Posted on 06/26/2002 7:33:52 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
It´s only June, the hot, dry months of summer are ahead, and according to the Washington Post, "there are six major fires in Colorado. Fires are also burning out of control in California, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona, where a large and dangerous fire in the tinder-dry forests of the eastern part of the state raced through a hastily abandoned town today, chasing firefighters off the line and prompting an evacuation warning for thousands of residents."MSNBC reported "About 393,000 acres have been consumed in eastern Arizona by two fires — the Chedesky fire and the larger Rodeo fire — which joined late Sunday into one massive blaze. The area consumed is greater in size than the city of Los Angeles and more than 16 times the size of Manhattan."
That is the largest fire in history, we are told, and it has happened about 30 years after a few city-bred college graduate students sounded a false alarm about the Northern Spotted Owl being "threatened" by timber harvest in the forests of Northern California.
In the intervening years we have had a huge amount of money spent by radical environmentalists such as the Sierra Club to, in their words, convince the American people that "we need to protect, not log, our national forests."
This notion that logging destroys national forests is based on a very simplistic notion – that left alone, forests will continue to grow until they are hundreds of years old. Actually, in the dry Western states, the forests are mostly conifers that grow where there is low rainfall. Most of the pine trees have a life span of about 100 years.
It was just about 100 years ago that America began to try to protect the national forests by quickly putting out any fire. About thirty years ago, the environmentalists began their determined, and largely successful effort to halt logging in our forests.
So, what has happened in those largely conifer Western forests in the meantime? They have been largely overrun by brush that creates the kind of mammoth fires we are now witnessing in the West. Fire is nature´s way of keeping conifer forests healthy, as even the Sierra Club is now belatedly beginning to comprehend. Without the small regular fires that we have been putting out in our forests for the last 100 years what we now have are forests overrun by brush that not only strangles the conifers but also changes the ecology of the conifer forests.
Instead of allowing nature to take its course in the conifer forests, 93 years into the forest policy of preserving the underbrush in our forests, a new policy was introduced that halted logging and removing dead and dying or over crowded trees and underbrush in the forests. During the eight years of the Clinton Administration, the forest-destruction policies sharply accelerated, with Vice President Al Gore as its chief proponent. In his book, Earth in Balance, published in 1993 he wrote, of "the heated dispute between the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest and conservationists eager to protect the endangered spotted owl." (Page 194)
Actually, the spotted owl was never endangered. The spotted owl boondoggle was the result of an owl counting venture in 1972 when Eric Forsman, a city-bred graduate student at the Cooperative Wildlife Research United at Oregon State university, reported, after only a year of study, that Spotted Owl pairs were found only in areas of old growth forests slated for timber harvest.
Yet, Spotted Owls in California have been found nesting in a K-Mart sign and they increased in the El Dorado National Forest in the early 1990s after a severe fire that burned a huge segment of the forest. Gore has a major role, he tells us, in implementing "Save the Spotted Owl" regulations that reduced or stopped logging in National Forests.
However, a widely ignored July 23, 1990, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report warned:
"Past fire protection practices in the forests have caused abnormal fuels conditions to develop" and noted that the practice of "protecting snags, dead but standing trees which are favorite nesting spots for the Spotted Owl are obstacles to fire suppression" and that "current practices are creating forest conditions that most likely will lead to large, high severity fires."In 1997 I attended a Congressional hearing held in California on the issue of management of the 10 million acres of National Forests in the Sierras where the supervisor of a one of the California forests stated, "It is not IF the forests will burn, it is only a matter of WHEN they will burn, because of the huge amount of fuel we have allowed to grow in them."In 1995 as Editor of the Michael Reagan Monthly Monitor, I interviewed Keith Butts, who grew up in the Oregon woods where his father was a logger and then spent 40 years in the U.S. Forest Service as a ranger. He said he was involved in four different theories of forest management in those 40 years.
In the 1950s, U.S. Forest management regulations required taking down any tree that would not live another 20 years. In the 1960s, regulations changed and entire blocks of trees were removed if 50% of them would not live another 20 years. Marketable trees in a block would be taken down, and the remaining saplings would be left to grow.
In the 1970s, Butts said, "Forest Service management decided to start clear-cutting." The Sierra Club and other environmentalists blame clear-cutting on the logging industry. However, according to Butts, the clear-cutting regulations imposed by the Forest Service were vehemently OPPOSED by the logging industry!
"In the 1980s, supervisors began ordering roads closed to keep the public out of the woods." Butts said. "In the 1950s, the forests were managed for the benefit of the taxpayers and actually financially sustained themselves. (Today everything in the woods can be used. Nothing needs to be burned. Portable chippers can be brought in to chip up the slash (branches and underbrush) for wafer board that is used for building. Keeping the underbrush under control would prevent the worst damage of wildfires and fire storms that destroy millions of trees, millions of dollars worth of property and sometimes kill firefighters.
"We are now either burning on purpose or letting wildfires consume millions of acres of trees, yet the Black Forest in Germany has been preserved for hundreds of years by good management that picks up every fallen branch to prevent fires."
Sadly, the voices of those who actually knew the forests were in danger never had the dominant media tell its side of the story, so we are left with city-bred environmentalists like Al Gore keeping loggers and portable chippers out of the forests, while the underbrush continued to grow.
