Paychecks are one side of the coin in rural communities, and the threat of wildfires is the other. The Forest Guild's director, Laura McCarthy, told a Senate subcommittee last month that the Healthy Forests Restoration Act was falling short on funding for community wildfire-protection plans. Without the seed money from those grants, prevention efforts don't get started and the fire risk increases.

"It feels like HFRA made a big difference to the agencies to be able to do streamlines -- or maybe not, because we don't know yet about court cases -- but in terms of rural communities, they don't feel safer from wildfires," McCarthy says.

The lack of funding for economic stimulus grants and community wildfire protection at the rural level reflects larger questions about Bush's real motivations.

The Bush administration's rollback of Clinton's "roadless rule" will open up some 60 million acres of forest to road building, tying neatly into not-so-subtle administration suggestions that it would like to use commercial logging to pay for fuel-reduction projects. This shift toward industry over environmental ethics is no surprise from the Bush administration, but it is an especially bitter pill when taken along with broken forest-restoration promises.

Already this year the total amount of wildfire-burned acreage has surpassed the acreage burned in 2003, including the devastation from the Southern California wildfires that prompted the passage of the HFRA. The 2004 acre burn total is double the average of the past decade. Firefighting occupies the public's mind as the best way to control wildfires, but the reality is that fire suppression doesn't work very well at all. Removing the massive amount of kindling that has built up over the past century is the best way to curb fires and maintain healthier forests. Yet fire suppression continues to suck a huge portion out of the budget compared with fuel reduction, despite the promises of HFRA.

"What the administration did was really shortchange HFRA," says Jay Watson, director of the wildland fire program for the Wilderness Society. "And despite all the rhetoric, it would appear that their commitment to act isn't all that significant."

"At the very least it is an opportunity lost to provide communities with real protection." Whether or not it leads to a lot of logs for the timber industry remains to be seen. In some ways the biggest beneficiary is the Forest Service itself."

When John Kerry elevated the discussion about forest restoration to the campaign level with his $100 million Forest Conservation Corps, which proposes to reduce subsidies to the timber industry to create new jobs and promote the long-term health of the forests, Lynn Jungwirth was pleased. She's heartened that both parties are treating the forests as an election-year issue. But she'll hold off passing judgment until rural communities see some of the benefits.

"We've had a lot of talk, but as they say in the woods, 'Talk is cheap. It takes money to buy whiskey.'"

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