We Will Burn You
Sharp-eyed SOSF operatives forwarded us the tripe below. It seems the Dead Tree Press in Missoula is hot to burn Montana’s forests to the ground, which is odd, considering that they are in the wood products business, and convey tons of ground-up trees to their customers every day, for obscene profit.
Be that as it may, cub-reporter Michael Jamison just discovered the USFS Let It Burn Program, and is all gaga to swoon over the Beasts in the USFS, who by the way are NOT foresters. The Missoulian tripe follows:
Foresters may extend ‘let it burn’ policy beyond wilderness areas
by MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian [here]
KALISPELL - Foresters looking to fight fire with fire have started looking beyond the boundaries of designated wilderness areas, and this summer will apply a sort of “let it burn” policy to public lands throughout northwest Montana.
They call it “wildland fire use” and this summer it could be used in the North Fork Flathead drainage above Columbia Falls, the Swan Range near Bigfork and the Mission Mountains.
Again, they are NOT foresters but ignorant functionaries with zero professional forestry training or background, hired because of their political affiliations, not their forestry expertise, which they lack in spades.
Jamison evidently just discovered whoofoos, even though whoofoos have been burning in Montana forests for years. Pathetic. But I suppose that the information seeping into his skull now, after years of Let It Burn holocausts in his state’s watersheds, is better late than never.
While many wildfires will be fought, others can provide “a valuable tool for land managers,” said Steve Brady, Swan Lake district ranger for the Flathead National Forest. “Decisions to use naturally ignited fire as a tool for resource management objectives are made incident by incident, and only under certain conditions,” he said.
The tools in this situation are the obsequious functionaries of the USFS who know absolutely nothing about forests or how to manage them. They are pawns at best who promote forest incineration without a clue has to the destruction fire causes.
It all began back in 1983, when lightning struck deep in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, a tree burst into flame, and firefighters did absolutely nothing. Instead, they watched as the flames crept slowly up-mountain, eventually burning across 230 acres.
It was, by forest officials’ own admission, a “huge moment,” coming as it did on the heels of seven decades of aggressive fire suppression.
Now we have legend-building. Some epiphany happened in some place at some time. That led to today’s USFS forest incineration program. NOT! This is junk journalism at its worst, creating myths that hopefully cause readers to marvel at the mysteries of nature. It’s a crap story, pure hogwash. Very bad writing, but typical of the Dead Tree Press, which cannot get one fact straight anymore, and has sunk to fairy tale levels in their efforts to placate Big Brother.
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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.
More 2007 Idaho Fire Aftermath Pics
During the 2007 fires. This how to destroy a watershed.
Welcome to the wasteland.
This mountainside used to be green.
The USFS claims the fires reduced the fuels. Does it look like that to you?
This forest was “treated” by a “wildland fire used for resource benefit.” Is this a healthy forest now? What resources benefited? Answer: none. All imaginable resources from wildlife habitat to watershed values were destroyed utterly.
Do you ever get tired of being lied to by your government? I certainly do.
Some Payette and Boise Pics
Busy today with a variety of projects, so I decided to post a few photos. These are from the Payette and Boise National (former) Forests in Idaho.
Pictures tell a thousand words, so I guess you can draw your own conclusions without my assistance.
Temporary Malfunction
I wrote a short essay about a hero of mine, and posted here. And I sent him the link. But then my hero declaimed that I had exaggerated and was inaccurate in a few places or possibly more, causing him some embarrassment. Furthermore, he is soon off on an important vacation, and does not have time to correct my flailing essay, until he returns.
So I have removed it, temporarily, until such time as the target of my praise can cool my ardor with some plain facts. If he can.
So that’s the short story. Don’t worry, though. I am only temporarily deterred.
Cap-and-Trade Kicks the Bucket
The Carbon Tax scheme known as the Cap-and-Trade Global Warming Bill was crushed today in the US Senate as Republicans filibustered it to death. Ironically, hot air strangled the Hot Air Bill. From Yahoo News [here]:
Democratic leaders fell a dozen votes short of getting the 60 needed to end a Republican filibuster on the measure and bring the bill up for a vote, prompting Majority Leader Harry Reid to pull the legislation from consideration.
