We Will Burn You
Sharp-eyed SOSF operatives forwarded us the tripe below. It seems the Dead Tree Press in Missoula is hot to burn Montana’s forests to the ground, which is odd, considering that they are in the wood products business, and convey tons of ground-up trees to their customers every day, for obscene profit.
Be that as it may, cub-reporter Michael Jamison just discovered the USFS Let It Burn Program, and is all gaga to swoon over the Beasts in the USFS, who by the way are NOT foresters. The Missoulian tripe follows:
Foresters may extend ‘let it burn’ policy beyond wilderness areas
by MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian [here]
KALISPELL - Foresters looking to fight fire with fire have started looking beyond the boundaries of designated wilderness areas, and this summer will apply a sort of “let it burn” policy to public lands throughout northwest Montana.
They call it “wildland fire use” and this summer it could be used in the North Fork Flathead drainage above Columbia Falls, the Swan Range near Bigfork and the Mission Mountains.
Again, they are NOT foresters but ignorant functionaries with zero professional forestry training or background, hired because of their political affiliations, not their forestry expertise, which they lack in spades.
Jamison evidently just discovered whoofoos, even though whoofoos have been burning in Montana forests for years. Pathetic. But I suppose that the information seeping into his skull now, after years of Let It Burn holocausts in his state’s watersheds, is better late than never.
While many wildfires will be fought, others can provide “a valuable tool for land managers,” said Steve Brady, Swan Lake district ranger for the Flathead National Forest. “Decisions to use naturally ignited fire as a tool for resource management objectives are made incident by incident, and only under certain conditions,” he said.
The tools in this situation are the obsequious functionaries of the USFS who know absolutely nothing about forests or how to manage them. They are pawns at best who promote forest incineration without a clue has to the destruction fire causes.
It all began back in 1983, when lightning struck deep in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, a tree burst into flame, and firefighters did absolutely nothing. Instead, they watched as the flames crept slowly up-mountain, eventually burning across 230 acres.
It was, by forest officials’ own admission, a “huge moment,” coming as it did on the heels of seven decades of aggressive fire suppression.
Now we have legend-building. Some epiphany happened in some place at some time. That led to today’s USFS forest incineration program. NOT! This is junk journalism at its worst, creating myths that hopefully cause readers to marvel at the mysteries of nature. It’s a crap story, pure hogwash. Very bad writing, but typical of the Dead Tree Press, which cannot get one fact straight anymore, and has sunk to fairy tale levels in their efforts to placate Big Brother.
Following the big burns of 1910 - when more than 3 million acres burned in Montana and Idaho - forest policy was to quench every flame by midmorning the day after a lightning storm.
But by the early 1980s, foresters had realized a whole host of problems with that policy. For instance, all that timber they saved from burning was piling up, creating a huge fuel stockpile.
Here we go again. I will go over this again and again for the simpletons out there. Forests are not timber. Timber are trees designated for harvest as sawlogs. There is near zero designated harvest of timber anymore on USFS lands.
The USFS did not stockpile timber by saving timber from burning up. Stockpiling is what the Missoulian does in their warehouses with their mega-tonnage of dead tree pulp. The USFS protected forests from incineration. There is a subtle difference.
Now, of course, the Missoulian and the USFS would like to see our forests explode into megafires. So they need to blame somebody for something. The use of the words “timber” and “stockpiling” have vague connotations in reference to logging, and so they hope to blame the loggers, who by the way were merely woodsworkers in service to wood product manufacturers like the Missoulian, for instance.
It might be worth noting that loggers have never raged into communities and burned homes with abandon, although USFS fires do that every year.
In addition, a change to hotter, drier, longer summers was making it harder and harder to snuff the big blazes. And Western forest ecosystems, it seemed, needed that fire, had evolved with that fire, were missing that fire.
Didn’t take long into the article for Jamison to blame Al Gore’s global warming, which is a hoax and a myth. Global temperatures have been FALLING for the last decade, according to every reputable scientific source including NASA. But myths are the stock-in-trade of the Dead Tree Press. Without myths, particularly anti-America myths, what would they have to write about?
Speaking of myths, the notion that forest need fire is pure balderdash. The facts are that the megafires favored by the USFS eliminate forests from the landscape. Their fires kill every tree and convert forests to brushfields. That’s called deforestation, not ecosystem need fulfilling.
