Today’s Wall Street Journal has yet another example of what happens when good intentions fail to connect with sound economics (or in this case, sound science).

Thanks to the nation’s housing boom, business has been good for the West’s sawmills for the past three years. But Jim faced an insurmountable problem: He couldn’t buy enough logs to keep his mill running. This despite the fact that 10 times as many trees as Jim’s mill needed die annually on the nearby Kootenai National Forest. From his office window, Jim could see the dead and dying standing on hillsides just west of the mill. They might as well have been standing on the moon, given the senseless environmental litigation that has engulfed the West’s federal forests.

Thanks to Jim’s resourcefulness, his mill survived its last five years on a steady diet of fire- and bug-killed trees salvaged from Alberta provincial forests. Such salvage work is unthinkable in our national forests, forests that, news reports to the contrary, remain under the thumb of radical environmental groups whose hatred for capitalism seems boundless. Americans are thus invited to believe that salvaging fire-killed timber is “like mugging a burn victim.” Never mind that there is no peer-reviewed science that supports this ridiculous claim–or that many of the West’s great forests, including Oregon’s famed Tillamook Forest, are products of past salvage and reforestation projects.

So the scorecard looks like this: One point to the environmental groups who have worked so hard to shut down sawmills; zero points to the sawmill workers who are now out of a job; zero points to the sawmill operator who can no longer make a return on his investment; and most ironically, zero points to the forests that will not be thinned and thus be at much greater risk of disastrous wildfires. Come to think of it, that might negate the point awarded earlier to the environmental groups, so let’s just say that nobody wins.

One more quote from that article:

Fifteen years ago, not long after the release of “Playing God in Yellowstone,” his seminal work on environmentalism’s philosophical underpinnings, I asked philosopher and environmentalist Alston Chase what he thought about this situation. I leave you to ponder his answer: “Environmentalism increasingly reflects urban perspectives. As people move to cities, they e infatuated with fantasies about land untouched by humans. This demographic shift is revealed through ongoing debates about endangered species, grazing, water rights, private property, mining and logging. And it is partly a healthy trend. But this urbanization of environmental values also signals the loss of a rural way of life and the disappearance of hands-on experience with nature. So the irony: As popular concern for preservation increases, public understanding about how to achieve it declines.”