Seen a Rogue on the loose? Get in touch with our Roguemeister: JOHN SCHRAG jschrag@wweek.com (503) 243-2122 FAX: (503) 243-1115 Prevent forest fires--cut down the trees. It sounds like a joke, some sort of Orwellian spoof, but in fact it is the rallying cry of the timber companies, and it's been taken up by this week's Rogue, U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith, Oregon chair for the George W. Bush campaign. Last Friday, Smith warmed up the crowd for the Republican nominee at a rally at the University of Portland by saying, "Can you believe our forest fires? I was elected to the Oregon State Senate the same year Bill Clinton was elected president of the United States. And I remember him making all of his promises, about cleaning up the forest and forest health and a sustainable yield, and it was all a hoax! He never intended it!" Blaming Clinton-Gore for the West's fires ranks as a cheap shot of the lowest order. True, selectively cutting down younger trees, combined with other forest health practices such as removal of slash and debris, can stop fires jumping from undergrowth to the tallest trees, thereby reducing the intensity of blazes. But profit-oriented lumber companies don't often employ such costly measures. In fact, the most exhaustive study of logging and fires ever conducted, the $6.5 million Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project, completed by government and university researchers in California in 1996, found that poor logging practices there actually added to the intensity of fires--not reduced it. In Montana and Idaho, areas that have been logged and those that hadn't burned with roughly equal intensity, according to The New York Times. That's not surprising because under extreme conditions of dryness and winds, "You're not going to see substantial differences" regardless of logging practices, says Carl Skinner, a Redding, Calif., fire historian and landscape geographer of the US Forest Service. In other words, weather--not an excess of trees--is the biggest problem. We at Rogue 2000 do not foresee Smith and Bush calling for better regulation of logging practices to improve forest health. We do, however, see them raising $1.3 million in soft money from lumber companies, and exploiting the fires to push for relaxed rules on logging. Shame on them.