SOS Forests

Active Forest Management Is the Solution to Bark Beetles

Dr. Peter Kolb, Montana State University Extension Forestry Specialist and an Associate Professor of Forest Ecology and Management at the University of Montana College of Forestry and Conservation, testified last month  before the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water and Power Hearing on Mountain Pine Beetle: Strategies For Protecting The West.

His testimony is now posted in the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: Forest and Fire Sciences [here].

It is a very interesting and powerful testimony. Dr. Kolb correctly described bark beetles as:

… a chronic population within pine forests, colonizing and killing trees that are unable or incapable of defending themselves due to a variety of physiological, genetic or environmental factors.

He further described bark beetle ecology and some of the factors that lead to large outbreaks, including mild winters, long summers, and forest conditions that provide ample susceptible trees.

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Climate Realist Numbers Growing

The proper term for those who reject Al Gore’s paranoid fantasy about global warming is “climate realists”. It’s not “skeptics,” its not “deniers,” and it’s not “traitors.”

Climate realists already outnumber Chicken Little Alarmists, and our percentages are growing. From the WSJ:

The Climate Change Climate Change

The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.

By Kimberley A. Strassel, Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2009 [here]

Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.

If you haven’t heard of this politician, it’s because he’s a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country’s carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as “deniers.” The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country’s weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)

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Is There a Forest Fire-Climate Connection?

by Mike Dubrasich

The Web is all atwitter with the latest news about an alleged global warming - forest fire relationship. The buzz was instigated by a new research paper published in the June issue of Ecological Applications.

The paper is Climate and wildfire area burned in western U.S. ecoprovinces, 1916–2003 by Jeremy S. Littell, Donald Mckenzie, David L. Peterson, and Anthony L. Westerling. The full text is [here, 2.5 MB], generously provided to us by the lead author.

The USFS PNW Research Station (where co-author David L. Peterson works) posted a News Release about the paper [here].

In the warming West, climate most significant factor in fanning wildfire flames

Study finds that climate influence on production, drying of fuels–not higher temperatures or longer fire seasons alone–critical determinant of Western wildfire burned area

PORTLAND, Ore. June 26, 2009. The recent increase in area burned by wildfires in the Western United States is a product not of higher temperatures or longer fire seasons alone, but a complex relationship between climate and fuels that varies among different ecosystems, according to a study conducted by U.S. Forest Service and university scientists. The study is the most detailed examination of wildfire in the United States to date and appears in the current issue of the journal Ecological Applications. …

“We found that what matters most in accounting for large wildfires in the Western United States is how climate influences the build up–or production–and drying of fuels,” said Jeremy Littell, a research scientist with the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group and lead investigator of the study. “Climate affects fuels in different ecosystems differently, meaning that future wildfire size and, likely, severity depends on interactions between climate and fuel availability and production.” …

Note the careful use of the word “climate.” And note the disclaimer: global warming is NOT implicated. The News Release and the paper itself do not blame global warming (aka “higher temperatures”) for forest fires.

Instead, the researchers found that a combination of weather factors, including precipitation in the years immediately prior to the fires, may be partially correlated with fire acreage.

Note my use of the term “weather”. Average precipitation has not changed. Some years are dry, some are wet. Note also my use of the term “correlation.” Correlation is NOT causation. Note also my use of the term “partial.” The correlations found by the researchers were weak.

However, that did not stop the USFS PNW Research Station from leaping to conclusions that are at odds with what was carefully parsed in the paper:

Findings from the study suggest that, as the climate continues to warm, more area can be expected to burn, at least in northern portions of the West, corroborating what researchers have projected in previous studies. In addition, cooler, wetter areas that are relatively fire-free today, such as the west side of the Cascade Range, may be more prone to fire by mid-century if climate projections hold and weather becomes more extreme.

Note that the USFS PNW Research Station uses the word “warming” in their headline and in the paragraph quoted above, despite the fact that “warming” was not even studied or correlated, much less causational.

Note that the conclusions of the USFS PNW Research Station rely on “climate projections” that have nothing to do with the paper and are themselves unskillful and largely failures at predicting anything.

