SOS Forests

Shall the USFS Allow Fires to Incinerate Our National Forests?

Part VI

Let It Burn fires damage natural resources including flora, fauna, water, air, and soils. They also damage human resources including recreation, scenery, heritage, and land management agency budgets. But the damages do not stop there. We continue our discussion in rebuttal to the recent Idaho Statesman series of articles [here], and for good measure, in rebuttal to an excruciatingly incompetent series of articles in support of Let Burn published in the Los Angeles Times [here].

Let It Burn is illegal, destructive of a multitude of forest and human values, is not cost-effective, and is the worst idea that ever came down the forest pike. Let me count the ways.

11. Let It Burn Has Significant Regional Economic Impact

The Payette National Forest is a leader in Let It Burn. Forest managers incinerated 470,500 acres last year, and in the process crippled the economy of numerous central Idaho towns. Yellow Pine was particularly hard hit as that recreation-based village was shut down and forcibly evacuated all summer. McCall, which is the gateway hub to central Idaho recreation industry, also experienced an economic hammer blow [here].

This summer Big Sur, a resort community on the California Coast, was closed for a month during peak season, and partially incinerated to boot, in a fire that could have been put out at a few acres but instead was encouraged to burn (via backfires) until it became a quarter of a million acres.

As I type, a whoofoo (WFU or wildland fire use fire) named the Gunbarrel WFU Fire [here] has burned nearly 20,000 acres in Wyoming and has caused the evacuation of Elephant Head, Absaroka Lodge, and summer cabins in Moss Creek. The Gunbarrel WFU Fire Fire is out of control, a raging firestorm/canopy fire causing 100% mortality to the forest. It is pluming and creating it’s own weather although seasonal Palouse winds are fanning it as well. Despite the destruction of natural and human resources, the Shoshone NF has announced that WFU is still main strategy.

Let It burn is not limited to whoofoo fires, however. It is a common practice today for the USFS to declare a fire a “suppression fire” and yet make no effort to suppress it. The Cabin Creek Fire [here] burning right now on the Payette NF is over 3,000 acres and growing in leaps and bounds, yet only 16 personnel are assigned. The Rush Creek Fire [here] has ballooned to over 1,500 acres three days, is officially a suppression fire, yet there are zero firefighting personnel on the scene.

Last year on the Payette NF the Raines Fire was officially a “suppression fire” yet had only a dozen personnel assigned when it was over 30,000 acres in size [here].Payette Forest Supervisor Suzie Rainville had this to say after the 2007 fire season had ended [here]:

A typical Initial Attack fire would use a handful of people, some bucket work, and (on a really difficult one) one to two loads of retardant. To suppress many of our fires this year, we had to staff them with up to 80 people, helicopters, and air tankers in order to keep them small.

That statement is disingenuous if not an outright lie. There was no initial attack on the Raines Fire and no initial attack on many of the Payette fires that burned over 700 square miles on the payette NF alone last summer. Rainville claimed, and continues to claim (as reported in the Idaho Statesman) that a mere 86,293 acres were burned on her forest in whoofoos last summer. Yet the truth is that none of the major fires on the Payette were aggressively fought with the intention of limiting them in size or duration.

Supe Rainville also had this say in her post-fire season press release:

Thank you to the people in harm’s way in Burgdorf, Secesh, Warren, residents in the South Fork of the Salmon River and Frank Church Wilderness, Yellow Pine, Copenhaver, Mackey Bar, Badley Ranch, Big Creek, Indian Valley, and Weiser. We appreciate the positive feedback we have gotten from several of you for the assistance the firefighters gave. You have shown genuine appreciation to those who protected lives and property. You helped us through this difficult fire season.

Those communities and their economies were devastated by the Let It Burn fires on the Payette NF, and they continue to suffer the after effects. The forests around Yellow Pine are charred to snags for miles in every direction. Major mudslides that resulted from the denudation of the Idaho Batholith have washed out roads, trails, and campgrounds, further crippling recreation-based businesses this summer.

The feedback to Rainville was anything but positive as the residents of Yellow Pine attempted to mount a lawsuit against her for criminal negligence. Unfortunately, US citizens have no recourse in our courts to recover damages inflicted by malevolent government functionaries, even when those functionaries are engaged in criminal acts of deliberate arson.

Rainville admitted in her press release that the fires did not yield resource benefits (the Big Lie promulgated by the Wildland Fire Leadership Council):

[One of] Several areas the Forest has identified to address prior to next year’s fires season are to… [w]ork together on how we manage fuels and fire on the landscape. Fire is capable of returning to the South Fork in multiple years. Areas that burned in 1994 reburned in 2007 with, in some cases, more damaging effects.

Yet instead of working to reduce the damaging effects of natural and human resources, Rainville has encouraged more non-suppression “suppression” fires that are burning today on the Payette NF.

Thank you, Suzie, for your negligence, incompetence, devotion to forest incineration, and Orwellian double talk lies that attempt cover your deliberate destruction of America’s priceless heritage forests.

One of the principal drivers behind the current collapse of the USFS and the acceptance of Let It Burn policies is the promotion of unqualified, untrained, inexperienced parties with no natural resource background to managerial positions, based on affirmative action that ranks gender above merit.

Meanwhile the community of Yellow Pine is attempting to lift itself out of disaster. The 19th Annual Yellow Pine Harmonica Contest and Festival was cancelled last year but is being held right now (Aug. 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 2008) against all odds. The Let It Burn fires burning today on the Payette NF are far enough away that they will not ruin this year’s fest.

Unfortunately such is not the case in Wyoming, California, Montana, Arizona, and other wetsrn states where current Let It Burn fires are inpacting rural events. Perhaps the biggest impact, however, to rural economies from Let It Burn fires is the wholesale destruction of timber resources upon which most forest-based communities depend.

The USFS was created (in 1905 by Teddy Roosevelt) for the stated purpose of providing an ongoing supply of wood products to America. Then as now trees (a renewable resource) for lumber are a primary output of our national forests. It is a great irony that the shrill voices today in opposition to logging on public lands emanate from people who invariably live in wood-framed homes, often built with boards sawn from trees harvested on public lands.

Let It Burn fires destroy that resource, and indeed destroy the renewability and sustainabilty of timber production, because the holocausts convert forests to brushfields. In that process rural economies are broken forever.

Rural counties throughout the West are today insolvent due to the shut down and lock up of federal forests. Services such as schools, libraries, road maintenance, and sheriff departments have been cut to the bone or eliminated entirely. Record rates of home foreclosure, business bankruptcy, unemployment, and even hunger have been visited upon rural western counties over the last 20 years with no relief in sight.

The rural West has been abandoned by America’s political elite, and the specter of vast tracts of public forests aflame in deliberate Let It Burn fires is more than symbolic of that abandonment; the fires are integral to the war being waged today on rural America.

War is by definition the takeover of territory by force, usually but not always by an armed militia. The takeover of territory by force is exactly what is happening today in the rural West. The belicose perpetrators are non-governmental, anti-American organizations with disdain for private property rights and a greed that knows no bounds. The urban leftists who support the Let It Burn cause and have sabotaged our land management agencies are tools in a much more nefarious game than they perhaps realize; the destruction of a free America by multinational, anti-democracy, monied interests.

The current victims of warfare are our forests, watersheds, and landscapes. Let It Burn fires are the weapons of choice. But make no mistake, it is the entire country and it’s citizenry that are the ultimate targets in this not-so-secret war. Tragically, the American Media by and large are fomenting and enabling the destruction through their support of holocaust.

To Be Continued …