The Destructiveness of Un-Management
Recent calls for active management of our National Forests are based on the very evident fact that the set-aside of forests into No Touch “un-management” zones ends up destroying those forests.
Wilderness Areas, Roadless Areas, riparian reserves, Late Successional Reserves, and other No Touch zones are burning up in catastrophic megafires. The megafires kill all trees, including old-growth, incinerate wildlife, violently consume habitat, convert ecosystems to weedy brush, pollute air and water, destroy recreation opportunities, uglify scenery, and generally result in outcomes at total odds with the mission and purposes of our land management agencies.
Un-management destroys all the values the US Forest Service was established to protect. Un-management is also destroying the USFS itself. Since inception of their un-management program, the USFS has lost more than two-thirds of its personnel and most of its professional stewardship expertise. Their capacity to manage public lands, even if the agency wanted to, has been crippled.
The imposition of un-management land set-asides is wrecking the very values the land was ostensibly set aside for.
The only active program the USFS has left is whoofoos, so-called Wildland Use Fires, more properly let-it-burn fires that hasten the demise of our public forests.
In their hysteria to shut down all stewardship, proponents of un-management have left millions of acres of public and private land permanently scarred. Megafires have not been contained on un-managed Federal forests, but instead have ravaged private countryside and urban areas alike. No Touch, Let It Burn has caused hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage to resource and human values over the last 20 years.
The Precautionary Principle cautions against forest management for fear the outcomes might be bad. Yet un-management justified by the Precautionary Principle has directly resulted in horrendous outcomes, without any shadow of a doubt. The movement to “save the ecology” has left tens of millions of acres of ecosystems in smoking ruins.
New legislation is being devised to counteract the trend toward un-management. Such efforts are often touted as “compromises” between loggers and environmentalists. Loggers and environmentalists are special interest groups that do not represent the majority of Americans, nor does either group offer any management program that would save our forests.
The only “special interest groups” that offer viable solutions are those that advocate active, professional stewardship of our public lands, in order to protect, maintain, and perpetuate forests. Good stewardship means active management that protects rather than destroys forest and natural landscape values.
No doubt, whatever legislation is proposed, the anti-management, pro-destruction special interest groups will fume and sputter. It is important that the American public, whose land it is, not be fooled by deep-pocket, globalist industrialists, no matter whether they are putatively “loggers” or “environmentalists.” Both those lobbies are mega-rich, mega-powerful, and think they run this country. But they don’t.
Stewardship is not successful if it is restricted to a tiny percentage of the landscape. Unless the majority of acres are treated, megafires will erupt on the un-managed portions and spread to all lands. Wilderness, roadless, and other set-aside zones are ticking time bombs that wreak destruction far beyond their regulatory boundaries.
Unless the new legislation legitimizes stewardship on the majority of the public acres, we will not be able to stem the tide of megafires and environmental destruction. Congress and the public need to realize that un-management is not the answer; in fact, it is the problem.
by bear bait
Society has many descriptions of this unmanagement thing with the USFS and other government agencies: throw the baby out with the bathwater, and you can’t get there from here are a couple that come to mind.
If the needed actions are to reduce fuels and arrange tree spacing to dampen fire effects, it will always be called logging, because it is logging, and logging is the third rail (urban term) of public land management. Nobody will touch it.
I have observed from the git-go that when you build urban housing, the first thing that NEEDS to happen is all the trees should be cut. Then, when the houses are built, the streets are in, new trees can then be planted. The planted trees should be trees that are good neighbors, are appropriate urban species, are not so tall or invasive as to compromise the safety a home should provide. That is common sense. Common sense is not a part of this discussion. Never has been, nor will it be, unless it is a one-sided discourse without an audience.
Those who despise logging are the majority and have the power. How to sway them, I don’t know. But I do know that before any good might happen, many terrible fire seasons will have come and gone. Our interests in change might be little more than interest in some vestigial remnants in some mosaic left by a conflagration. Big whoop…
The Swopes Trial was so long ago, yet the very ideas under fire are still on the table today, are a part of the ongoing Presidential campaign. I have no inclination to believe that years and years of eco-propaganda, spewed venom, will ever be breached to where a meaningful alignment of trees in the forest to lessen fire danger will ever happen. There will be, of course, some Potemkin Villages constructed to dazzle the media, but no meaningful work will ever happen on public lands.
The sad part of this is that prospective solutions will be tested on private ground, will have positive results, but will not be a model for public lands as they have their own nutzoid constituency, True Believers, who will find some way to worship burnt ground as the Global Warming saviour. Unmanagement will prevail for at least two generations more. And then some genius, some bright light, will reinvent the wheel, and create Eden out of burnt cloth. Forest management will start anew long after I am ashes myself.
My cynical two-bits worth. It is an election year so promises are in and deeds are out. Time to be an observer of the idiocy and excitement. I expect a Presidential attempt to declare all burned public lands “wilderness” after the fire. If it burns, it becomes wilderness. That way they have to spend no money, will make many people happy, and the problem is solved. And I would expect that to come from either party. Sweep the ashes under the congressional rug. Out of sight, out of mind. And git them durned welfare counties weaned, rat now!!!