be that the West is really an unsettled area that has pristine forests and that they must be preserved for eternity. It’s their strange view that the forest fires are good...they cleanse the forests....and the burned trees can rot...fall over and create more places for the creatures of the forest to exist.

They give little thought as to where the lumber for the homes they buy come from, and certainly no thought as to the consequences of destroying the lives and fortunes of thousands who live and depend on logging for their livelihoods.

These type of environmentalists are as much a threat to our future as are those who might be contemplating another attack on this country.

They have attacked and destroyed the lumber industry locally....have taken dead aim at confiscating the water that is so vital to the agricultural industry.

Unfortunately, as I said earlier.....the hearings were really much ado about nothing.....and there will be nothing done until and unless forces of reason take over our national leaders.

This is Floyd Wynne and that’s THE VIEW FROM HERE.