Posted on 06/14/2012 5:47:20 PM PDT by george76
As crews continue to face off against a fast-moving wildfire in northern Colorado, some in the timber industry say the area's fire danger has been heightened by U.S. Forest Service policies and an economy that discourages them from harvesting millions of acres of dead trees that stand ready to burn.
The High Park Fire burned has about 80 square miles west of Fort Collins, Colo. It is 15 to 20 percent contained but has been active on its west flank, where there are many beetle-killed trees... As bad as the fire has been, timber experts say the forests of northern Colorado and southern Wyoming stand primed for more devastating burns.
Wyoming State Forester Bill Crapser said poor forest conditions in that area have increased fire danger. "We do have a real unhealthy forest situation out there," Crapser said. "We have too many trees per acre ... and we need to look at ways to thin some of those forests out."
(Excerpt) Read more at ktvu.com ...
Well said
Looks like the Lake George fire might be out. The wind died last night after all.
by design, the leftest’s thrive in a world of scarcity.
“I live in central Idaho. We have millions of acres of federal forest land in central Idaho that looks like it’s been used for a nuclear weapons test site. Millions of acres of bare, quartz lined rocks and bleached white snags.”
I was curious as to just where those millions of acres are. I’ve flown over most of central Idaho and can’t place where much of that kind of ground is. There are some fair size burns back in the wilderness but nothing that would meet that description. What many people forget or don’t realize, or ignore is that most of that ground is wilderness for a reason - it’s not commercially useful for anything else. You would spend many times more than what the trees are worth trying to get them out.
The problems that have arisen from federal management of that ground are the result of decades of “every fire is bad and must be put out”. This has resulted in huge fuel loading that results in a catastrophic fire instead of a light under burn. This policy wasn’t the result of some bureaucratic whim, but was put in place after the devastating fires of 1910. People perceived that putting out fires was a great thing, little realizing the problems it would cause future generations.
A few acres my family owns was devastated by pine beetle. I can't wonder whether a few more male rangers and administrators might have been more pro-active about the problem.
We mock communism for its economic catastrophes, but what if these kind of dopey "equality" policies are helping create our catastrophes?
Ummm. Yes.
The upper Selway and most of the Salmon River drainage have been devasted by insane bureaucracy (wilderness designation) and obscene litigation. What doesn’t look like a nuclear weapons test site has been reduced to a massive weed patch because of ignorance and corruption. Allowing Forest Service management of semi-arid evergreen forests is a death nell for the nutrients in the soil of those forests. We should kick the Forest Service crooks out of Idaho and place our forests under the management of county conservation corps with the direction of the Natural Resource Conservation Service. The soil in privately owned and tribal owned forests is in good condition as a result of forest management policies taught by the NRCS. The same can’t be said for forests managed by Forest Service crooks and ignorant federal judges. The Forest Service crooks and greedy lawyers are more interested in making a lot of money from burning trees and vaporizing soil than protecting habitat for animals and fish.
That is what we have going on in the the Oregon forests. We are saving the spotted owl to be eaten by the Bard owl and since they are not "managed", they all burn eventually and now the environmentalists and the Governor will not let us cut the burned trees. It has been said the CO2 output by a half million acre of rotting burnt trees is equivalent to an entire year of all the CO2 emissions of every car in the country!!
So when fire comes through these burnt out, not harvested high fuel areas it will put a thick glass sheen on the ground that will inhibit growth of anything for decades, thus the term "nukes the place."
Think very carefully about what you said. If only forest fires could cause pine cones from lodgepole pines to open up, I doubt seriously they would have spread over the West if they were solely and completely dependent upon wild fires. I’ve been to areas that haven’t had a forest fire in decades and they are covered with “young” lodgepole pines.
This is quite true. Do a little research and you will find that there are two types of cones - sometimes on the same tree. Some open normally, some open after a fire. Lodgepole is very adept at seeding bare areas, whether from fire or other disturbance. After 90 - 120 years, they become susceptible to disease and insects and begin dieing off to make way for other longer lasting species (if they’re available). That’s why so many of the West’s lodgepole forests are in such terrible shape - they’re just doing what comes naturally. And, because many managers are reluctant to harvest the trees - for whatever reason - sooner or later they are going to do what else comes naturally - burn....
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