So what did the researchers actually find, and how skillful were they at their historical analysis (note again that they attempted no “projections” or “predictions” as those words are generally interpreted)?

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Whoofoo Kaput?

The latest scuttlebutt from fire community insiders is that whoofoo is no more.

Orders have come down from on high forbidding the use of WFU, aka whoofoo, aka Wildland Fire Use.

The new terminology is “fires used for resource benefit,” or foofurb.

Evidently my invention of the term “whoofoo” got under their skin. After three years of my needling the National Interagency Fire Center with whoofoo, they decided to dumpsterize it.

Unfortunately, nobody told the 30 or so National Forests that wrote whoofoo (WFU) into their Land and Resource Management Plans (LRMP’s).

Granted, the secret conversion of LRMP language constituted Federal crimes in the first place. Altering any National Forest plan is supposed to require a NEPA process, but there were no (none, zero, zip) NEPA processes invoked when the LRMP’s were rewritten, clandestinely, in the dark of night, by gremlins, across the Nation.

Now, however, all those altered plans must be altered again because foofurb has replaced whoofoo in the parlance.

The Kaibab NF, home of the Warm Whoofoo, now has a foofurb going (the Ruby Foofurb) that has topped 4,600 acres. That’s just a midget compared to the 58,400 acre Warm Whoofoo, but it could be a record for foofurbs.

Foofurbs don’t really “benefit resources.” If they did, the USFS would be willing if not anxious to demonstrate such with normal NEPA exercises. But they know that the whole foofurb deal is a Big Lie and are desperately afraid of transparency of any kind. Can’t let the public in on what transpires on public lands.

It’s hush hush. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Just ignore the fire plume, the choking smoke, the forests burned black, the streams filled with poisonous ash and mudslides.

That’s just Smokey the Foofurb doing his thing. And before you know it, Smokey will be foofurbing your property with his handy aerial drip torches. It’s for your benefit. Be sure to thank him.

New York Noodle Flipping

New York Times pundit Paul Krugman flipped his noodle yesterday, calling those who oppose the Cap-and-Stifle Bill “treasonous” [here].

Krugman, a noted socialist economist who won the Nobel Prize, (a cheap piece of junk jewelry also awarded to terrorists such as Yasser Arafat), claimed that terrorism was a false threat but “climate change is all too real.”

Guess he never visited Ground Zero.

Krugman also claimed “the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate.” In fact, those claims are false, although his attempt to terrorize people is real.

Krugman is not a climatologist — he bases his galloping paranoia on climate models that purport to predict the future 100 years out. Sadly, the climate models can’t predict the future two weeks out.

Krugman’s own economic models failed to predict the economic crash; you would think he might have learned his lesson regarding garbage-in-garbage-out computer models.

Speaking of treason, Krugman advocates a socialist takeover of the banking industry by One World Government. And speaking of economic failures, his employer, the New York Times, is on it’s last financial legs and staring bankruptcy in the nose.

Evidently Krugman wants to bring the entire country along on his mad dash to the poor house.

If I’m a traitor, what’s that make Krugman? A mega-traitor?

One thing is for certain: New Yorkers are loony. If there ever was a cesspool of failed socialism, New York is it. Yet they have temerity to dictate economic sanctions and punishments to the rest of the Nation.

Let’s excise New York like an ugly wart. Cut it off and build a wall around it. No more free handouts. Then watch the New Yorkers eat each other. Wasn’t there a movie about that? Honey I Ate The Kids or something?

For the record, the globe is not warming, CO2 is not a pollutant, and loonies like Krugman deserve straight jackets and padded cells.

The Definitive How to Write A Book Book

Stephen J. Pyne. 2009. Voice & Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Serious Nonfiction. Harvard Univ. Press.

A review by Mike Dubrasich

Note: We usually place book reviews in the W.I.S.E. Colloquia, but this book does not fit readily into any of those, or perhaps it fits in all of them. So we placed it here.

*****

It is a rare thing for a champion of a sport to write the definitive instruction manual. Jack Nicklaus’ Golf My Way springs to mind, as does Ted Williams’ The Art of Hitting.

