SOS Forests

This bill still does not address the real core issue: the paralytic legal environment that leaves fire-watching as the only task USFS is able to do. Further, it seems that establishing this kind of slush fund is simply back-and-fill work by Dicks, Nick, Joe, and Raul in order to deflect attention away from, again, the fact these guys support the kooky, destructive framework of laws and don’t want to be placed in a position where they would have to undertake substantive reforms.

In the short term, FLAME is nothing more than a holding action to keep the agency intact. Yet I must ask, why bother?

How much does it cost to do essentially nothing? How many people do you need to look at something? Why would you look at something, call it employment, if there was not action taken except “no action-the preferred alternative?”

I was approached by a horsemen’s club to provide tools to clear USFS trails. They do that voluntarily. Nice. But who is getting paid to do that or monitor it? How many minders do you need for volunteer campground hosts, volunteer trail cleaners?

Every timber sale I bought had deposits, non refundable, and charges, above and beyond stumpage and road use, to take care of those acres we logged on and those roads we used. The roads we used we had to replace any rock we wore out, keep it bladed by motor patrol, and then we paid a fee of somewhere between $0.35 to $1.40 per thousand board feet of logs per mile of road used. If there was a 10 mile haul on USFS roads, and we average 4mbf per load, we easily were paying $4/mile to haul on the road, for every truck load of logs. We paid into reforestation funds (Knutson-Vandenburg), we paid for slash disposal, we paid for pre-commercial thinning, all up front payments to cover future assumed costs to establish trees on those logged acres and thin them pre-commercially. And we paid for the upkeep of the road.

Now the road is obliterated, or tank trapped, the rock and culverts wasted, and no access to fight fire. The replanted stand is choked with the planted trees and the natural ingrowth while the land was relatively clear. It is becoming a real fire hazard, and the stocking levels are so high nothing is growing. All the money that was there to take care of that, and the road, were pissed away by the USFS or the Congress.

Now I don’t really give a damn. I don’t care if the USFS lives to the next budget cycle. They abrogated their forestry responsibilities to the woo-woo magic of seers, soothsayers and mystics in the BINGO crowd, and now they have no job other than being Barney and Betty Fifes. As it should be. Like those trees left to rot for habitat needs construed by snapshot geniuses, the USFS needs to be left to rot. Let their social engineering process wear away like quartz filled basalt road rock. Let them fall, ever so slowly, every year, in numbers, like the forest loses trees that are not replaced. If there is a budget crisis, a perfect storm of higher costs and less revenue, let that monetary conflagration grow unchecked, taking out the good and the bad. I no longer care. In the grand scheme of things, it matters not what happens on USFS lands with far fewer minders, recorders, nanny state troopers. It does not matter what they choose to do, it will be challenged from within, by their own Quislings raising road blocks and burning bridges. That they might or might not survive with fern faeries and ghosts of forests past makes no nevermind to me. It has never been wise to send good money after bad, and that is what the USFS budget is all about.

I have to wonder how those Chiefs of old feel about having a directed policy of not fighting fire, arrived at by auditors and not a public forum. Why would they even comment on the budget? Their contracting rules have allowed the air tanker fleet to drop to less than 20 aircraft in the heavy class. Their own employees, or at least that is who they claim to be, have sued to not use retardant. All their efforts are towards WFU plans. We know the results of that idiocy. We know how to manage for fire resistant older age open forests, but can’t get there from here. The BINGOS won’t let them. Congress won’t let them. So why the need for more money? Is there a new rathole that needs plugging?

Managing for dead wood by dead wood.

Here’s an interesting statistic: since 1979 (the first year of the Five Chiefs’ reign, 142,161,319 acres have been incinerated in wildfires. That’s 142+ million for you math challenged folks.

Given that the USFS total acreage is 192 million, the burn total is roughly 75% of their holdings. Of course, not all the wildfire acres were on the USFS, but then, that’s not counting whoofoos either (roughly 25 million acres).

Somehow these chumps have gotten the idea that their JOB is to burn America’s priceless heritage forests to the ground, at exorbitant expense to the taxpayers, and at the cost of bankrupting rural economies across the West.

One thing is for sure, there won’t be any parades in their honor. Not around here.

I’ve been waiting 30 years for these throwbacks to the Stone Age to get out of the damn way so younger, wiser heads can start saving our forests. Now my hair is grey and these geriatrics are still screwing things up. I’ve had enough of them. Roll their wheelchairs back into the Home and be done with them.

