My Judgment
Nobody asked me, but here is my judgment regarding the entire Plumas matter.
Everybody involved is in the wrong. The Plaintiffs, the Defendants, the Judges, all parties involved, are acting manners that will hurt the American people, that will harm wildlife, and that will destroy priceless heritage forests.
No one is seeking to protect, maintain, or perpetuate THE FOREST. As a result, the forest will be destroyed, along with the animals that live there and likely the adjacent communities as well.
The Plaintiffs don’t care if a megafire holocaust blows up in the Plumas National Forest, in fact they welcome it. Their “experts” routinely call for no initial attack, no fire retardant, no firefighting, Let It Burn, and good riddance. It is their stated objective to “reintroduce” fire to America’s forests come what may. If spotted owls are killed and their habitat destroyed, so what. If old-growth trees are incinerated, so much the better; they wish to “renew” forests by burning them down. If the skies and waters are filled with smoke, ash, and soot, hooray for our side.
The Plaintiffs come to these issues not from long experience in caring for forests, but from a radical political agenda that seeks to overthrow the U.S. Government and institute a communist/fascist dictatorship. They are closet anarchists and America-haters. In fact, they hate the entire human race.
The Defendants are a corrupt federal bureaucracy that seeks to incinerate the forests under their charge, and any and all private properties, homes, or communities within 30 miles of public land. They know nothing about forests or forestry, and seek public funds and power to destroy that which they were hired to protect.
The Defendants routinely create faulty plans that they know are out of accord with the laws that govern them, seek to cut corners in every case, appoint idiot lawyers who know nothing about anything, and display an incompetence that borders on criminal negligence. No, not borders, IS criminal negligence full blown.
The Judges are ignorant about forests, forestry, wildlife biology, fire, any and all environmental science, and are ignorant of the law as well. The 9th Circuit Court routinely issues ruling so out-of-whack with the U.S. Constitution and our laws that nearly every one of their decisions that makes it to the Supreme Court is overturned.
Nobody involved seeks to protect, maintain, and/or perpetuate forests, old-growth trees, wildlife populations, wildlife habitat, watershed values, or any other facet of forests.
Can forests be saved from catastrophic fire? Of course. Can owl habitat be protected from incineration? Of course. Can old-growth trees be saved and perpetuated? Absolutely.
What is required is professional forestry oriented to those missions. And that is exactly what is lacking.
The question is not what size of trees should be removed. The question is what trees should be left. The purpose is not to fill the mills with public logs, the purpose is to protect, maintain, and perpetuate the treasures that are our National Forests.
But nobody involved gets that. They all bury themselves in erroneous minutia and political posturings that do not address the actual forestry conditions or what might be necessary to save our forests from destruction. Nobody involved gives a rat about forests, or the various disasters that ensue when forests are destroyed. They all have agendas that are entirely separate from forest stewardship.
As a direct, planned, and authorized result, every summer our forests are visited by raging megafires that destroy all forest values, kill wildlife, foul air and water, and leave behind wastelands, scorched earth, and tick brush where once magnificent forests stood.
Every summer homes and communities are visited by those same fires, raging out of control off the Federal Estate, generated by the selfsame Parties Involved, with horrible consequences including billions of dollars in destruction and the deaths of innocent people.
My judgment: I condemn them all. I find all of the Parties Involved guilty as charged. I am sickened by their behaviors. If it was within my powers, I would throw every one of them in the penitentiary for 20 years to life, and let them rot in their tiny cells while they contemplate the error of their ways.
by bear bait
My idea of how to fight insane bureaucratic stuff is to get behind really bad ideas and drive the process to institute them. Be the extra push to roll that snowball even bigger.
I also think that sometimes the people who would like to have a realistic management of forests, that produce forests as the end product, need to follow the lead of the greenies and do it on a micro basis. Always the opposition to insane green policy is to take it on at the macro level. I would like to see it at the micro level. If they want to put wood in streams, my idea would be always suing that it was not enough to be viable and effective. There needs to be more.
I could think about suing to protect on particular tree. The ground litter below it is too much to withstand any fire at all. And then identify this particular very large, very old tree, and demand that this tree have a minder that keeps the litter and a defensible perimeter around it free from fuel. And then find another tree, and another.
It would not be beyond me to demand that the ladder fuels around such and such tree be removed. That silver fir there, and the two small hemlock, and the yellow cedar over there. You could make up your own path to protection, one tree at a time. If enough people identified particular trees that needed protection, you could then pursue protecting all of them with a class action suit. All the people who had one or more trees, or a group of trees, that needed protection, could become a part of the class. Sue the Feds on a class action for litter, ladder, and canopy clearing issues. You would not care what happened to the removed trees. Just get rid of them. Haul them to a landing and burn them. Who cares? Have a zillion small piles of limbs and litter that need to be burned in the winter. Piecemeal them to death.