When The Charade ...

... goes up in smoke. Some thought-provoking snippets:

THE MANY SPECIES CONSERVATION PLANS that cover the southern California region all make claims of benefit to the species they purport to protect similar to the claims in the San Diego plan. It is now perfectly obvious that "habitat conservation plans" are to species protection what Soviet five-year plans were to steel production: A vast amount of wasted ink and money, signifying only the ideology and vanity of the planners. I have been a participant in many of these discussions, as a lawyer representing landowners, and know first hand the arrogance of the agencies that issue these orders and devise these grand schemes. Don't count on any apologies coming from their direction.

...

THE MOST PRESSING QUESTION for the federal government after the fires are put out will be the number of acres of land burned which had already been set aside for species conservation purposes. Whatever that number is, it will be a challenge to the drafters of the plans to provide evidence that they had anticipated the conserved acres being charred. Of course they didn't, but that won't protect the guilty from intoning about the natural benefits of fire. In their acquisitiveness, the planners have focused only on locking up land against development, not in protecting it from devastating fire. The nakedness of their error is found in the very plans they developed, which lack comprehensive fire management programs and the means to carry them out. [Emphasis added.]

This from the same people most likely to be complaining about lack of planning for post-bellum Iraq. Don't worry though, they're much, much smarter than us ordinary people -- even if none of the facts on the ground support it...