SOS Forests

I haven’t read the decision, but in simpleton legal terms, I cannot fathom how an indemnity can trump the fifth amendment. I would argue it from that standpoint if I were in front of the Supreme Court. That wonderful amendment guarantees no deprivation of life, liberty and property without due process or just compensation.

I would argue that these citizens were denied due process. No reasonable judge can find that due process was served during the public comment period for the indemnity. Because there wasn’t a public hearing held nor were the affected landowners comments considered when the decision to light the backfire occurred. It’s a simpleton legal argument, but hell it would have to be taken seriously by the Supreme Court, who happens to have at least five members (a majority) who would take it seriously.

The facts aren’t in dispute in this case, are they? It is a simple case of lighting a backfire that backfired, and private property was lost. The residents were denied due process and obviously were denied just compensation for the loss of their property. Essentially this was a taking.

I don’t see how a policy directive can trump the fifth amendment.

It is a damn shame, but if you are a private citizen and you are banking on the Ninth Circle of Hell for an appeal, you can kiss your appeal goodbye. I hope it goes to the next level.

That’s a perceptive comment and I totally agree.

Similarly, when some functionary of the USFS declares a Let It Burn fire on the spur of the moment, every affected person in the watershed/airshed is denied due process.

Indeed, when the Chief of the USFS unilaterally and without any warning dumps Fire Management Plans in the trash, millions of people are denied due process. Those USFS actions will impact and destroy private property values, and public property as well that provides water and other values to citizens.

Denial of substantive public input and due process when landscapes, livelihoods, property, and lives are at stake is the mark of a dictatorship, not a constitutional republic. The implications are far-reaching and very serious. What kind of government do we wish to live under? Does America still possess a government of, by, and for the people? Is our Constitution still in effect?

I guess this is one more nail in the concept of federal agencies acting to uphold their public trust responsibilities, hmmm?
Sell/return the ground to the states. Let’s get this over with.

Now we are back to what happens when a private citizen steps out the back door in a legitimate attempt to preserve his life, liberty, and property with a back fire of his own right up against the Piss Fir Willy line. Is a private person protected in the same way public employees are?

The backfire deal is disingenuous now, because it is driven by a directive from the Auditor General of the USFS to keep, promote, or fire fire managers based on their fire suppression costs on a per acre basis. The more cheap acres you can add to a fire, the better your chance of surviving an audit. Therefore, the farther from the fire front you set the backfire, and the more acres you burn, the better you are doing your job.

The sad deal is to look at fire maps and see where the backfires never reached the fire front. Maybe it rained. Or the fire ran out of hoorah in a rock garden. The answer, then, is that you send in the “Hot Snots” to do burn outs of islands of fuel. How tough can that be? You already have the fuel area lined by the burn. You go in and take out that heralded “mosaic of burn treatments and unburned areas” that fires are supposed to produce at a benefit to the ecosystem.

Somebody is bullshitting somebody in all this fire benefit deal. You get what you say you want, and then to save your financial ass and your job, you go burn out the unburnt places within the burn, and the seed sources that might otherwise help with recovery. Don’t log, because you will disturb regrowth, but burn the islands so you can increase the acres, and “reduce” the fuels. That’s like the two Polish firing squads with one victim in the middle between them. Do you wonder if the USFS had Cormack McCarthy write their plan? No meaningful end but death and destruction, to make a place for the next generation of hopelessness and despair. Makes my skin crawl.

I don’t know, now, if Weyerhaeuser now gives a damn about timber. Maybe they are trying to figure out the Boise Cascade exit strategy. Boise Cascade became Office Max. Instead of a poorly run vertically integrated timber company, they are now an office supplies retailer. Cleaner work. And you don’t have to worry about running the store when you consume your inventory. You just order in more stuff to sell. They couldn’t order in more trees to cut. The USFS quit selling, and they had many more mills than land to support them. Do you want a ream of paper with that box of pencils? How about some sticky note pads? A calendar? And you want to know the joke on that deal? Both the Boise Lumber Co and the Cascade Lumber Company were once partially owned by Fred Weyerhaeuser in the 1930’s! And even today, the Weyerhaeuser Family is the owner of the Potlatch Paper Co. Preferred stock. The common stock holders sued Potlatch several years ago because the Preferred Stock got annual dividends (have to keep the real Timber Barons of today, the geriatric grand daughters and great grand daughters of the originals, in money so they can live the good life in Minneapolis or St. Paul, Chicago, San Francisco, or wherever they are now) and all the while Potlatch was showing losses and no dividends to common stock holders and their pension funds. It is not greed, but need that drives the process. Those old ladies need the money.

