SOS Forests

Lies, Deceit, Obfuscation, and Destruction

The Wilderness Society is so full of lies. They are destroying America’s forests behind those lies. too. TWS has wormed into the highest branches of the USFS and uses their clout and the public’s money to foment holocaust. It’s not about “wilderness” either. It’s about pure destruction.

One of their operatives, John McCarthy, Idaho Forest Program Director, The Wilderness Society, wrote an excruciating diatribe in praise of holocaust entitled “Idaho Fire Story 2007″. Some quotes:

In another post-Smokey Bear, fire-is-back category Idaho also led the nation in 2007. Idaho saw Wildland Fire Use (WFU), where wildfire runs its natural course for resource benefit, spread across 189,442 acres. And without question the ecological benefits of fire for forest clean-up, nutrient flow and re-structuring were not limited to these WFU lands.

TWS led the “Kill Smokey Bear” and “Blackened, Charred, Dead Forests Are Beautiful” campaigns, with millions of public dollars handed to them in secret, sweetheart contracts by the USFS. The outcomes include the 800,000 acre Yellow Pine Fire [here]. The Yellow Pine Fire is our name for a collage of dozens of fires in 2007 that blackened the Boise, Payette, and Nez Perce National Forests. The Yellow Pine Fire is a complex that includes the Rattlesnake, Raines, Loon, Zena, Profile, Landmark, Monumental, Krassel, and Trapper Ridge Fires, and a few dozen more.

There were no “ecological benefits” from the Yellow Pine Fire, only ecological destruction. Whole watersheds were roasted, and steams fouled with ash and debris.

The Wilderness Society promoted those fires by encouraging something called “Appropriate Management Response,” the most inappropriate Let It Burn policy ever dreamed up. From McCarthy of TWS:

Most of the big fires were managed with a focus on Appropriate Management Response(AMR) and point protections. The AMR strategy protected people and communities, provided safety for fire fighters and allowed fire to play its ecological role of reducing dry fuels and recycling nutrients.

Fuels were not reduced. Instead whole green forests were converted to dead fuels. The fuel loading today is ten times what it was before the fires. And nutrients were not “recycled”; they were volatilized and went up in smoke or down the river.

Especially nitrogen. Today the carbon:nitrogen ratio in those soils is 15 to 25 times what it was before the fires. There are no nitrogen-fixing plants left either. That means all the soil nitrogen is bound up in rotting dead wood (carbon) and very little is available to whatever weeds might sprout in the ashes. The productivity of the land for growing trees has plummeted. An entire ecosystem has been destroyed and will not return for centuries, if ever.

The Wilderness Society finds the new look of the land to be quite lovely. From TWS’s McCarthy again:

In the peaceful winter quiet we noticed how different the burnt brown, dull grey and remaining green tree needles looked when set against white snow, instead of the vast black ground of fire season.

Here is a sample of the winter loveliness he is gushing about:

No one in their right mind would call that “beautiful” unless they hated forests with a diabolical passion. Yet that is exactly the point of view of the Wilderness Society. They have corrupted the USFS and co-opted them into a program of wholesale forest destruction, for the sheer powertrip of smashing our forests to death.

According to McCarthy, the USFS is delighted at the result:

Experiences with recent, large fires are likely key to perception. Sam Hescock, fire management officer at neighboring Krassel district, saw things a little different than McCoy-Brown hen he did a similar, winter drive the week before. “All of the north slope on the South Fork Salmon River) got hit hard, the rest is fine. Anything we had burn, had (seed tree) survivors. I’m not at all unhappy,” he said afterward.

TWS is a frequent suer of the USFS. They have a swarm of lawyers that sue for this, that, and the other thing at a drop of a hat. Their favorite monkey wrench is NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act. TWS recently sued under NEPA to stop the Plumas NF from doing fire-preventative thinnings [here]. That was just one lawsuit out of hundreds aimed at stopping the USFS from protecting forests from holocaust megafires.

But TWS’s precious AMR (appropriate management response) and whoofoos (wildland fires used for resource benefit) have NEVER been subject to any NEPA process whatsoever [here]. That doesn’t stop TWS from threatening NEPA lawsuits for any kind of post-fire rehabilitation, however. McCarthy again:

[T]he lack of NEPA review for BAER [burned area emergency response] is a concern to conservationists. … In this process there is little or no public interaction, such as with NEPA scoping or informal NFMA [National Forest Management Act] discussions. … The proposed project list and the final approved projects are public documents but not publicized documents, in the way regular NEPA documents are distributed for public review.

The standards for snag retention, course woody debris (CWD) and anticipated tree mortality were established by the Forest Plan. While these standards were set using the ICBEMP [Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project] data, it is seen by some conservationists [i.e. TWS] as inadequate. … Concerns were also raised in our comments on the intensity of the cut along roadways, the remaining snag density and the riparian protection. …

Some projects, such as road and trail repair, fall under already approved programmatic NEPA and do not need additional environmental analysis. Other projects do require advance planning, including NEPA and consultation in the bull trout, salmon and steelhead streams.

So TWS is going to sue to halt forest rehabilitation after the fires, but most hypocritically did not sue and will not sue to stop the NEPA-less fires in the first place, regardless of the damage to forests or wildlife, including listed species, that those fires cause.

TWS hates forest rehab. They hate that any money gets spent on fixing the catastrophic destruction that TWS perpetrated. McCarthy again:

The BNF [Boise National Forest] and PNF [Payette National Forest] also secured a large amount of In-the-Black or NFN3 [National Forest Native Plant Program Projects] and WFW3 [Watershed, Fish, Wildlife, Air & Rare Plants Program] money, gaining about $6 million of the $7 million available to Region 4.

This became subject to the “oh, shit” test, as in – “oh shit, if we get the money, can we actually get the work done with the time and people we have?”

Oh shit is right, as in oh shit here comes the eco-arsonist Wilderness Society to incinerate our forests, destroy our wildlife habitat, foul our streams, roast our watersheds, jam our court system with petty lawsuits, and corrupt our government in the process.

TWS is not pro-environment. They are not environmental preservationists or conservationists. They are rapscallions who will stoop to any level to impart destruction to the environment. Their motive is Marxism, their means are holocaust. TWS has no interest in forests except to burn them. That fact should be very clear to every American.