Voice & Vision is one of those remarkable and special All-Star pedagogies: a how-to-write-a-great-book-book written by a champion of the sport.

Dr. Stephen J. Pyne is Regents Professor at Arizona State University. He is author of Awful Splendour: A Fire History of Canada (2007); Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 (2001); Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (1982); Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (1991); World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth (1995); Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told Through Fire, of Europe and Europe’s Encounter with the World (1997); The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica (1986), and numerous other histories, memoirs, essays, and texts about fire, history, and the human condition, (and a novel, too: Brittlebush Valley).

Steve Pyne is a literary master, a leading historian, a weaver of words, a lyrical scribe, a story teller, a humorist, an indefatigable researcher, and most especially, a teacher.

And a friend. I admit my bias. But he was a great writer long before I knew him. Indeed it was through his books that I first came to know him. Many of Pyne’s essays may be found at W.I.S.E. (see the History of Western Landscapes and Forest and Fire Sciences Colloquia).

Now, with kindness and mercy, he has written a book that explains how he does it, for all of us who aspire but need a guidepost or two, without which we would flounder in ruts and get nowhere, or worse, write some putrid academic drivel that no one can read nor would they want to.

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House passes Cap-and-Stifle

In a demonstration of one-party-rule by total jackasses, the largest tax increase and economic monkeywrench in American history was passed by the US House of Representatives today.

The Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Stifle Bill (HR 2454) passed by a vote of 219-212 on nearly straight party lines (Democrats 211 Ayes, 44 Noes, 1 not voting — Republicans 8 Ayes, 168 Noes,  2 not voting). The 1,201-page bill that not one Congressman read had an additional (unread) 309-page amendment slapped on by the Dems and Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The new Enron-style “carbon market” will hamstring American industry and citizenry with onerous energy taxes that will run into the $trillions. The new national energy tax will make it more expensive to heat and light homes and run businesses including farming, ranching, and forestry. The costs of food, clothing, shelter, and transportation will skyrocket. The Enron-style market, based on fiat “carbon derivatives” of no intrinsic value, will collapse like Enron, AIG, Fanny Mae, the Bernard Madoff Investment Securities, and other horrendous scams, bleeding coerced investors dry.

The Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Stifle Bill is based on the enormous Global Warming Hoax and Fraud perpetrated by Al Gore and the UN. Yet even proponents admit that the economy-breaking provisions will not impact global temperatures by a tenth of a degree in a hundred years.

The Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Stifle Bill will not relieve this country of dependence on foreign oil; in fact that dependence will increase because domestic energy production will be curtailed by stifling new taxes and penalties.

At a time of deep economic crisis, the Democrat Party just nailed that coffin shut.

The Wall Street Journal reported [here]

WSJ, June 25, 2009

The Cap and Tax Fiction

Democrats off-loading economics to pass climate change bill.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has put cap-and-trade legislation on a forced march through the House, and the bill may get a full vote as early as Friday. It looks as if the Democrats will have to destroy the discipline of economics to get it done.

Despite House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman’s many payoffs to Members, rural and Blue Dog Democrats remain wary of voting for a bill that will impose crushing costs on their home-district businesses and consumers. The leadership’s solution to this problem is to simply claim the bill defies the laws of economics. …

The hit to GDP [Gross Domestic Product] is the real threat in this bill. The whole point of cap and trade is to hike the price of electricity and gas so that Americans will use less. These higher prices will show up not just in electricity bills or at the gas station but in every manufactured good, from food to cars. Consumers will cut back on spending, which in turn will cut back on production, which results in fewer jobs created or higher unemployment. Some companies will instead move their operations overseas, with the same result. …

Even as Democrats have promised that this cap-and-trade legislation won’t pinch wallets, behind the scenes they’ve acknowledged the energy price tsunami that is coming. …

The reality is that cost estimates for climate legislation are as unreliable as the models predicting climate change. What comes out of the computer is a function of what politicians type in. A better indicator might be what other countries are already experiencing. Britain’s Taxpayer Alliance estimates the average family there is paying nearly $1,300 a year in green taxes for carbon-cutting programs in effect only a few years.