Potlatch owned the patents on the PrestoLog machines they leased to Weyco to make PrestoLogs out of planer shavings. Hmmmmm. Would ya wonder if all the dough was made by Potlatch on the deal, and it was their stock holders, not Weyco’s that got the dividends from PrestoLogs? And who are the Potlatch stockholders? Connect the dots… like Mike says, connect the dots… It ain’t rocket science. Northern Pacific RR headquartered in St. Paul. They sell the land to Weyco. Weyco has partners in every venture. You name it. Poles and piling, planing mills and cut up plants, wholesale lumber yards, railroads, pulp and paper, they got about as vertically integrated as they come. And now that is long gone. The world has changed.

bear bait,

I appreciate very much that you did not use the term “inbred” in your remarks. That would have been in poor taste, and I would have had to edit it out.

Reply to bear bait and Mike:

I think one reason why you have to do backburns sometimes far from the fire, is because if the fire is “out of control” and spreading fast, you have to have enough distance and time for the backburns to do their work, before the main fire arrives. Also firebreaks have to be defensible, so they may have to go all the way out to some already cleared road or freeway, and not the first tiny river or stream on the map. But because backburns can add so much to the total burned acreage, that may not have burned naturally anyway, I see them as ineffective to “protect” mere unpopulated wilderness. There has to be some clear human-benefit reason to doing them. I have read claim somewhere, that backburns burn out more severely, than the actually fire, the “mosaic” patterns of natural burns, supposedly having some future “diversity” benefit. That could be partly due, to the much larger “ignition” source of fire-fighter drip torches and such, soon building a more solid and hotter fire-front, than from a “point” source such as lightning, that may spread more scatteredly?

One assumption that I am thinking under, is the adage that it usually costs more to “do something” than to “do nothing.”

Due process becomes more problematic, when certain special interests (i.e. “environmental” extremists) clog the courts with endless, circumvent the will of the people, litigation.

I am not so sure that every rich celebrity who builds some costly mansion out in the middle of nowhere, without reasonable defensible clearings, and not according to any reasonable firesafe design, can reasonably expect the taxpayer to pick up the tab for their fire suppression when the forest inevitably burns. So often I hear of the forest fire passing on, and then later, homes catch fire, pointing to poor design or maintenance issues, or excessive evacuations denying people opportunity to monitor for smoldering remnants of the forest fire landing near their home. But people should have that right to build where they want, and perhaps assume their own risk, especially if such an “unsafe” place that they can’t get insurance.

I am troubled by various conspiracy theories of ulterior motives, to “burn people off their land,” or the fire-fighting “industry” that may seem to profit by deliberately making the problem worse, in order to rake in more taxpayers dollars.

Yes, conspiracy theories are troubling. That’s their purpose. They aren’t designed to ease your mind.

I take it then that you aren’t a rich celebrity? You don’t own a costly mansion? Don’t worry, come the Revolution, ain’t gonna be no more limousines.

Reply to Mike:

No, I am no celebrity, and can’t afford any fancy mansion right now.

But if I could, and decided a mansion not to be a huge waste of money that I could instead use to help other people, I would built it right, put in fire sprinklers, firesafe design, or whatever would reasonably be called for.

What “revolution?” The long overdue high gasoline price-gouging revolt?

But one thing to keep things in perspective. One can live in the forest for 50 or 100 years, and have not much happen. Then Poof! One day, it’s all gone, reduced to ashes. The forest soon grows back on its own, but it costs a lot of money to rebuild homes, a reason why people buy insurance. Or the house in the supposedly fire-prone forest may last for over 100 years, while the mansion on some beachfront topples into the ocean during some storm, or some houses in Very-Safe-ville, gets knocked down by some freak tornado. But houses aren’t designed to last “forever,” but only 50 years or so. Some buildings don’t even last that long. I think it such a waste, how quickly they tear down buildings not even that old, in Las Vegas, because they aren’t “trendy” or “in style” anymore. Sometimes the land plot is worth more than the structure upon it, just due to what could be built in place of it.

Sorry, I was a being a little obtuse. The limousine remark was a literary reference, to R. Crumb in the heady days of the 1960’s. Everybody was a revolutionary then.

You don’t like the rich building big homes? Sounds like class envy to me. But think of this: they pay thousands of times more taxes than you. When the fire dept. protects a town, all homes get the service, regardless of who paid what in taxes. The rich subsidize the fire protection for the poor. Just like they subsidize the roads, sewers, schools etc. Bill Gates pays hundreds of millions in taxes every year. You, Pronate, are getting a free ride, more or less. The rich are helping you, though you don’t seem all that grateful.

By the way, when forests go poof! they do not grow back on their own. That’s an urban myth. Forests very often turn into brush fields after catastrophic fires. Then those brush fields burn again after a few years. Permanent brush results, and the forest is no more. The Biscuit Burn is a good example of that.