SOS Forests

Senate Pushes Massive Forest Holocaust Act

In the very first act of the 2009 Congress the US Senate pushed through a catastrophic incineration bill that guarantees megafire holocausts across Oregon the West.

While the national economy collapses, the US Senate fiddled and earmarked 200,000 acres in Oregon and 2 million acres in eight other states for wholesale destruction by raging wildfire. It is important to note that those fires will not stop at the newly designated holocaust boundaries, either.

The Oregonian reported today [here]

WASHINGTON — Crashing through a barrier that blocked popular wilderness bills for more than a year, the Senate on Sunday voted overwhelmingly in favor of legislation that would permanently protect more than 200,000 acres of threatened “natural treasures” near Mount Hood and other Oregon locations, as well as 2 million acres in eight other states.

The 66-12 vote on a rare weekend session cleared the way for final passage later this week of a sprawling public lands bill that extends formal wilderness status and protection to federal land across a wide swath of the country in addition to expanding national parks.

Though many senators grumbled about a Sunday session, the vote was a happy milestone for Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who has been pushing the Oregon elements for more than a year only to be blocked by objections from a single Republican lawmaker.

With Sunday’s vote, those objections have been overcome and the path to additional protection for land and streams in Oregon has largely been cleared.

Protection? Guaranteed destruction is more like it. Last summer alone catastrophic fires incinerated old-growth forests, habitat, and heritage in the Boulder Creek Wilderness, Sky Lakes Wilderness, South Sierra Wilderness, Jarbidge Wilderness, and Ventana Wilderness. The damages beyond the Wilderness boundaries from smoke, fire, and watershed destruction were severe and will be long-lasting.

Other designated wilderness areas subject to catastrophic fires since designation include Alpine Lakes, Bandelier, Black Canyon, Bob Marshall, Bull of the Woods, Frank Church-River of No Return, Golden Trout, Gospel Hump, Hells Canyon, Lake Chelan-Sawtooth, Manzano Mountain, Marble Mountains, Mount Adams, Mount Hood, Mount Jefferson, Mount Washington, Okefenokee, Rogue Umpqua Divide, Saddle Mountain, Selway-Bitterroot, Siskiyou, Tatoosh, Yolla-Bolly, San Rafael, Dick Smith, Three Sisters, Kalmiopsis, Matilija, and many others.

“After five years and well over a hundred meetings, the Senate has finally overcome the procedural hurdles that have delayed action to safeguard some of Oregon’s most special places,” Wyden said after the vote on a bill that was pushed equally hard by former Sen. Gordon Smith, a Republican.

Wyden was joined by new Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley and Washington Senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray in voting for the destruction.

“Countless Oregonians, including Sen. Gordon Smith, worked tirelessly and in a bipartisan fashion to protect these natural treasures, which define Oregon as one of the most beautiful states in the union,” Wyden said.

Ron Wyden is delusional, or worse, an advocate of Burn, Baby, Burn. It is a fact that he did not visit one fire scene this year and has not issued any statement about the fires that raged through the Boulder Creek and Sky Lakes Wildernesses. Not did he address the Gnarl Ridge Fire that incinerated the very lands that he “worked tirelessly to protect”.

The Senate vote is expected to create additional momentum in the House, where lawmakers said there is broad support and an absence of the parliamentary privileges that stalled action in the Senate.

“Three years ago, we passed the first Mount Hood wilderness bill in the House, and Oregonians have been waiting a long time for this moment,” Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., said after the Senate vote.

Rep Blumenauer is another urban liberal whose understanding of forest and fire issues is nil. “Bowtie” Blumenauer represents downtown Portland. He also has never witnessed a forest fire nor visited the desolation afterward. He is blissfully uncaring about forests and has no conception regarding the destruction he proposes to inflict on downstate communities, watersheds, and landscapes.

How the bill will play out in Oregon

• Preserve almost 127,000 acres around Mount Hood with wilderness protection and add almost 80 miles on nine free-flowing stretches of rivers to the National Wild and Scenic River System.

• Designate 9.3 miles of river at the headwaters of the North Fork of the Elk River as Wild and Scenic and add 13,700 acres of wilderness adjacent to the existing Grassy Knob Wilderness.

• Designate as wilderness almost 30,000 acres in an area 15 miles east of Bend.

• Establish a 23,000-acre wilderness area, to be known as the Soda Mountain Wilderness, in the Cascade Siskiyou National Monument’s southern backcountry.

• Designate approximately 8,600 acres of BLM land as the Spring Basin Wilderness, overlooking the John Day Wild and Scenic River.

Over 5,000 acres of the new “reserve” on Mt. Hood have burned in the last two years at a suppression cost of over $20,000,000. That does not include evacuation costs, public health costs from the smoke, degradation of watersheds, or loss of recreation revenues. Grassy Knob is no longer grassy. It is a firetrap of second-growth fir growing in dense thickets. The Deschutes National Forest near Bend has been subjected to over 180,000 acres of wildfires over the last ten years and the towns of Bend and Sisters have been victims of repeated evacuations as those fires raged toward them. The Bridge Creek WFU (Let It Burn) Fire was allowed to incinerate the Mitchell watershed last summer, and it escaped and burned 2,000 acres of private land besides. That’s nothing compared to the Egley Fire which burned 135,000 acres in Central Oregon in 2007.

Blumenauer has introduced similar legislation in the House and is optimistic that it will move this year.

Sunday’s vote also represented a separate milestone: the first vote for Oregon’s newest senator, Jeff Merkley. Like Wyden, he voted for the bill.

“This bill gives that effort a boost by expanding protections for some of the most iconic and special wild areas of our state,” Merkley said. “I wish this bill had passed sooner, but I am very proud to be able to cast my first vote in support of Oregon’s natural resources.”

Merkley snubbed rural Oregon in his run for office. His understanding of forest issues is also nil.

What does this protection mean?

Bestowing “wilderness status” on federal property brings a host of protections and, at times, bureaucracy. At its most basic level, wilderness status means that the property will remain untouched and pristine. It is the most stringent protection offered by the federal government and is rooted in the 1964 Wilderness Act. The act set forth standards to protect those lands, already owned by the American people, that were “untrammeled by man.”

The property in question is neither untouched nor pristine. It has been home to humanity for thousands of years. The residents have cared for it, and that is why that land is attractive today. Abandoning that land to holocaust fire is the most senseless and cavalier act imaginable, and a travesty of historic proportion.

The American people should be concerned about the wholesale destruction that was guaranteed today on our lands. We should be concerned about our crippled economy and our crippled Congress, which acts senselessly and to our great detriment when they inflict megafire and scorched earth moonscapes on our landscapes and watersheds.

Today was not a day when anything was “protected.” It was a day of destruction by a government gone mad.