Americans should know that those Members who vote for this climate bill are voting for what is likely to be the biggest tax in American history. Even Democrats can’t repeal that reality.

The Cap-and-Stifle Bill was passed only days after whistleblowers disclosed that the EPA’s (like the IPCC’s) analysis of the impacts of CO2 on “climate change” was totally politicized at the expense of real science [here].

One party rule is the hallmark of dictatorships. This sorry chapter in American history will live in infamy.

Walden, Barton: House Should Investigate EPA

House Energy and Commerce Committee Press Release, June 25, 2009 [here]

Barton, Walden Ask Committee Democrats to Investigate on EPA’s Suppression of CO2 Report

WASHINGTON – U.S. Reps. Joe Barton, R-Texas, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Greg Walden, R-Ore., ranking member of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, today asked Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Oversight Committee Chairman Bart Stupak, D-Mich., to begin an investigation on the process the Environmental Protection Agency used in developing its endangerment finding.

The endangerment finding, if formalized by a rule, would allow the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act, something U.S. Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., once called “a glorious mess.”

“It appears the administration and EPA administrator rushed to issue the proposed endangerment finding without considering fully substantive analysis and views of senior EPA career staff within the agency,” Barton and Walden wrote. “The attached EPA emails raise serious questions about the process for developing the proposed endangerment finding, whether analysis or information was suppressed because it did not support the administration and/or administrator’s proposed finding, and/or whether there is a fear within the agency that there will be negative consequences for offices that offer views critical of the prevailing views of the administrator and the administration.”

A copy of letters from Barton and Walden to Waxman and from Barton to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson can be found [here].

An additional Press Release from Barton entitled “Draft of Report Suppressed at EPA Shows Why Agency’s Career Staff Challenged CO2 Endangerment Ruling” is [here].

EPA Suppresses Internal Report Questioning Regulation of CO2

A series of articles and posts are sweeping the Internet regarding malfeasance by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Background: in April the EPA announced they will be regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant [here]. They issued a document in that regard entitled Proposed Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act (EF). The EPA requested public comment on the “endangerment” finding [here]. The comment period ended June 23rd.

But it turns out that the EPA suppressed their own scientists who had disagreements with the “endangerment” finding, and further, the EPA has no intention or capability to evaluate the public comments they received.

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Opening Pandora’s Box: Classifying CO2 as a “Pollutant”

By Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson, Center For Vision & Values, June 08, 2009 [here]

A few days before “Earth Day” (which happens to be the same day as Lenin’s Birthday), America’s ideological greens and reds received a present they have been desiring for many moons: The Environmental Protection Agency — egged on by the U.S. Supreme Court — officially designated carbon dioxide (CO2) as a pollutant. That means that either Congress or the EPA is expected to produce a plan for regulating this common gas.

So opens a new chapter in regulatory absurdity, a veritable Pandora’s Box of complications.

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Concerned Citizens for Responsible Fire Management Report

Last October (while the fires were still burning) the Concerned Citizens for Responsible Fire Management, a group made up of professional foresters resident in Trinity County, CA, critiqued USFS fire suppression practices in a (now) 48-page report to Congressman Wally Herger.

That report has now been posted in the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: Forest and Fire Sciences [here].

The nine authors (David Rhodes, Charley Fitch, Michael Jameson, Clarence Rose, Jerry McDonald, Frank Grovers, Stan Stetson, Dana Hord, Gay Berrien) have a combined professional forestry experience of over 220 years, most of those in fire prevention and suppression.

Their conclusions, expressed in the report, are that the US Forest Service leadership has altered (for the worse) Federal fire and fuels policies, and the new policies have led to repeated failures in fire management.

If these management policies in suppression are not addressed and changed, then we can look forward to the same catastrophic fire scenario each summer until our Trinity forest is no longer a forest.

