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EBUCK and the Fire Group ^ | 10/04/2002 | EBUCK

[stalin]

It bears very much on the situation today. Lands logged in the past are the ones that are the most suceptible to fires now because the largest trees that can survive fires were removed and the small trees and brush were left to flurish with more light. Now they are the tinderboxes.

The only logging used by by industry that prevents fires in the short run is clear cutting but that is so destructive to the environment that it is economically worse than no logging at all.

The bottom line is that this sign is wrong - Period. It is blaming envinormentalists that had almost nothing to do with the problem. It was very poor managment practices of the past that caused this. The environmentalists of today had virtually no influence on those policies.

It is only very recently that environmentalists have power to stop logging in a few ( vwery few ) managed forests. That's not what made these fires terrible. It was fire supression , first and formost , combined with short term profit taking instead of managment by the timber industry in the recent and distent past. It is the forest service that is responsible for this mess not environmentalists.

[CyberCowboy777]

I can't go round and round with you, there is no argument here.

You refuse to state facts, twist my words, make stuff up and you parrot the now defunct Sierra Club.

Anyone can easily see the culpability of the environmentalist, even PBS ran a story on their negative involvement and the end results.

You just throw out your bumper sticker logic and flyer sentiments.

I have stated that the Government and the logging industry had partial blame for the state of the forest. However they changed the policies YEARS ago. The Environmentalist REFUSED to work with them though. They wanted NO MANAGEMENT, NO LOGGING, NO CLEARING OF BRUSH, NO ROADS and NO HUMAN intervention.

The environmentalist ARE the reason the fires have gotten so bad. If they had worked with the Forest Service over the last 20 years, most of the forests would have been cleared of the buildup.

You want to blame polices that were changed years ago, instead of blaming the ones who blocked those changes at every opportunity. COSTING hundreds of MILLIONS in tax dollars. Money that was to be spent on the new policies, including the clearing of buildup so complete fire suppression could be stopped.

You obviously have another agenda here. Everyone except the extreme environmentalist know these facts. Yet you ignore the experts, you ignore those that have been working on this for years and you ignore documented facts. Hell, you ignore the media outlets that WANT you to be right.

[CyberCowboy777]

The Fire This Time
Wall Street Journal 6/21/02

In December 1995, a storm hit the Six Rivers National Forest in northern California, tossing dead trees across 35,000 acres and creating dangerous fire conditions. For three years local U.S. Forest Service officials labored to clean it up, but they were blocked by environmental groups and federal policy. In 1999 the time bomb blew: A fire roared over the untreated land and 90,000 more acres.
Bear this anecdote in mind as you watch the 135,000-acre Hayman fire now roasting close to Denver. And bear it in mind the rest of this summer, in what could be the biggest marshmallow-toasting season in half a century. Because despite the Sierra Club spin, catastrophic fires like the Hayman are not inevitable, or good. They stem from bad forest management -- which found a happy home in the Clinton Administration.

In a briefing to Congress last week, U.S. Forest chief Dale Bosworth finally sorted the forest from the tree-huggers. He said that if proper forest-management had been implemented 10 years ago, and if the agency weren't in the grip of "analysis paralysis" from environmental regulation and lawsuits, the Hayman fire wouldn't be raging like an inferno.

Mr. Bosworth also presented Congress with a sobering report on our national forests. Of the 192 million acres the Forest Service administers, 73 million are at risk from severe fire. Tens of millions of acres are dying from insects and diseases. Thousands of miles of roads, critical to fighting fires, are unusable. Those facts back up a General Accounting Office report, which estimates that one in three forest acres is dead or dying. So much for the green mantra of "healthy ecosystems."

How did one of America's great resources come to such a pass? Look no further than the greens who trouped into power with the last Administration. Senior officials adopted an untested philosophy known as "ecosystem management," a bourgeois bohemian plan to return forests to their "natural" state. The Clintonites cut back timber harvesting by 80% and used laws and lawsuits to put swathes of land off-limits to commercial use.

We now see the results. Millions of acres are choked with dead wood, infected trees and underbrush. Many areas have more than 400 tons of dry fuel per acre -- 10 times the manageable level. This is tinder that turns small fires into infernos, outrunning fire control and killing every fuzzy endangered animal in sight. In 2000 alone fires destroyed 8.4 million acres, the worst fire year since the 1950s. Some 800 structures were destroyed -- many as a fire swept across Los Alamos, New Mexico -- and control and recovery costs neared $3 billion. The Forest Service's entire budget is $4.9 billion.

That number, too, is important. Before the Clinton Administration limited timber sales, U.S. forests helped pay for their own upkeep. Selective logging cleaned up grounds and paid for staff, forestry stations, cleanup and roads. Today, with green groups blocking timber sales at every turn, the GAO says taxpayers will have to spend $12 billion to cart off dead wood.

It's no accident that two of the main Clinton culprits -- former director of Fish & Wildlife Jamie Rappaport Clark and former Forest Service boss Michael Dombeck -- have both landed at the National Wildlife Federation, which broadcasts across its Internet homepage, "Fires Are Good."
Fixing all of this won't be easy. After 30 years of environmental regulation, the Forest Service now spends 40% of its time in "planning and assessment." Even the smallest project takes years. Mr. Bosworth has identified the problems, but fixing them will require White House leadership and Congressional cooperation.

One solution would be to follow the lead of private timber companies, whose forests don't tend to suffer such catastrophic fires. Their trees are an investment; they can't afford to let them burn. Americans should feel the same way about theirs.

[stalin]

You are the one that wants to ignor that facts cyber. You guys want to blame environmentalists because you don't like them but they are only a small part of the problem. I don't like some of them but it isn't wise to make up science and ignore the evidence of what really caused the problem.

That's like trying to blame Bin Laden for the deficit. Maybe he has won a small battle by giving cowardly politicians an excuse to spend more money than we take in but he didn't create our budget. We did.

Lands logged in the past are the ones that are the most suceptible to fires now because the largest trees that can survive fires were removed and the small trees and brush were left to flurish with more light. Now they are the tinderboxes.

The only logging used by by industry that prevents fires in the short run is clear cutting but that is so destructive to the environment that it is economically worse than no logging at all.

Blaming envinormentalists that had almost nothing to do with the problem isn't going to solve the problem any more than blaming Bin Laden for the deficit is going to solve the deficit. It was very poor managment practices of the past that caused this. The environmentalists of today had virtually no influence on those policies.

It is only very recently that environmentalists have power to stop logging in a few managed forests. That's not what made these fires terrible. It was fire supression , first and formost , combined with short term profit taking instead of managment by the timber industry in the recent and distent past. It is the forest service that is responsible for this mess , not environmentalists.

[stalin]

I have admited that some environmentalists pose a problem for fixing the mess that they didn't create by blocking some legitimate efforts for controlled burns based on clean air laws.

Logging the way industry wants to do it makes the problem worse not better. That has to be fixed also.