A mighty blow was felt as Al Gore exploded. But Alarmists held on tight to false hopes that the worst Bill since Clinton did not dissipate into the ether:
The 48-36 vote fell short of a majority, but Democrats produced letters from six senators — including both presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain — saying they would have voted for the measure had they been there.
“It’s just the beginning for us,” proclaimed Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., a chief sponsor of the bill, noting that 54 senators had expressed support of the legislation, although that’s still short of what would be needed to overcome concerted GOP opposition.
“It’s clear a majority of Congress wants to act,” Boxer said at a news conference. She and other Democrats said this now lays the groundwork for action on climate change next year with a new Congress and a new president that will be more hospitable to mandatory greenhouse gas reductions.
Both Obama and McCain have called for capping carbon dioxide and other emissions linked to climate change.
Don’t hold your breath, wackos. Sure, Congress is as adept at flipping and waffling as an IHOP breakfast chef, but putting the kibosh on the American economy in the name of “saving the planet from warmth” is not going to happen, now or ever.
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Federal forest policy Politics and politicians Saving Forests
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Eastern Oregon “Rubes” a Million Times Smarter Than Californians
That last post left a bad taste in my mouth. Californians are soooooooooooo stupid. Fortunately, somewhere in the world there are people who are clued into fire and know how to prevent it. That somewhere is Eastern Oregon.
Not that they can do much about it. Most of E. OR is owned by the Federal Gummit, and the boneheads in DC are hellbent to burn, baby burn. But at least Eastern Oregonians see the big picture and are trying to knock some sense into the the DC bosses before the next megafire holocaust hits.
From the Baker City Herald last week [here]:
Farm Bill’s forest fix falls short
By ED MERRIMAN, Baker City Herald, May 29, 2008
The 2008 Farm Bill includes new programs and funding for private forests, but woodland owners and forest managers in Baker County and across the state deem the dollars a “drip in the bucket” considering the scope of the nation’s forest health crisis.
“There is so much fuel buildup that we are going to have more and more catastrophic fires. It’s just such a tragedy to waste that natural resource,” said Lyle Defrees, who owns forested land near Sumpter and is a former president of the Baker County Private Woodlands Association.
The Food Conservation and Energy Act of 2008, commonly referred to as the Farm Bill, includes $39 million in new funding to be distributed over 10 years under the Healthy Forest Reserve Fund, which helps private forestland owners protect endangered species and provides funding to restore forestland damaged by natural disasters through the Emergency Forestry Conservation Program. …
Defrees said he has participated in forest thinning projects with 75 percent funding distributed by the Oregon Department of Forestry through the federal National Fire Plan. That federal program helps landowners thin overstocked, fuel-loaded forests in urban interface areas where the risk of catastrophic fire threatens homes and entire communities located in or near forests.
Defrees said the program is making dramatic improvements on private forestland in the urban interface zones. But he contends that what’s really needed — and is not included in the Farm Bill — is a federally funded program to carry out that type of thinning on a broad scale to restore healthy forests on private and public lands across the country.
The Incineration of California
Today the Wall Street Journal published the most ignorant article ever about the California fire situation. It is so ignorant as to constitute criminal stupidity. Many thousands of people will be killed and billions of dollars of damages will ensue if the ignorance displayed by the WSJ is not corrected.
An Open Letter to Californians:
IT’S THE FUELS, STUPIDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The ignorant WSJ article is [here]. It was written by a Class A moron named Jim Carlton, but we do not know the name of the braindead editor that reviewed and published it. Both individuals should be locked in stocks in the public square and be mocked incessantly for a few weeks.
Here’s a taste of flaming ignorance from the WSJ:
California Frets Fire’s Early Start — Real Fight Isn’t With Mother Nature, but Residents Who Live in Blaze-Prone Areas
By JIM CARLTON, Wall Street Deadly Morons, June 3, 2008; Page A16
GILROY, Calif. — Californians normally are treated to a kaleidoscope of colors this time of year as spring rains give rise to wildflowers and verdant hillsides. But following one of the driest March-May periods on record, the predominant color in the Golden State’s wildlands is brown — and that is fueling an unusually early start to the state’s fire season.