You know I go to these public hearings all the time that the forest service puts on, and it is really sad that the people who make the most sense have either left the forest service because they couldn’t do what they were hired to do or they have retired or retooled from the logging industry because there wasn’t enough work. And the forest service logs their comments and does the opposite.

I guess the federal agencies will burn big sagebrush and graze the public lands to the ground under the guise the vegetation is a “fire hazard”. Sagebrush is one of the most valuable shrubs on public lands in the west. This fire suppression program has many fallacies. People have built their fancy houses with trees next to their roofs next to public lands. They wanted their seclusion and privacy. They know the federal government will save their hind-end first in case of a forest fire before our public lands and buy them a new retreat as well. Many don’t carry fire insurance for that reason. So here we have another misguided federal program funded by us taxpayers. It’s also created quite a federal trough for government employees in the west. Stop funding this wasteful program U.S. Congress it’s nothing but “pork barrel”. What are we buying…. does anyone know??

Partially correct, Jack. Big sagebrush did burn last summer in the largest fire in the history of Utah and megafires in Idaho and Nevada. Over a million and a half acres of sage grouse habitat was lost, including 75% of the leks (breeding grounds). Sage grouse chicks feed (are fed) primarily on caterpillars living on sage brush, so the future of the entire population is in question.

But the grazed land did not burn. The vegetation was kept down by livestock, so big build-ups of fuel weren’t there. Often the fires burned right up to the barbed wire fences and stopped. Grazing saved sage grouse habitat. Whooda thunk? But that’s what happened. By the way, we aren’t all vegetarians and I prefer range-fed beef over feed lot beef. Less pollution, too, out on the range compared to next to the feed barns.

And those “fancy” houses are just houses. The Fat Cats live in urban penthouses and Beverly Hills mansions. Rural folk live in simpler dwellings. Besides that, what kind of a world would it be if we all lived in exactly the same concrete tenements? “Soviet” is an adjective that comes to mind.

And “next to public lands” is an urban legend. In the rural West the government owns 60 to 90 percent of the land base. There is no private land that is not within a few miles of the Public Domain. And fires know no legal boundaries. Often fires that start on Federal land have traveled 15 or 20 miles to get into the little private land that does exist out here. The 48,520 acre (75 sq mi) Castle Rock Fire that threatened Ketchum ID last summer started more than 10 miles away from town.

The feds are burning down our public lands on purpose. Allowing fires to burn unimpeded until they reach town is what has broken the budget. Rapid initial attack and full suppression when fires are small costs little compared to fighting megafires at the city limits. If the USFS tended their land, did forest restoration, and fought fires when they are small, we could save more than a billion dollars per year on suppression costs. Not to mention the tens of billions in resource values we could save from incineration each year.

Before you get all class-envious, think about your own neighborhood firefighters and decide whether you want to let fires burn out of control where you live just so that the Federal government can “save” some money (which they don’t, as I explained). That’s what you recommend for my neighborhood, and you probably wouldn’t like it if the tables were turned.

Another thing, Jack. If you need a fresh conspiracy theory, try this one:

The Nature Conservancy gets its boy Henry Paulson in as Treasury Sec. He proceeds to bankrupt the entire USA, driving equity values into the tank. Land values plummet, but no one but the BINGOs have the ability to cash in on cheap land. Transfers USFS to DOI, already a BINGO stronghold. International power brokers take over USA, drive the peasants into slum tenements in the inner cities. Cars are banned, gasoline goes up to $20 a gal, if you can get it. Entire world economy collapses. Fat Cat BINGOs take over 99% of the land base. Dumb Americans look on in poverty and horror. Agriculture collapses. Starvation riots. Cannibalism. Then the next Ice Age hits. Human race goes extinct, except for BINGO insiders who breed a new not-so-super race that looks suspiciously like Neanderthals. Devolution back to Stone Age. The ice sheets return and only the polar bears and the new cave men survive. Civilization and all human collective knowledge are lost forever, including language. Grunts and howls of small freezing band of apemen with crude spears wearing wolf fur are all that’s left.

People who really DO give a damn about something take care of it. That is how we got those wonderful heritage forests from the aboriginals: they valued them and took care of them because the forests took care of the people.