As noted in a previous SOSF post [here], the Concern Citizens report also offered these comments:

… [A] lack of responsible suppression policies and actions … in the past several years  have caused great damage and negative impacts to private property (timber, watersheds, water lines), the local economy, watersheds and soils, wildlife, aesthetics, cultural resources, and air quality–sometimes in radical proportions. Safety in firefighting is also challenged. When fires continue for such long periods of time, there is increased potential for accidents and, yes, fatalities. …

The fire suppression organization has been adversely affected due to retirement of many of the older, more experienced people in the last 20 years. This has left a void in the top incident command management positions as well as in line personnel. …

If the tactics were as aggressive and reasonable as they were several years ago, these fires would have been contained several ridges over from where they were finally stopped. …

Although we agree that fuels are a problem, something to consider in fire management, they are not THE cause of large-scale and long-enduring fires–the cause is changes in fire suppression practices. …

A few people think all fires are beneficial, irregardless of the reality. This is what is promoted by many environmental groups who do not seems to want any management of the National Forests. Under controlled circumstances… prescribed fire can be beneficial. Uncontrolled wildfire is NOT beneficial. …

The people of Trinity County are not happy with the mismanagement in the way fires are being suppressed, and the way the Forest Service is being managed. Something needs to change.

We need to (1) get the Forest Service back to managing the timber and other resources on National Forest Lands, (2) change fire management suppression tactics–if this includes adding more firefighters, then that is what should be done, (3) re-staff stations in remote areas, and (4) have the Forest Service address and resolve the “liability” issue. …

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US Government’s Climate Con-Job

Note: the Waxman-Markey Carbon Cap-and Trade Bill is due for a floor vote in the House of Representatives, possibly as soon as Friday [here]. The following timely essay was written by Paul Driessen, senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death.

*****

Obama administration “report” on climate change is deceitful, scare-mongering, bogus science

by Paul Driessen

Suppose a company doctored data, misrepresented study findings, replaced observations with computer simulations, and hired PR flacks to promote its new “wonder drug.” News stories, congressional hearings and subpoenas would be in overdrive. Fines and jail sentences would follow. And rightly so.

But the standards change when “climate catastrophe” is involved.

The White House has made global warming the centerpiece of its revenue-raising and energy policies. A House of Representatives 1,201-page bill would tax, regulate and penalize all US hydrocarbon energy use, to “save the planet from climate disaster.” The Senate promises an August vote.

But average global temperatures peaked in 1998 and since have fallen slightly, even as carbon dioxide levels continue to climb. Thousands of scientists say CO2 has little effect on planetary temperatures, and there is no climate crisis. Few developed countries are ready to commit economic suicide, by agreeing to reduce their CO2 emissions by a fraction of what the House bill demands for the United States.

Americans are beginning to realize the legislation would cost millions of jobs and trillions of dollars for a hypothetical 0.1 degree F reduction in global temperatures. Most put global warming dead last in a Pew Research list of 20 concerns.

The government’s answer to these inconvenient truths is simple.

Issue another report by government scientists carefully selected to exclude any who don’t subscribe to climate Armageddon. Ignore contrary data and analyses. Crank out more bogus computer-generated worst-case scenarios. Hire an activist media firm that specializes in environmental scare campaigns. And spend tens of millions hyping every imaginable climate disaster:

Rising sea levels, floods in lower Manhattan, California beaches permanently submerged. Ferocious hurricanes, floods and droughts. Food shortages, epidemic diseases, a quadrupling of heat-wave deaths in Chicago. Aged sewer systems convulsing from massive storm runoff. Wildflowers disappearing from Rocky Mountain slopes and polar bears from the Arctic. Leisure time gone, as people struggle to survive.

“Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States” is the “most up-to-date, authoritative, comprehensive” analysis ever done on how human-caused warming affects the United States, deadpans Obama “science” advisor John Holdren.

Actually, it’s the most flagrant attempted con-job and propaganda campaign in US history.

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Environmental Apocalypticism

Professor Aynsley Kellow is Head, School of Government, University of Tasmania in Hobart. He is the author of Science and Public Policy: The virtuous corruption of virtual environmental science, 2007, Edward Elgar Publishing [here].

I have not read his book yet, and so cannot review it at this time. But he posted an excerpt at Watts Up With That [here] that rings true like a silver concert bell.

The discussion at WUWT revolved around the suicidal tendencies of certain social movements, notably the Xhosa people of Southeast Africa [here, here]. The chat then drifted into millenarianism [here], a type of a religious, social, or political movement whose followers are sometimes prone to committing mass suicide.

