With credit to MrNeutron1962:
"Is that a Spotted Owl? I've never seen one in flames before, I'm sure glad we didn't cut these trees down and ruin it's habitat."
Posted on 07/02/2002 10:49:28 AM PDT by CedarDave
Tuesday, July 2, 2002
Lawsuit Threat Complicates Thinning Plans
By Brendan Smith Journal Staff Writer
A threatened lawsuit from environmentalist Sam Hitt could delay the thinning of the Santa Fe watershed, which is needed to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire and subsequent flooding.
State legislators on the Water and Natural Resources Committee heard Monday about the U.S. Forest Service plan to thin about 7,300 acres of the 17,384-acre watershed, which provides about 40 percent of the city's water supply from the Nichols and McClure reservoirs.
Hitt, who formed a group called Wild Watershed after leaving Forest Guardians, filed a notice in May that Wild Watershed, Forest Conservation Council and Santa Fe Forest Watch planned to sue the Forest Service over the thinning project.
The notice claims the Forest Service is violating the Endangered Species Act by not establishing safeguards to protect about 2,800 acres of habitat for the endangered Mexican spotted owl within the proposed thinning area.
Santa Fe Mayor Larry Delgado has said he will blame Hitt if a wildfire rips through the watershed because of delays in the thinning project.
Neither Hitt nor the three environmental groups could be reached for comment Monday on whether they still plan to file suit. A 60-day waiting period required from the date of the May 3 notice expires this week.
The Forest Service is forging ahead with the thinning project despite the threat of a lawsuit, said Santa Fe National Forest forester Bill Armstrong.
The Forest Service is awaiting responses to a request for proposals from companies willing to cut trees and pile them for controlled burns, which hopefully will begin later this year, Armstrong said.
"It makes me a little nervous burning those trees," Sen. H. Diane Snyder, R-Albuquerque, told Armstrong.
Because the narrow, winding Upper Canyon Road is the only road into the watershed, the Forest Service rejected the idea of trucking out cut trees.
"Any acre that is thinned will have burning done on it," Armstrong said.
The burning of slash piles roughly 8 feet by 6 feet will be done in fall or winter when fire risk is low, Armstrong said.
"People aren't going to tolerate us risking anything," he said. "Escaped fire is not an option, especially after the Cerro Grande."
In 2000, the National Park Service ignited the Cerro Grande prescribed burn at Bandelier National Monument which roared out of control through Los Alamos, destroying 354 residences.
The Santa Fe watershed project — estimated to take up to seven years and cost up to $10 million — would thin to an average of 50 to 100 trees per acre by removing the choked undergrowth of small trees. Most of the trees that will be cut and burned are less than 6 inches in diameter, for which there is little commercial market, Armstrong said.
Earlier this year, the Forest Service began some hand thinning with its own crews, but that work stopped when the Santa Fe National Forest closed because of extreme fire danger, Armstrong said.
The city owns 1,124 acres of the watershed, while the Santa Fe National Forest controls 15,333 acres. More than half of the watershed is located within the Pecos Wilderness where thinning is banned, Armstrong said.
The Forest Service also must be careful about the amount of smoke created from the burning given the project's proximity to downtown Santa Fe, Armstrong said.
"We don't know how tolerant the citizens of Santa Fe are going to be to smoke," he said.Copyright 2002 Albuquerque Journal
Yeah, that's the ticket...
The owners of the destroyed homes in Cerre Grande should file a class action lawsuit against Hitt and/or any other enviro-whackos if they try to hinder thinning and whatever other forest management that's needed.
With credit to MrNeutron1962:
"Is that a Spotted Owl? I've never seen one in flames before, I'm sure glad we didn't cut these trees down and ruin it's habitat."
One entry found for barratry.Main Entry: bar·ra·try
Pronunciation: 'bar-&-trE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -tries
Etymology: Middle English barratrie, from Middle French baraterie deception, from barater to deceive, exchange
Date: 15th century
1 : the purchase or sale of office or preferment in church or state
2 : an unlawful act or fraudulent breach of duty on the part of a master of a ship or of the mariners to the injury of the owner of the ship or cargo
3 : the persistent incitement of litigation
Thanks for expanding my vocabulary!
They can try ignoring them in Federal Court.
I guess the Forest Guardians were too conservative for Mr. Hitt:
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Eco-Defense & Zero-Cut Logging |
Santa Fe Mayor Larry Delgado should assign a detail of police officers to watch Hitt's whereabouts.
If a wildfire does hit the area, maybe the newspaper should publish Hitt's home address and phone number. I bet there will be a few people willing to give him a piece of their mind, since Hitt is clearly in need of one.
In 2000, the National Park Service ignited the Cerro Grande prescribed burn at Bandelier National Monument which roared out of control through Los Alamos, destroying 354 residences.
You posted, The owners of the destroyed homes in Cerre Grande should file a class action lawsuit against Hitt and/or any other enviro-whackos if they try to hinder thinning and whatever other forest management that's needed.
They need to drag this anti human/tree hugging enviral nazis into civil court and end up owning his clymer, his board and the organization he represents.
Then if Rico actions or fraud due to poor science posing as the reason for their actions is found in the civil trials, turn that data over to the NM Attorney General for investigations and submission of their findings to a Federal Grand Jury for criminal actions.
As soon as any fire breaks out, wildfire, nature caused or arson cause, Hitt and his EnviraL Nazis should be strapped into parachutes, given a hoe dag, put into a smoke jumping plane and forced out of the plane while over the fire. Then they can either hug a tree or fight what they have brought about by their agenda.
Then the meanest civil trial lawyers should line them up for civil trials to sue them for all of their personal savings and holdings and their organization. If during those trials, any evidence of criminal or Rico actions that set up this tinder box should be given to the NM DA for investigation and presentation to Federal Grand Jury.
Sue them in civil court and get everything they. Then hammer them in federal court. Any judge involved, who is a card carrying enviral must recuse themselves or be up for impeachment for not recusing themselves.
Thin Forest Instead of Spinning Blame
There's plenty of blame to go around for the tinderbox condition of the West, according to an environmental activist and an advocate of natural fire.
Don't single out environmentalists for overgrazing, overzealous fire suppression and other factors that go back more than a century, said John Horning of Forest Guardians in Santa Fe and Tom Swetnam, director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research in Tucson.
Their remarks came in the wake of a statement from the Western governors meeting in Phoenix. But neither the governors nor anybody else is laying a century of accumulating forest fuels at the environmentalists' door.
The governors criticized efforts over the past couple of years to stall or block removal of those fuels by weeding out smaller trees. And that was not a criticism of environmentalists in general, but of a far smaller group of litigious activists.
For example, the watershed above Santa Fe, grown thick as a matchbook, is a disaster waiting for a spark. It is imperative that it be thinned. Santa Fe Mayor Larry Delgado doesn't blame "environmentalists" for a century's worth of mistakes. He blames environmental extremist Sam Hitt for threatening a lawsuit to keep foresters from starting to rectify those mistakes now.
There is plenty of blame to go around -- but the full-time activist fringe is too self-righteously obsessive to shoulder its share, much less adopt a cooperative approach to reducing today's threat.
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