Already, firefighters have been deployed to more than a dozen wildfires, including a massive conflagration in the rugged Santa Cruz Mountains above here that broke out on May 22 and scorched more than 4,000 acres and 31 homes before being declared under control Wednesday. State officials are so concerned about the potential for fire damage this year that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued an executive order mobilizing California’s firefighting resources in early May. Normally, the fire season begins in June, but doesn’t really get going until late summer.
But the real battle for the “Terminator” star and his staff isn’t against Mother Nature. Forests and brush have burned with nearly clock-like regularity for thousands of years. The fight, instead, is with the humans who insist on moving into fire-prone areas — and other regions buffeted time and again by natural disasters that people soon forget.
Excuse me? Human beings have been living in California for THOUSANDS of years. The current spate of fires have burned in CITIES of long standing like San Diego and Oakland.
STOP BLAMING THE VICTIMS!!!!!
It ain’t the people – IT’S THE FUELS!!!!!!
But the WSJ, a major forest raping company, doesn’t stop there. Jimbo Carlson then blames, you guessed it, GLOBAL WARMING!!!!!!
Global warming is making the situation even worse. Many scientists blame man-made climate change for unusually dry conditions that have begun to appear in California and much of the rest of the West.
Here’s the real story. the fires have everything to do with fuels. All the areas burned this Spring have been heavily populated for thousands of years. CA is the ideal climate for people, and plenty of people lived there for millennia. They did not suffer massive conflagrations that wiped out their civilizations, despite the vagaries of climate over the last 13,000 plus years.
Why not? Because they controlled the fuels with human-set fires. Regular, frequent, seasonal, anthropogenic fire kept most of California in prairie and savanna. That’s the facts, supported by numerous works of anthropology, landscape geography, ethno-ecology, and plain history.
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To Log or Not to Log — Water Is the Question
For critical thinking about California’s forest resources, it’s hard to beat the California Forestry Association. Their latest issue (Summer 2008, Vol 12 No. 1) of California Forests is entitled “To Log or Not to Log,” and it’s all about… water!
As David Bischel, President of the CFA puts it:
Forests are water factories for our thirsty state.
Today, water is at stake in a way it never has been before. Roughly 75 percent of California’s water originates in forested watersheds. How we manage those watersheds has a great implication on the quality and quantity of water we deliver downstream for fish, farms and families. …
We’ve also learned that forests left alone will burn, sometimes catastrophically and often placing communities at risk. When that happens, water gets choked with silt and debris, and fish habitat and municipal water systems are damaged.
We know that on some public forestland, two to three times as many trees are growing as the land can adequately support. When too many trees compete for water, less is left to deliver downstream and the entire system is disrupted.
The entire issue is available online [here] (3.1 MB). Articles include “Conserve Water at the Source — What We Do, or Don’t Do, in Forests Has a Tremendous Impact on Our Water” by Norman Pillsbury, Ph.D., professor of forest hydrology and watershed management at Cal Poly - San Luis Obispo:
The trend of restricting forest management, often in the name of protecting water quality for salmon and other aquatic species, is having serious, negative consequences on California’s water quality. …
Well-managed forests play a critical role in assuring that Californians have abundant, clean water. Sustainable forest management can reduce the cost of providing clean drinking water, provide spawning gravels and cool temperatures fish need, and mitigate the affects of storm flooding and mudslides.
Forests where “hands-off” management prevails, conversely, are more prone to overcrowding, wildfire and mudslides that can degrade water quality for years. …
High-intensity fires do more than scorch the surface; they create a crust-like hydrophobic layer below the surface, an oilbased film that greatly slows the penetration of water. When rain follows catastrophic fire, water quickly saturates the exposed topsoil and hits the hydrophobic layer about two inches underground. Since the water cannot seep into the ground any further, the topsoil, ash and debris gets washed away. Mud fills nearby watercourses, devastating wildlife habitat and polluting drinking water.
