Posted on 06/26/2007 9:50:48 AM PDT by BurbankKarl
The mood of the crowd jammed into the meeting room was angry.
Many had lost their homes to the forest fire that swept through the Sierra Nevada just south of Lake Tahoe.
They said they were angry at bureaucrats and environmentalists who made cutting of trees and clearing of land difficult. There was always too much red tape, they said, and now it was too late.
In all, a crowd of nearly 2,000 people descended on the South Tahoe Middle School auditorium Monday night, wanting to be heard in the face of their losses.
And if there was an object of scorn in the crowd, it was the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, a powerful bi-state environmental land use agency charged with managing the resources of the basin.
When a speaker mentioned the agency, the crowd responded with a chorus of boos. "What a joke!" yelled one man.
The wrangling began in earnest over the assignment of blame, including arguments over whether federal and state forest managers had made their tree clearing rules too strict in the face of pressure by environmentalists.
A common sentiment Monday was expressed by Jerry Martin, a bartender at the Horizon Casino Resort, whose house was still standing, although eight others around it had burned to the ground. He said U.S. Forest Service rules regulating the harvesting of dead trees were too stringent for those living next to government land.
"I hate to get political, but environmentalists wouldn't let us cut down the dead trees," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Thanks! Lots of folks are asking hard questions, I saw that community meeting on all the news channels too.
Here’s hoping some common sense will finally prevail.
A lot of folks were blocked from clearing their properties and singled out the Regional Planning Agency.
I caught a bit of Bill the other night, he’s a gem and dead on how envirowacko groups do more damage than they claim to try to prevent.
oops
should have said
clearing their properties of dead trees and ground clutter
Whaddya bet TRPA decides that it's just too dangerous to let them rebuild in there?
In Malibu since the coastal commission virtually shut down remodeling private homes, homeowners now burn their house down instead of contracting a knockdown in order to upgrade their home. A firefighter from the area once told me that except for the big wildfires, almost all fires in Malibu are arson. The same coastal commission has denied permission for the firehouse to install a clothes washing machine, so the heroes have to drag their firewear down to coin laundry’s in Santa Monica, imagine that!. sewer problems etc. Of course it just fine to allow tons of horse poop run down into the ocean...ahh the limo liberals...
Bingo. It's just beginning. It will be especially interesting to see what they'll do to those with their houses still intact. My guess is that they'll try to stop any cutting of standing burned timber.
heh, rain taxes! Reminds me of the Beatles song
It is in fact a charge for handling storm-water run-off.
I wonder if they have a credit rebate system for taxpayers if it doesn’t rain...
It's an annual charge, IIRC based upon collection area.
You miss the important — critical, in fact — point that rural areas do not NEED regular wildfires to maintain a healthy ecosystem IF — and this is the “IF” that has just burned hunderds of people out of house and home — property owners have the freedom to clear deadwood and underbrush themselves.
When human property owners undertake to do the things that nature would otherwise use fire to do, then those fires are no longer necessary to the maintenace of a healthy forest. But environmentalists don’t WANT the humans to do the things that nature uses fire to do, because they worship nature and believe that, if the humans do the things that nature uses fire to do, that would be bad because it would be humans doing those things, not nature. They believe, in fact, that ONLY fire can do the things that nature uses fire to do, and that humans doing those things is discordant with nature, and insufficient to the achievement of the Utopian world they believe could exist if we always just sat back and let nature take its course. In this way, they believe, we will all achieve Nirvana.
The sane among us, however, have heard about Nirvana, and readily recognize it by it’s more common name: Hell.
Yep.
Think they’d learn something sometime but nooooooo . . .
That's a pretty subjective definition of "healthy." There are a number of plants that require occasional fire to replenish the post disturbance seed bank; else dormancy fails and the plant is extirpated (along with its insect associates and their predators). Others need to have the decadent growth removed in order to rebalance. An example is the way oaks need their root crowns exposed and lower branches singed to reduce end weight.
While it may be possible to emulate the effects of fire, the entire system has been accustomed to periodic burning for thousands of years. It isn't a matter of simple thinning.
It is a runoff tax. They determine how much impervious surface you have and charge you accordingly. This is why you are seeing many new projects using pervious concrete.
http://www.concretenetwork.com/pervious/
We had routine forest fires each Summer here in Alabama until the 1950’s when we started implementing scientific forest management (e.g. cutting dead trees, building logging roads in strategic locations, etc.).
Now you seldom if ever hear of a forest fire in Alabama (a woodland state).
...more liberal states can’t say the same thing.
I only hit upon the most commonly debated aspects of the management process, because those activities are what is most often prohibited, or made inordinately difficult to get permisson to do, and because I’m not intimately involved with those ecosystems to the degree required to address much beyond those frontline concerns. That’s not meant to deny that the deeper intricacies are important to achieving a management strategy that gets closer to 100% healthy, just that the uproar over what one might call “the basics” has eclipsed all discussion of the more advanced management needs that you bring up.
As the situation exists, with the ideas of the more radical elements of the environmentalist camp holding sway over the controlling bureaucracies, and much of the public mind, we can’t get beyond wrangling over the simplest, most obivous management tasks. If we could, if there were even a modicum of sanity and reason in the environmentalist camp, then the floor could be opened up for discussion of methods by which to address the more involved requirements of various flora. Perhaps if some rational agreement could be accepted regarding the clearing of underbrush and the cutting and disposition of deadwood, THEN there could be discussion of, say, controlled burns to revitalize oak trees, and other strategies for artifically replicating other necessary natural processes.
None of those needs can get any “airtime”, however, until the present impasse over artificial (non fire) means of clearing undergrowth and dealing with standing deadwood is broken up. And it doesn’t seem to me that those on the more restrictive side of that discussion are prepared to even allow REASONABLE measures, but are bent on maintaining an environmental absolutism that, ideally, wholly excludes man and human needs — much less “mere” human WANTS — at every turn.
In my esteemed county they've addressed that little property rights loophole and have fixed California's oversight. Here's how it works. They "grandfather" the property, usually waterfront, from new more oppressive zoning after threatening the owners with gloom and doom junk science giving the homeowner a false sense of security. Then comes time for a rebuild/remodel for WHAT EVER REASON, they then play the "Critical Areas Ordinance" on the unsuspecting homeowner. This gives them the authority to prevent any building and or the opportunity to utilize their preferred remedy, Critical Areas MITIGATION which equals extortion.
I wouldn't cry a tear if several environMENTALists (and perhaps some bureaucrats as well) took a long walk in the desert and never returned. Those people are beyond useless.
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