With damned few tools but fire and clever minds, and a couple thousand years of shared experience, they burned when conditions were correct to accomplish survival and sustenance goals, in ways not so risky as to lose the whole salami. The first risk managers. That the big trees stood for so many generations is serendipity at work. They were the lucky trees. There was no use for large trees except ones that had tipped over on their own and had broken over obstacles. Those you could split huge planks from with wooden or stone wedges. But the clear ground underneath provided a bounty of materials for food, fiber and shelter. The working forest was a very old concept that has been discarded by over-educated idiots without vision, people who have their microscope focused at such short distance they can’t see what they are really looking at.

Those old foresters should know better than to petition Congress for more money for anything. Who would know better that the larger part of that money will be siphoned off at the Chief’s office in D.C. for “scoping” or “task forcing” or some other bureaucratic pissing away of the public treasure. They have been there and done that.

I once foolishly followed the money from slash disposal collected from a timber sale. I was burning slash with helicopter ignition and putting the fire to bed in a day, for $135 an acre. The USFS was collecting $12/mbf on a sale that went 55 mbf per acre. That works out to $660 an acre, or 6 times what they paid me. Well, they claimed at the Ranger Station that my crew got it done for about $200 per acre, but they had to add in overhead for the RD, the SO, the RO, and the Chief’s Office. About 35% at each level. I did the math and it came out to $664 and cents per acre.

So a US company can’t pay bribes to get work done overseas, but we pay bribes here to our government. That 35% at each level was nothing more than a bribe paid (extorted from) by timber purchasers.

I know how they have worked in the past, and now that the USFS is a bunch of gender confused ethnic slot fillers with dubious education and training in their field of influence, I really don’t give a damn if they exist or not. One big old affirmative action project that did not work, and Obama says it did not work, does not need more money. The African American community evidently is still sitting on the porch waiting for something while all phases of the USFS bureaucracy was stilted to a preference for people of color and females, all the while discriminating against white males, deliberately. So the end result is a pile of dysfunctional crap called forest management by lawsuit, with USFS people suing their own outfit when they don’t get their way. Hell, untreated syphilis can run itself better than the USFS can run their fiefdom, with about the same result.

If the thought that removing fuels, introducing safe fire on a frequent basis, and logging merchantable salvage and poorly spaced trees of all sizes and species is not possible, then why spend the money to aid the sure failure of management that is the current track? At least let it burn itself without those insane backburns from a township away that incinerate more area than the fire that’s being fought.

Mike is right. They (USFS directed firefighting personnel) have become arsonists in their own right. They are afraid of injury or loss of life to the point that they will cause people to be injured and die. The timid are easy to kill (Playground 101). The survivors are the people who are not afraid to work to conserve their means to live. If the Chiefs were paid a pension based on the modern timber sale program, and not on acres burned as they must be now, then they would starve with the rest of us.

Now there is talk of moving the forest service from the Dept. of Ag to the Dept. of the Interior from a GAO report. I believe that may be a bad idea. Many of our forests around National Parks may all of sudden be included into the parks (and become Pay to Play like the parks). Example: Yellowstone Park start of Y2Y.

Any extraction of natural resources would cease to happen. No fire suppression. The FS used to be a self supporting agency but due to corruption in management and legal suits brought by enviro orgs it has become an impotent agency! The FS is in the Dept. of Ag because it should be managing for renewable resources just like farming and ranching. But it seems the DOA is now into preservation of lands for no use and we are seeing this even on our private lands today.

Maybe we do need to move the FS. The Department of Commerce may be the best place to put the FS. The DOC is out to make money and provide services for the people of the U.S. Make the FS a self supporting agency via timber harvest, grazing, etc. Control small fires before they become huge, and make them pay for their own fire suppression. If they burn over X amount of acre’s of land per year, take that money away from the district that burned, if it is proven that it could of been contained, and demote or fire the forest officials in charge. This may seem biased, harsh,and unreasonable, but we need to battle extremists with extreme measures. The road we are going down is not working now. We need to rattle these FS officials and their career paths to make them realize that they do not have a form of diplomatic immunity from the majority of public opinion!

For a discussion of GAO Robin Navarro’s dimbulb idea, see Moving USFS at the Rogue Pundit here:

http://roguepundit.typepad.com/roguepundit/2008/03/moving-usfs.html

PS Don’t miss the comments of Rep. Todd Tiahrt of KANSAS!!!!!!! I wonder how much the Big Shift will affect Kansas? I say if that’s what Kansas wants, then throw them out of the Dept. Ag, too. Zero out the Farm Bill subsidies to Kansas corn geeks, cattle raunchers, and all the other welfare farmers in the Great Flat State of Nowhere.