The natural result is the Colorado Monster Fire, which has already consumed nearly 400,000 acres and, at this writing, has driven 25,000 people from their homes is the legacy of Clinton-Gore environmentalism which flatly refused to allow the logging and lumber industry to use the trees.
They chose to allow millions of trees in our forests to be burned up rather than thinned out and used to build homes or manufacture paper.
Anyway, I've been in the Black forest. UGLY!!! German forests look like row crops. Squares of trees planted in rows, all the same size and nothing is underneath. With all do respect to jaq who doesn't want to hear about biodiversity, the Black forest could use some.
Even Bolo gamers (Macintosh shareware game) know that you are not supposed to cut down every tree. That takes away lumber for you to use to build roads, repair pillboxes and build walls.
However, it is acceptable to thin the forest of your enemy.
Maybe that is what the environmentalists want
The Sierra Club is a PRESERVATIONIST group. They want all land to remain UNTOUCHED, and therefore undisturbed by the evil humans, who have no right to live on this planet.
CONSERVATION is the careful husbanding or renewable resources. ALL renewable resources, from the trees the eco-wackos build their houses in the woods out of, to wildlife...because deer are delicious, nutritious, AND so low in fat it is close to being a "calorie negative" food.
It is therefore in the best interests of mankind to keep habitats healthy for food...I mean wildlife...and keep forests healthy because we need to keep growing trees, or the envirowackos will have nothing to build their houses out of...and nothing to print tons of junk mailings out of. THAT is CONSERVATION.
Newsflash: trees are not static structures. They sprout. They grow. They reproduce. They die. They are subject to natural stresses which make them susceptible to insects and disease. Healthy forests are better.
What a ridiculous reply.
FMCDH (now 10 miles from the Missionary Ridge fire and gettin' closer)
Honest loggers are very much against clear cutting...OR leaving nothing but a bit of polewood every twenty yards in order to get around EPA regs. Many of us consider it "wood butchering" and the epithet "wood butcher" denotes a dispicable pig (my apologies to the pigs)
Sadly, there are wood butchers out there...but their greatest enemies are not the treehugging preservationists...THEIR GREATEST ENEMIES ARE THE HONEST LOGGERS. The stupid treehuggers just get in the way and muck everything up.
That is not remotely what was suggested or implied in the article. But to a liberal, of course that is not useful unless it can be fashioned into a slogan which does not have to relate in any way to reality.
Per-usual a democratic icon was “thoroughly” investigated and as usual found not guilty of mismanagement of his duties. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Judge Royce C. Lamberth has been rendered impotent in the investigations of the missing funds of the BIA, but his hands have been tied time and time again. The casino fiasco, which should have finally sent the arrogant Mr. Babbitt to jail did not...Janet Reno and Harold Ickes are more than prominent in this political frolic for the highest bidder, i.e. donations to the DNC and the Clintons. Meanwhile On Tuesday June 4, 2002, plaintiffs filed a motion with the Court to have Treasury Secretary O'Neill and Interior Secretary Norton and responsible employees and counsel held in contempt of court for perpetrating another fraud upon the Court. O’Neil and Norton are left holding the bag for the nefarious acts of Babbitt and gang and the GAO!
Now Secretary of The Interior Gale Norton has little hope of cleaning up the EPA etc. mess left her as IMHO the woman is not up to the job. The job requires someone who is beyond politics, who is morally and judicially honest and can assess the truth, implement reforms within the US Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife etc. holding them responsible for carrying out obviously stupid congressional rules/laws that aid and abet the destruction of OUR forests without hearings from the state and the taxpayers about that land and how to correctly protect and care for their forests. Political interests have no place in such a program and we are now watching as special interests torch the land with the ill-gotten votes and mendacious rhetoric. Let these cluttered and badly cared for forests now burning be the END of Elitist Politics and those among you who encouraged environmentalists be it the Green Party or EPA aficionados...stand back and look at what you have done to your country or your state; you couldn’t even cut the dead wood off your property in Northern AZ. without going through reams of federal and state red tape, how very, very short sighted and utterly stupid.
Now Secretary of The Interior Gale Norton has little hope of cleaning up the EPA etc.Minor correction, Christine Todd Whitman is the RINO Head of the EPA.
It says logging, not clear cutting. Normal logging would prevent a lot of forest fires, and the logging companies replant the forest.
Proper forest management would prevent any fire from getting out of hand.
Freedom Is Worth Fighting For !!
Molon Labe !!
Don't like environementalists? Too bad. Frankly, I'm glad we have 'em. Sure SOME of them have some extreme viewpoints. But I've done a lot of traveling out of the developed world and have experienced first hand what a country becomes when there's no pressure group reminding people and the government to keep it it clean. Garbage stacked like mountains on the beach and washing into the sea. Rivers clogged with filth and waste and then the river is used for irrigation. No pollution controls on cars. Air so filthy that soot comes out of your nose when you blow it.
You've no idea how clean the US and the developed countries are because of 'environmentalists'. Open your eyes and get out a little more.
So, which group do you back? "Earth First!", "ELF"... "Sierra Club", or one of the other quasi-intellectual groups?
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