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.
Thanks, meant to clear that...both Ladies are ill equipped to handle this hot-bed of power-mad politicians and special interest!
You don't have to go to the Black Forest to see very good forest management. The Apache Indian Res. AZ is a model for excellent forest stewardship.