One fact that the Dead Tree Press NEVER seems to grok is that human beings have been tending our forests for millennia. That just doesn’t compute with the Euro-American Creation Myth, in which the pioneer forefathers encountered a pristine wilderness as God’s bounty to the favored Caucasians from plague-ravaged Europe. So let’s just bury the actual facts; the injuns were more like animals, not like the highly evolved and intelligent Teutons.
Far from being biological deserts, scientists were learning that burned-over forestland was home to tremendous life.
Give me a break. Here we go with more mythology. If anybody calls anything but the Moon a “biological desert” they are dead wrong. Nobody claims incinerated forests are biological deserts. That’s called “creating straw men” and is typical junk journalism and a sure sign of propagandizing, not reporting.
No, Virginia, incinerated forests are not devoid of life; they are devoid of trees and so cannot be called forests anymore. But they are filled with exotic, invasive weeds and brush, saprophytic fungi and detritivore insects. The birds are gone, as are most mammals that live above ground. Whole guilds and communities of wildlife are eliminated.
Western tanagers thrived in low-severity burns. Juncos nested in somewhat hotter burns, and birds such as the black-backed woodpecker, mountain bluebird and olive-sided flycatcher actually liked their forest well-done.
They came to feast on beetles, some of which have evolved infrared detectors in their thorax, and some with smoke sniffers in their antennae.
More mythology. Roasted forests have a paucity of wildlife compared to the unroasted variety. This kind of excuse making is pussilanimous. Magic robot insects with detectors? Any and every animal can smell smoke, except perhaps for the journalistic kind.
Lodgepole pine relied on fire’s heat to open their serotinous cones and release tree seed. Western larch hate the shade, and grew faster once the overstory was burned away. Seeds from red-stemmed ceanothus - dormant for centuries - germinated only after a good fire.
More mythological crap science. Lodgepole pines, the only conifer with serotinous cones, are crap conifers. Moreover, lodgepole cones open and their seeds sprout without holocaust fires. Larches do not hate shade, that would be a hate crime. Larches grow in a variety of conditions and never, I repeat, never, have emotions.
Tick brush like ceanothus sprouts like crazy after forest fires. It takes over and lo and behold, a brushfield replaces the forest. Ain’t that swell. Note that the Missoulian is not made of ground-up tick brush, nor is the USFS called the US Tick Brush Service.
Spirea, fireweed, arnica, pine grass, Bicknell’s geranium, even certain toads, all boomed in the burn.
Toads boomed in the burn? This article is so poorly written and full of atrocious BS that I am only posting it as a favor to the SOSF operatives who sent it to me. Otherwise I would heave it in the burn barrel. If anything deserves to be burned, it is the junk journalism emanating from the pathetic Missoulian, and NOT America’s forests.
In fact, let’s cut to the chase. The USFS is planning to incinerate 4 million acres of Montana’s public and private forests as soon as they can. This is to be done without any Environmental Impact Statements or NEPA processes of any kind. There will be no Section 7 ESA consultations. There will be no Section 6 NHPA consultations. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts will be ignored. The USFS spits on the law.
There will, however, be some public meetings, where you can go see the arsonistic functionaries face-to-face, and tell them what you think of their illegal and super-destructive anti-forest schemes.
To hear more about the Flathead’s expanded wildland fire use program, drop by any of several public meetings scheduled in coming weeks.
For fire’s future in the North Fork, an open house is set for Thursday, from 7 to 8 p.m. at Sondreson Hall, north of Polebridge. The Swan Lake District is holding two meetings, one to discuss wildland fire use in the Swan Range, and one to talk about fire in the Missions.
The first open house will be Wednesday, June 18, from 4 to 7 p.m. at the Condon Community Center. The second is Thursday, June 19, from 4 to 7 p.m. at the Swan Lake Ranger Station in Bigfork.
Flathead forest fire management specialists will be on hand at all meetings, available to discuss firefighting policy past, present and future. For more information, call the Hungry Horse-Glacier View District at 387-3800, or the Swan Lake District at 837-7500.
Or you can call them up. They are, after all, your public servants. They do not own the public forests; you do. The functionaries at the USFS are there to do the bidding of the public, not to dictate holocaust to the people who pay their salaries. They work for you; you do not work for them. Remind them of that, would you please?