Dr. Kellow chimed in with a passage from his book that describes the postmodern cognitive dissonance of the Environmental Movement, a cult of sorts that exhibits millenarianism tendencies. I had just posted The Trap of Uncontrolled Equivocation [here], a post that discussed the clash of ontologies: colliding world views, and so I was particularly attuned to PoMo deconstructions of runaway apocalyptic environmentalism and, perversely, environmental “science”.

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A Pyne Trifecta

Stephen Pyne, World’s Foremost Expert on fire and author of over 20 books on the subject, has written three “fire journalism” essays on modern anthropogenic fire in the Midwest. They are now posted in the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: Forest and Fire Sciences.

Missouri Compromise was posted last December [here]. Patch Burning is [here]. People of the Prairie, People of the Fire is [here].

“Fire journalism” is Pyne’s label. I see them more as non-fiction literary essays. Pyne further demurs:

Anyone familiar with the pyric geography of these sites will appreciate that I add nothing to data or concepts. Instead, I have sought only to establish a different perspective and narrative for their understanding.

which is too humble, in my opinion. In truth, Pyne once again plows new ground with insight and wit.

This collection of three essays is group-titled Middle Ground and surveys fire in Oklahoma, the Missouri Ozarks, and prairie remnants in Illinois. The set has also been posted at the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center [here]. A photo montage entitled Middle Ground: Image Slideshow accompanies the essays at the WFLLC site [here].

As usual with his writing, there are numerous quotable quotes, or Pynisms. From Patch Burning:

Especially as the proneness of landscapes to propagate fires splintered to the eastward, as land roughened, watercourses multiplied, and humidity thickened, only people could have set enough fires. Remove any part of this prairie fire triangle and the fire would go out.

The upshot is that those prairie patches were not only pyric landscapes: they were cultural landscapes. They remain so today. …

And from People of the Prairie, People of the Fire:

The indigenes at the time of European contact, the Potawatomi, were known variously as the people of the place of the fire, or the keepers of the fire, because they maintained the great council fire around which the regional confederation of tribes gathered. But that fire did not stay within the council circle: it spread throughout the landscape, a constant among the diversity of grasses, trees, shrubs, ungulates, small mammals, birds, and insects that congregated around the informing prairie. In time the Potawatomi became known equally as the people of the prairie since the one meant the other. Remove fire, and the prairie disappeared. Remove prairie, and free-ranging fire lost its habitat. Remove the keepers of the fire and both prairie and fire vanish into overgrown scrub, weedy lots, or feral flame. …

Yet there is a second narrative of fire restoration at work as well, in which fire is returned not only to the land but to the hand. The reconstruction of Nachusa reinstates fire to ordinary people. The volunteers, who do much of the hard work of gathering and disseminating seeds, clearing invasive shrubs and weeding new acres, also do the burning. As much as reinstating big bluestem and lady fern, Nachusa has returned the torch to folk practitioners, the kind of fire wielders who sustained the prairie peninsula through millennia. The people of the new prairie have become people of the new fire. …

Please study and enjoy these works. This post is the proper place to make comments about Pyne’s Midwest trifecta — generally speaking, comments are not allowed in the Colloquia subsites to avoid littering them with extraneous dialog.

Roadless Rule Enjoined — Again

On June 15th US District 10 Judge Clarence A. Brimmer reinstated his injunction against the Clinton-Dombeck Roadless Rule for the third time [here, here, here, here]. Technically speaking, he denied a USDA motion to suspend his previous injunctions, which has the same effect.

The motion had been made by the USDA and intervenor the Wyoming Outdoor Council in response to the suit (dating back to 2002) brought by the State of Wyoming and the Colorado Mining Association. The attorney representing the CMA, Harriet Hageman, wrote an excellent synopsis of the long-running case [here].

Judge Brimmer’s new ruling is clear and concise [here]. Some excerpts:

Once again this Court is faced with determining the validity of the 2001 Roadless Rule. On two different occasions this Court has held that the Roadless Rule is invalid as it was promulgated in violation of this nation’s environmental laws. …

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